Gov. Ned Lamont lives in a bubble, and that bubble is impenetrable. I know this because he was once a potential juror on a criminal case I was trying in Stamford. The charge was attempted murder.
Bottom line: The judge, prosecutor and I agreed that after listening to Mr. Lamont’s answers to questions about the presumption of innocence, we all concluded he was unfit to serve. You see, Mr. Ned – I think of him as the human version of Mr. Ed, Wilbur’s talking horse – just couldn’t seem to commit to following the law. He was so busy...
February 20, 2019
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 year felt like watching a campaign for national office. Battling Billy Tong ran hard on his anti-Trump platform. I understood the politics even though I viewed the campaign as largely bombast.
But I have a question: How much is Battling Billy’s blather costing the State of...
February 20, 2019
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian with a love for the long view, as in where did we, as a species, come from, the topic of his first book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), and where we, as a species, are going, the topic of his second book, Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016). Of course, the latter book depends on our ability to move from the past to the future through the challenges presented by the present. Just how will get from where we have been to where we are going?
He tackles the present in his third book, 21 Lessons for the...
February 17, 2019
The panel of judges was uncomfortable. One judge wondered whether the United States government had brought the very issues it was complaining about upon itself by charging the defendant with crimes carrying crippling mandatory minimum prison sentences. Another judge was quick to defend the Government: wasn’t I asking the Court to endorse jurors’ ignoring the law, a practice known as jury nullification?
I was in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, on the 17th floor of the federal courthouse on Foley Square in Manhattan. Three judges...
February 13, 2019
February 11, 2019
I’ve never worn blackface, but I’ve laughed when I’ve seen actors like Bing Cosby do so. Just like I laughed when I saw...
January 10, 2019
It turns out that I am not the only person to notice the recent increase in Facebook censorship. Just yesterday I learned that a lawyer in California...
January 13, 2019
Darnell Moore was charged with murder. He was black. Almost every potential juror was white. We made an issue of it. After his conviction, the Courts...
January 3, 2019
I like to say the following to folks after one of my all-too-frequent displays of bad temper: “I’m sorry. I’m in AA. That outburst...
February 10, 2019
The apocalypse dawned for me in the summer of 1967.
I was living on Detroit’s East Side when all hell broke...
November 12, 2018
There’s not a whole lot written about identity politics and immigration that makes much sense. From the right come claims of...