Defending People

The U.S. Congress, in its (ahem) wisdom, has specified the purposes of punishment in federal criminal cases:
(A) to reflect the seriousness of the offense, to promote respect for the law, and to provide just punishment for the offense;
(B) to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct;
(C) to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant; [...]

Here I mentioned Jeffrey Rosen’s The Brain on the Stand. Quoted in Rosen’s article (and elsewhere) was Stephen J. Morse, professor of law and psychiatry (but not, as he is sometimes described, a psychiatrist) at the University of Pennsylvania. Morse is the go-to pundit for the proposition that, neuroscience be damned, people are still “responsible” [...]

Scott Greenfield in his post, Mental Impairment as a Mitigating Factor, writes, “To the simple-minded, there is no spectrum of disability. It’s all or nothing.” I’ve written before about traumatic brain injury and criminal defense. Scott’s post discussed bipolar disorder and low intelligence as mitigating factors. At some point, a mitigating factor must become so [...]

I wrote here about the Practical Blawgosphere — the group of blogs producing original content useful to the practice of law. I am starting a list of blawgs in the Practical Blawgosphere. Here are the rough criteria:
1. Blog;
2. Recently updated;
3. Focused on knowledge or ideas
3a. clearly useable in the practice of law; or
3b. potentially useable [...]

The discussion of the stagnation of the blawgosphere and the vitality of the Practical Blawgosphere, as well as this post from attorney Anne Reed’s Deliberations blog — specifically, Juror Number 3, Len Aslanian’s comment on the importance of geographical proximity to the success of a community — has me thinking about the (metaphorical) geography of [...]

Last week I helped a client plead guilty to life in prison plus 20 years. He’ll be eligible for parole, if all goes well, in 34 years. Realistically, though, he’ll probably never get out.
The motivation for his plea was, of course, that he might receive a death sentence if he didn’t make a deal. He [...]

There are lots of things that a person can get in trouble by possessing: drugs, weapons, and alcohol (if the person is a minor) to name but three.
Possession is defined as actual care, actual custody, actual control or actual management.
For possession to be illegal, it must be voluntary. Possession is voluntary if the possessor possesses [...]

(I promised, on reading New York criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield’s Independence Day post, 231 Years and Still Trying, to write about the nature of freedom, the power of fear, and the abandonment of American ideals. This is the third post in the series; it covers the second topic. I discussed the nature of freedom [...]

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about Bennett’s Chainsaw, which is the principle that:
The more things you must contest and the more explanations you must provide in order to mount a defense, the more likely it is that you will be convicted.
Here is the first corollary to Bennett’s Chainsaw:
In the defense of a criminal [...]