Other Trial Technologies

In case you couldn’t already tell . . . I’m fascinated by the things other fields have to teach us (criminal trial lawyers) about what we do. For example, theatre: Keith Johnstone’s books, Impro for Storytellers and Improvisation and the Theatre contain lots of nuggets of wisdom that my brain translates into ways of thinking [...]

Why Mindfulness Matters in Trial

A classic mistake made by inexperienced lawyers is to write out the questions to be asked in direct examination. When the questions are written out, the answers don’t matter because the lawyer knows what the next question is regardless of what the witness says.
Likewise, an inexperienced lawyer (or one who has not unlearned the bad [...]

Mindfulness

In Keith Johnstone’s Impro for Storytellers he relates:
“A Japanese swordsman wrote that if you fight someone who has no plan, you’ll be thinking, I’ll do such and such! as your severed head bounces down the temple steps!”
(Then Johnstone adds, “(Well, he didn’t put it exactly like that.)”)
Johnstone is talking about how being “in the moment” [...]

Beating up on the Mentally Ill

In another sentencing hearing (the defendant had pled guilty to theft and was seeking probation from the judge), the prosecutor argued that the defendant, who was mentally ill (diagnosed but unmedicated at the time of the theft, which was followed by two suicide attempts; medicated now; a thousand pages of medical records in evidence) had [...]

Pot Calls Kettle Black

In a sentencing hearing the other day (I was observing a colleague’s injury to a child case), I heard a prosecutor argue something that made me do a double take:
“This man used his position of power to hurt other people.”
Isn’t that a pretty fair description of what prosecutors do when they put people in prison?

Technorati [...]

Introduction

I’m a criminal defense lawyer in Houston, Texas. I represent people accused of all sorts of crimes in state court all over Texas, and in federal court all over the country. In this blog, I plan to talk about anything that relates in any way to the practice of criminal defense law. In my mind, [...]

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