Blog Posts

Am I guilty of professional misconduct worthy of forfeiture of my law license if I publicly question whether we really need Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Day? Or if I post a photograph of a Budweiser beer bottle surrounded by Coors beer cans wearing hoods above the caption “Ku...

I’ve got a serious case of the dystopian jitters, and I can’t tell whether the source of them is realistic or not. So, I share them with you, the better to reality test in these days of isolated anxiety.
What are dystopian jitters?
A fear...

I suppose it was inevitable that Connecticut’s Attorney General would sign on to California’s federal lawsuit seeking to block president Donald Trump from redirecting federal funds to build a border wall with Mexico. Watching Connecticut Attorney General William Tong run for office last...

I've never really thought of Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, as a prophet. The former general, politician and university president seemed more of a technocrat, a dry-as-dust sort of fellow fit for the 1950s, but not much more. He was Ozzie and Harriet's president; not...

The gods smiled on our clients in 2014, and for that reason alone, I will count the past year a success: On behalf of all five of the lawyers at the Pattis Law Firm, LLC, Happy New Year.
We represent people accused of serious crimes; we also represent folks in life-changing civil conflicts....

“Everybody talks,” the prosecutor said. He was confident, strutting his stuff in the well of the court. “In the end, everyone talks,” he said again.
I felt as though I were watching a bad version of Inspector Javert, from Victor Hugo’s “Les...

Did you catch the news that Eric Holder and the geniuses at Justice persuaded a grand jury to indict five members of the Chinese military? The superhackers are charged with computer crimes: they've been snooping in the electronic entrails of American corporations, by golly. That's a federal...

A reader wrote the other day to ask whether I ever get upset with a client for lying to me. What would I do, she inquired, if a client told me he was not guilty of murder, and I later learned that he had done the crime?
The answer is simple: Nothing.
This struck her as a revelation. All...

How many innocent men and women are sitting in prison? No one knows, exactly, and few care. A person who’s been found guilty by a jury had their trial, right? And if they’ve lost their appeal, well, doesn’t that settle it once and for all?
We know better, of course. The...

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about my dogs, Odysseus and Penelope, but I swear they have been giving me tutorials in the law, teaching me about loyalty and zealous advocacy, the two most important qualities any criminal defense lawyer must have. I’ve learned more about...