Apr 11th, 2008
I’ve written before, here, here, and here, as well as here, about former prosecutors taking criminal cases. So when I read Rick Casey’s column in this morning’s Chronicle, Who I’ll Hire if I’m Caught, in which he explained why he would hire Kelly Siegler to defend him against criminal charges — because “if she can [...]
Apr 10th, 2008
The last time I had an ID on a lanyard was the summer of 1988, when I was working at CIA’s Office of Technical Services and had a green badge that had to be exposed at all times at work. For reasons that are perhaps obvious, I would remove the badge and lanyard when I [...]
Well we’ve obviously had this political mantra over the last 30 years about “getting tough on crime.” And I think too often, buried in that mantra is the implication that there’s no room for fair justice. We’ve stripped away protections for the accused. And as a result, I think many prosecutors went into a case [...]
I’m feeling uninspired. Here are some of the posts I’ve thought of in the last few months, titled, and then not written:
Josh Karton in Houston
The Commerce Clause
The Problem of the Working Poor
Lanyard Nation
Of Course It’s Not an Individual Right!
Here’s the deal: pick a title and suggest three or four words or phrases (PG or G [...]
Apr 9th, 2008
(I write blog posts offline in Ecto. When I have a new idea for a post, I create a new post and title it, then set it aside until I feel like writing it. This one’s been brewing for a while, so I wanted to get a couple of thoughts down in bits and bytes [...]
Apr 8th, 2008
Pat Lykos, clearly the less-qualified candidate for Harris County District Attorney, has beaten Kelly Siegler, the champion of the Office’s old guard, in the Republican primary. And so the Holmes-Rosenthal era ends: not with a bang but with a whimper.
We defense lawyers have reached no consensus on whether this will improve our lives or our [...]
Today Harris County Commissioner’s Court approved the creation by the County’s Management Services Department of a study and recommendation on the feasibility of establishing a Public Defender’s Office in Harris County.
If the study reveals that a PD’s Office will provide a cost savings over the current ad hoc appointment system (Grits agrees with me that [...]
From the agenda:
Request for discussion and possible action for Management Services to provide a study and recommendations on the feasibility of establishing a Public Defender Office in Harris County.
Apr 7th, 2008
Georgia public defender S.C. Ruffey’s comment about his fondness for the Uniform Commercial Code brought to mind a special kind of character that pops up from time to time in a criminal law practice.
[Digression: Austin criminal defense lawyer Jamie Spencer talks about "how to rank high on Google's natural results." I have heard -- and [...]