Blog Posts

Here’s a tip: If you want to avoid jury service, simply tell the judge you have a pre-paid vacation planned. No one will seek to verify if what you are saying is the truth. Vacations are the get-out-of-jail card for potential jurors. It works every time.
Of course, the real question is...

"[T]he great emancipatory gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below." Thus concludes James C. Scott's brief celebration of the joy and necessity of anarchism,...

The Fifth Amendment provides that no one can be compelled to testify against himself. In other words, a person cannot be required to speak if his statements would tend to implicate him in a crime. The right is what lawyers call a testimonial privilege, and it is related to other areas declared off...

I confess to being among those who regard the reach of the surveillance state with a tired sense of inevitability: I’ve long since grown accustomed to the notion that the government can, and does, record everything. It’s not that I do not value privacy; I just feel that worrying about...

“Congratulations,” the caller, another lawyer, said. “You hung ‘em up; I’d call that a win.”


“Thanks,” I replied. “But I am not so sure. We’ve got to try it all over again in October.”
My client stands...

Robert Ferguson's book on the American criminal justice system, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment (Harvard University Press, 2014) ought to be must reading for every legislator, judge and prosecutor in the United States. You will note that I did not include criminal defense lawyers in the...

Perhaps the single most important moment in the debate about whether to approve the Green Haven condominium association project on Bethany’s Halter Farm property took place more than a year ago. That’s when Patsy Weiner, then a member of the town’s Planning and Zoning Commission,...

Death comes swiftly, with a crushing finality, leaving the living numb with grief and overcome with loss. Our comings and goings remain stunning mysteries. When a life is taken at the hand of another, anger rises like a tidal wave.
So we are angry today at Christopher Plaskon. “I did...

One measure of our humanity is how we treat the least among us. The future will judge us harshly, I am afraid. This is especially so regarding our prisons. We’ve taken a punitive turn in social philosophy, and have created penal colonies in our midst. What’s worse, we’ve fallen in...

The process, criminal defense lawyers like to say, is the punishment. Nowhere is this so true as in the low-level criminal courts in Connecticut, known among the cognoscenti as the “GAs,” or Geographical Areas. All criminal cases make their courtside debut in the GA courts. Only the...