New Harris County Criminal Justice Blawg

Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, by an anonymous criminal lawyer who started blogging on January 8th, 2008, “genuinely concerned with the way the media displays our local criminal justice system”.

Harris County DA’s Diversity Policy is “Pretty Much Ignored”

The general counsel for the Harris County DA’s office says that the DA’s operations manual provision related to diversity and equal employment, which has been policy since 1993, is “pretty much ignored as far as our actual hiring practices are concerned.”

What Tangled Webs . . .

The Houston Chronicle has an interesting column today by Lisa Falkenberg, in which she suggests that when Kelly Siegler described the 45,000 members of Houston’s Lakewood Church as “screwballs and nuts” she might not have been being entirely candid with the court.
The context: Kelly was trying a capital murder case. The defense made a Batson [...]

The Heart of the Matter

Veteran prosecutor, to veteran defense lawyer, in the wake of the moral collapse of the Harris County DA’s office:

Now we’re all sleazy lawyers.

Welcome Language Fans

Defending People has received lots of hits today from the Language Log. It’s a good match, I think; words are criminal defense lawyers’ tools, and at Defending People we love words and are not shy about using them. We’re not even above making up a word, on occasion, when there isn’t already one that works.
Criminal [...]

The Rosenthal-Siegler DA’s Office (?)

I’ve referred here a time or two (okay, at every opportunity) to the Chuck Rosenthal-Kelly Siegler DA’s Office. An anonymous commenter on Defending People (a prosecutor whose identity is known only to her and me) says that’s not fair — that Kelly doesn’t share responsibility for the missteps of the Chuck Rosenthal administration. I told [...]

The Prosecutor’s Reply

The prosecutor whose “Canadians” email I wrote about here and here responds:
Vivian King knows NOTHING about “the real story.” It is probably a waste of breath to defend my reputation since it sounds like a portion of the defense bar has made up their minds, but to me it is never a wasted effort to [...]

One Less Witness

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram brings us this story (H/T: Isiah Carey) of a 32-year-old Arlington, Texas man who believed that his 18-year-old stepson had anally raped the man’s 8-year-old daughter. After the man’s wife (the stepson’s mother) made bail on her son’s aggravated sexual assault charge despite the man’s warning that he would hurt the [...]

O Canada

I wrote a bit here about an email that circulated through the Rosenthal / Siegler DA’s office mentioning “Canadians” on the jury. “Canadian”, as it turns out, is a cryptoracist code word for “Nigger”. (Others may coyly write “the N-word” instead: it seems to me that when we use that circumlocution we insulate ourselves, to [...]

More on the Fifth

In response to this post about prosecutors advising witnesses who wish to take the Fifth, an anonymous Harris County prosecutor wrote:

Before you are too hard on the D.A.s for telling a witness that they can’t plead the 5th on the stand, you should realize how often that comes up for us. Too many [...]

« go back — keep looking »