Blog Posts

As of Oct. 5, 754 people, or almost three people per day, were shot to death by police officers in the United States in 2015. This information was not compiled by a law enforcement agency, although it easily could have been. Instead, The Washington Post has been gathering the data and posting it...

It is difficult for me to understand why U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Meyer thought it necessary to refer attorney Josephine Miller for professional discipline. It's even harder for me to comprehend why Miller thinks she can prevail in the brand new federal lawsuit she filed to prohibit...

During the past 30 days, an average of three people were shot to death by police officers each day in the United States. It was a particularly bloody month. For all of 2015, the average number of people shot to death by police officer was 2.7 per day.
As if that were not bad enough, as of the...

I'm not sure how much money was spent on the renovations to the Elm Street courthouse in New Haven, but it wasn't enough. Sure, the courthouse looks pretty, although there are those embarrassing holes drilled in the stairs approaching the front door where contractors miscalculated where to sink...

My first instinct was to shrug the call off, to regard it as unnecessary alarmism. But the caller was a lawyer I respect, and would turn to in a heartbeat if a family member were injured. I told him I would mull the matter overnight and then get back to him.
Were the pictures in his...

Law students are taught that there are four factors a judge should consider when a criminal defendant is sentenced: specific deterrence, general deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is now proposing addition of a fifth factor: future criminality.
Buckle...

Only once have I had to take the witness stand to plead the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and that was after I felt compelled to betray a client on death row. You see, I came into the possession of plans for a violent escape from the Northern Correctional Institution in...

Hard cases, the maxim goes, make bad law. So it is hardly surprising that the Connecticut General Assembly is poised to weigh in on the use of deadly force by police officers with a sloppy piece of legislation. I wonder, really, whether new laws are necessary. And if they are, I harbor doubts about...

Reliable information is hard to come by in the death of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray, but, from a distance, he looks to be a victim of a police practice known throughout the United States: Gray was no doubt administered an overdose of “van therapy.”
What’s that? Why,...

Now that we've abolished the death penalty in Connecticut, at least insofar as future cases are concerned, the fate of those currently on death row being much at issue, there is really no cause for jurors ever lawfully to consider the consequences of a guilty verdict. Why, then, are prosecutors...