A Reader Writes

A friend in Tennessee writes:

Your November 29, 2007 post seems to me to be potentially irresponsible and potentially unethical. How many times have you gotten your clients into more trouble? I bet you would not admit it if you had.

Friend, aside from being an unfriendly thing to say, that last bit is a [...]

Another Beauty Contest

The American Bar Association (that’s not the real link — the ABA is merely worthless rather than sinister — but it’s entertaining nonetheless) is hosting another blawgers’ beauty contest. Kevin O’Keefe writes about it here. The heart of Kevin’s excellent post (hat tip to Anne Reed):

Law blogs represent disintermediation of publishers and gatekeepers. [...]

Just Pleading Guilty

Shawn Matlock, who’s growing up quite nicely, writes about trust (a topic dear to my heart) and his distaste for potential clients who “just want to do a quick plea.”
I get such potential clients in the office now and then. When they tell me they want to “just plead guilty and take probation”, I tell [...]

Aimless Rambling

From Therapeutic Metaphors & Clinical Hypnosis, by David Puchol Esparza:

[Milton] Erickson told many stories and told them to a variety of clients. As he said of his treatment for a young, anorexic girl, “My treatment for Barbie was to tell her short stories, metaphors, suspenseful stories, intriguing stories, boring stories. I told her all kinds [...]

Legal History Query

I can’t figure out a way to phrase this search on Westlaw, so I thought I’d turn to the the hive mind of the blawgosphere:
Has Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller ever voted in favor of a defendant in a criminal appeal?
I’ll send a valuable prize to the first person to offer either [...]

Winning Despite Yourself

In this post about Gerry Spence’s defense of Geoffrey Fieger (well, it’s not really about that; it’s about the egos of Gerry Spence [who boasts he's never lost a criminal case] and Geoffrey Fieger . . . or maybe all criticism is autobiographical and it’s not really about that either . . .), my New [...]

Jury Argument in Criminal Cases

Today my copy of Ray Moses’s “Jury Argument in Criminal Cases: A Trial Lawyer’s Guide (Second Edition)” arrived in the mail. (Bookmark the book’s website.) This is one of my favorite resources, but I had never gotten around to ordering a copy before now (Professor Moses doesn’t make it particularly easy to order) — I’d [...]

Two Courthouses

Harris County has separate courthouses, both built in the last seven years, for its civil and criminal courts. Courthouse number one is a dingy-looking beige building, solid and generally functional; courthouse number two is ornate, with a dome on top.

In courthouse number one, a judge enters her courtroom from a door to the side and [...]

The Tyro’s Return

This guy is back. Now he’s been retained to represent another of my former clients.
It’s beyond me why people hire this guy. He has handled five federal criminal cases to completion, all at least six years ago. Between 2001 and this year he didn’t have his name attached to a single federal criminal case in [...]

Why Let Juries Sentence?

When Texas legislator Scott Hochberg sought to ban probation for murder, he was able to get a bill passed preventing juries from recommending probation in murder cases. Judges can still, if prosecutors play along by agreeing not to have jury trials, put people on probation for murder.
If things had to change (there really was no [...]

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