Five Questions

One of our speakers at the Dealing with the Media and Fighting Like You Mean It seminar last Friday gave us this tip for dealing with the media the next time they catch you coming out of the courtroom. Answer five questions for them:
Who are you? (What is your name? Spell it.)
What happened in court?
What [...]

The Presumption of Innocence

I heard something good last week:
“The presumption of innocence means ‘he didn’t do it until they prove he did.’”
(I doubt that the speaker, Houston trial lawyer Rusty Hardin, had quantum mechanics in mind when he said that [see Schrödinger's Jury], but I think his is a quantum view of the Golden Thread.)

Terry MacCarthy Cross-Examination CDs

I was about to write something about “legal speaking” and the use of archaic locutions like “may it please the court,” when I remembered the use Houston criminal defense legend Richard “Racehorse” Haynes put that phrase to when he was introducing Chicago criminal defense legend (and master cross-examination teacher) in 1998:
Click here for the mp3.
This [...]

A Truly Compassionate Profession Redux

(I posted this last month inadvertently before I had rounded out the thought. No idea how. I do try hard to provide quality product.)
Defenders seek to prevent suffering, as do physicians. Unlike physicians, however, defenders are trying to prevent suffering that someone else is deliberately trying to cause.
Causing suffering to our clients is someone’s [...]

Group Voir Dire II

Gideon commented on my earlier Group Voir Dire post:
Thanks for the insight! It seems that both have their advantages.
I’m still concerned that people in group sessions might not express their true feelings in the presence of others. For example, if someone has a strong feeling that anyone who is arrested is guilty, might not reveal [...]

Bad Voir Dire / Good Voir Dire

I think a lawyer should never pick a jury alone (it takes at least four eyes to keep track of jurors’ body language). I also like to watch other lawyers’ voir dire efforts. So whenever I get a chance I help out other defense lawyers when they pick juries. Even when it’s bad, I learn [...]

Top 10 Criminal Defense Blog

Jamie Spencer is taking a poll on criminal-defense related blogs. I look forward to seeing the results — I’m sure I’m missing lots of good stuff in blogs that I don’t yet know about.

Group Voir Dire

Gideon asks how jurisdictions with group voir dire handle “jurors’ reluctance to disclose sensitive or embarrassing information in the presence of the entire jury panel and courtroom observers.”
The answer to his question in Texas, where all non-capital voir dire is done in groups (generally of 20 or more potential jurors for a 6-person misdmeanor jury [...]

High-Profile Cases

Lawyers love publicity. We all like to get our names in the newspaper. Right or wrong, we think publicity going to get us more business. If we didn’t love publicity, we probably wouldn’t have chosen this profession.
Publicity never hurts the lawyer. But we have a duty to our clients that has to take priority [...]

Video and Banquet

No blogging yesterday because I was (a) being interviewed on-camera for 3 hours by a guy from Faces Media to create a few short videos for my website; and (b) preparing for and attending the Harris County Criminal Lawyers’ Association’s annual banquet, at which I was sworn in as president-elect, I gave the outgoing president [...]

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