28 April 2006

Around the Web

1) Criminal Defense in Massachusetts: "It isn't news that prosecutors and big-firm lawyers are the people who become judges, but today I wonder why so few criminal defense lawyers ascend to the bench."

2) Norm Pattis asks whom Lynne Stewart was representing and gets some interesting comments.

3) Eugene Volokh finds a rape case which would make a perfect law school hypo.

4) Don't blog about a case which hasn't yet been tried - the other side and the judge will find out.

5) A judge calls an officer's defense - in a civil trial - "too ridiculous to merit comment."

6) Alaskablawg makes an interesting proposal: Let defense attorneys designate, before the decision is issued, whether an appealed case should be published or not because so many appeals which are required by defendants rest upon horrible facts and will cause bad case law (under the old maxim hard cases make bad law).

BTW: check out riderz67's comment. It's kinda touchingly naive and makes me wonder what happened to that boyish naivete I used to have when I believed the system actually worked the way the books say it does. Oh, yeah - I started practicing criminal law.

7) Tom, as ever, is encouraging deep and meaningful conversation about the legal show-trial of the day: the Duke case. ;-)

8) Judging Crimes comments upon the lack of experience in criminal law found in our federal supreme court.

9) The celebrated case wherein the pot seller was convicted by the feds despite having State authorization has been reversed because a juror who was going to nullify was told by a lawyer that he could get in trouble if he chose to ignore the judge's instructions.

10) An "unnecessarily lengthy" brief wins the day.

11) Wow. DNA evidence clearly points away from the person you're trying to convict. How to deal with that? It could be the investigating officer's DNA.

12) 1,023 foreign criminals are released in the U.K. and Lenny gets called a racist in the comments.

13) Pro se pain.

14) Sentencing Hispanics to learn English.

15) And, of course, the most important posting of the day - which everyone must read - The All Important Motion to Wear a Cowboy Hat in Court.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

4) How amusing. The Metropolitan Police and other UK forces issued guidelines on bloging recently. No one as yet has managed to get caught out on the events they blog. Obfuscation is key.

12) It's amazing, one mildly political blog about "foreign criminals" (as reported by 3 media outlets) not being deported when they were let out of prison after serving their sentences by the courts and I'm called a racist. I think it is a definite attempt at trying to make me trip up probably by a media organization or a far right party. Fortunately I am a moderate conservative with reasonable views.