Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | December 1, 2009
If you’re the sort of person who needs anyone other than your dog to think you’re noble, criminal defense is the wrong line of work for you. Still, it’s nice that former criminal defense lawyer and now prosecutor Ken Lammers thinks that the criminal defense lawyer who takes the job of defending a “Reviled One,” [...]
Mark Bennett | June 27, 2009
Defending People reader “Ryan”, writing at Plain Error, the official blog of the Innocence Project of Florida, responds to my “Law and Justice Explained.” post:
As someone with the status just above armchair philosopher (disclosure: I will be attending graduate school for a PhD in philosophy in the fall), I have a few words on that [...]
Mark Bennett | June 25, 2009
I just stumbled upon this, in comments to a long-ago Ann Althouse post:
One of the most annoying things about lawyers is the way they casually conflate “law” with “justice.” To clarify: justice is a concept in philosophy; also to some extent in psychology, sociology, economics, etc. Law is what a bunch of mostly long-dead politicians [...]
Mark Bennett | December 11, 2008
A DAY IN COURT
By James Kavanaugh © 1979
(From his collection, Walk Easy on the Earth)
The unsmiling judge with wet, flapping jowls,
Dismissing the tears of husbands and wives,
Spitting out consonants, rolling his vowels,
Tearing out hearts and carving up lives,
Slicing the children apart at their bowels,
Believing that justice latterly thrives—
Wiser than Solomon or blinking old owls—
As long [...]
Mark Bennett | December 4, 2008
From today’s mailbag (the correspondent somehow tried to post it to the version of this post that lies on my long-defunct blog on Wordpress; he left the name “Michael” and an email address, but the email address failed):
From the standpoint of justice, what matters is whether the factually guilty are found legally guilty, and the [...]
Mark Bennett | August 12, 2008
From Western Justice:
If we are truly concerned about the guilty being punished and the innocent being let free, then why encourage one side to hide the truth from the other side? Is the system about winning more than it is truth?
and (apropos of reciprocal discovery):
I know that defense attorneys are immediately concerned about such a [...]
Mark Bennett | April 26, 2008
New York criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield asks of the criminal justice system, “is it too broken?“
These are a few of the questions he asks:
Are jurors capable of discerning truth from deception, or is this just a vanity of our support for trial by jury?
. . . .
Is there a fundamental flaw in our selection [...]
Mark Bennett | January 20, 2008
Anonymous Harris County prosecutor AHCL, in a post that illustrates the need that she remain anonymous, wrote yesterday about African-American Jurors, Batson, and the D.A.’s Office. She said,
prosecutors are very much aware of the fact that probably every African-American member of a jury panel has been treated like crap at some point during his or [...]
Mark Bennett | December 20, 2007
Gideon wrote:
Maybe I’m naive, but I thought it – what we do, this side and the other – was about justice. Righting wrongs. Then why, for some, is it about winning and losing?
What this side does is different than what the other side does. The other side has (but of course doesn’t always follow) an [...]
Mark Bennett | December 20, 2007
Bennett & Bennett are back from seven days in Paris.
A few of the things the French do exceedingly well:
Food and drink.
Subterranean transport.
Historic preservation.
Clothing.
Something the French do less well:
Technology.
While the hotel at which we stayed in the 7th Arrondissement provided, in theory, a high-speed internet connection, that mostly-theoretical connection didn’t work well enough to stay online [...]
