Jul 25th, 2008
I wrote back in May about Kelly Siegler’s future as a Hired-Gun Prosecutor (motto: “I get paid to make people afraid!”). “How to get the business?” I asked, “Word of mouth and the internet, of course.”
Then in June she posted to the Women in Crime Ink blog with the tagline “Prosecutor for Hire.” The businesspeople [...]
Jul 24th, 2008
I’m going to be on Reasonable Doubt tonight at 8:00, along with Todd Dupont and Steven Halpert. Watch. Better yet, call in.
The smell of flowers fills the air in the elevator at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center. Is it love . . . or is it The Gruff Marshmallow bringing flowers to his number-three prosecutor for, in her first felony jury trial, convincing a jury to give the defendant a life sentence for DWI?
For something [...]
I wrote last December about cover, and a problem that arose because the lawyer whom I had asked to cover for me hadn’t been diligent. Today I learned (H/T A Public Defender) that in L.A. there’s a lawyer, Steve Levy, who offers cover to other lawyers for pay.
I’ve read “The Lincoln Lawyer”, so I understand [...]
“Semi-nude” means “any state of dress which opaquely covers no more than a human buttock, anus, male genitalia, female genitalia or areola of a female breast.”
Can anyone tell me what that means? I think it’s English, but I’m not certain.
Those of you who stop reading the comments here when they degenerate into a serious discussion of the fine points of Texas constitutional, statutory and case law will have missed this ingenious bit from frequent commenter (and prosecutor) “Tarian.”
“THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF MARK AND PJ”
A One Act Play
. . .
A Harris County prosecutor today (perennially gruff but a marshmallow on the inside) took umbrage at my public statements that until very recently I hadn’t seen a Harris County prosecutor conduct a voir dire that was worth a damn. I invited him to tell me when he was picking a jury, and I’d come watch [...]
The discussion of prosecutors’ pet jury selection question, the “One-Witness-Rule” question, continues. Prosecutor SC asks:
“People who would require more than one witness to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt (for reasons Biblical or pragmatic) are qualified to serve as jurors.”
Why? Why isn’t this scenario the same as having a juror who would require DNA [...]
Prosecutors respond to my post on the single-witness-rule voir dire question.
Seeking Justice says that it “sounds like an effective question to discern which jurors have opinions about the burden of proof that are contrary to law”:
There is nothing about that burden, considered either theoretically or historically and legally, that contains even an implicit caveat, [...]
Jul 19th, 2008
When I learned that Hostis Civitas and MacLitigator were both spending July at Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College in Dubois, Wyoming (joining Underdog and In The Moment in the world of TLC-lawyer-written blawgs), I had hopes that one of them would find a way to blog from Thunderhead Ranch, becoming the first lawyer to do [...]