Blog Posts

One of the benefits of foreign travel and time away is a much-needed sense of perspective. Struggling with a foreign tongue, struggling to see from a different perspective, being steeped in different mores: These are all good things. Even moreso, if, as my wife and I did on our recent trip, you...

           I am offering a gift today. Accept it if you will: There is just enough time to prepare for the publication of a long awaited book that may be as significant as any to be published in this dawning century. But to be prepared to hear what this author has to say, you must first read...

Much though I love to travel, I still leave home reluctantly. Something about leaving familiar landmarks behind me heightens a sense of being lost asea in a world far too wide and vast to comprehend. So sitting in Europe wondering whether I've contracted H1N1 scares me.
We are in Edinburgh now,...

The secret tap came the other day: Caitlin Larimer, Lynne Brachter, Carl Bettinger, Fredilyn Sisson have all been asked to resign. Rex Parris will soon be asked to yield his head to the block. Jude Basile's been making the rounds, trying to trim the body and fill it with folks to his...

My wife and I are lolling about in Europe, but my spies are ever at work. Comes this morning a report from the inner sanctum of the Trial Lawyers College. Blood is soon to be spilled, and, cognoscenti, all is not what it appears.  It feels as though I never left the United States.
First the...

"I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of the day, at the furtherance or knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering."
Robert Louis Stevenson,  The...

When a car accident slows traffic, I am as morbid as any other rubber necker. Something about the harm that an accident can spawn draws me. The same is true of a crime, only more so. Intentional harm and its consequences mesmerizes.
So there I was in the wee hours of the morning reading a mass...

Solomon Moore's piece in this morning's New York Times did less than nothing to advance understanding of the nation's sex offender laws. In fact, it set back understanding. Call it a high-class version of pandering to hysteria.
The headline was jarring enough: "Struggling to Keep Tabs on...

On Tuesday, all Hell will break loose in the State of Connecticut. That is when Joshua Komisarjevsky's interviews will be published in a new book. That's the book in which he tells what really happened when a mother and her two daughters were were raped, beaten and set afire in a Cheshire home in...

I've received private notes and a few public comments asking why I have picked an unnecessary fight with Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College. One infuriated loyalist calls me obsessed, a soul in so much pain I cannot let it go. Another wants to know simply what happened to cause such...