Jun 22nd, 2008
I have a DWI jury trial tomorrow in Harris County. No NLSes; this time it’ll be “Full speed ahead!”, David Farragut-style.
Did you know that the Intoxilyzer-5000’s margin of error for an unknown solution (i.e. your breath) is +/- 0.020? That means that if your BrAC is .06 and the machine says .08, it’s within the [...]
Jun 21st, 2008
Having seen my website rise to the top of the Houston Criminal Lawyer, Houston Criminal Defense, Houston Criminal Defense Lawyers, and texas Criminal Lawyer Google organic search results, I have a few thoughts for other criminal defense lawyers who recognize that potential clients aren’t looking in the yellow pages anymore.
First, you don’t have to spend [...]
Texas Counties with Criminal Case Information Online:
Brazoria County, Texas Criminal Case Search by Defendant Name
Brazos County, Texas Criminal Case Search by Defendant Name
Collin County, Texas Criminal Case Search (H/T Lars Isaacson)
Dallas County, Texas Criminal Background Search
Dallas County Jail Inmate Lookup (H/T Lars Isaacson)
Denton County, Texas Criminal Case Search
Denton County, Texas Jail Inmate Lookup (H/T Lars [...]
Lewisville, Texas federal criminal defense lawyer Lars Isaacson (my erstwhile second-chair, who learned from me how to take a severe beating, if nothing else) has posted a page of court and jail contact information (telephone numbers, URLs) for state and federal criminal cases in the Dallas area — Denton, Dallas, Collin, and Tarrant Counties and [...]
Jun 19th, 2008
I wrote last month about Laurence Gonzales’s Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why and promised “much more later.” It occurs to me that the start of scavenging Gonzales’s work for criminal trial lawyers has to be relating survival to a criminal trial.
When Gonzales is talking about survival situations, he’s not referring only to [...]
The Center for American and International Law is presenting its seminar on The Mind and Criminal Defense again July 17-18, 2008. The program is funded by a grant for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, so you’ll wind up paying $185 (or less if you regularly represent the indigent accused) for 13.25 hours of CLE [...]
Anne Reed writes at Deliberations about blind strikes:
In a “blind strike” voir dire, both sides exercise their strikes simultaneously. If you get four strikes, you strike four jurors, without knowing (until it’s over) whether your opponent struck those same jurors too.
All these years I’ve been using blind strikes without even knowing it. In Texas state [...]
Jun 18th, 2008
Suppose that you were a prosecutor prosecuting a first-time DWI case, and that I was defending it.
Suppose further that the accused’s husband, an ex-cop, watched her performing the field sobriety tests at the scene, and would testify that she did fine. That the arresting officer claimed that his in-car video camera wasn’t working. That the [...]
Jun 14th, 2008
Given that Americans’ second most common justification for the death penalty’s fairness is its provision of “satisfaction and closure” to the victim’s loved ones, it’s astounding to me that Kelly Siegler (”Prosecutor-for-Hire”, according to her tagline) admits in a blog post that there’s no such thing as closure (H/T AHCL). A successful death penalty prosecutor [...]
Jun 13th, 2008
Sometimes the best you can hope for is for the rope to break.