Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | July 23, 2008
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
. . .
Mark Bennett | March 30, 2008
By a margin of more than 11 to one, Defending People choose freedom over safety as the thing they value most. [poll=2] AHCL, at the Elect Kelly Siegler Blog can be forgiven a bit of snarkiness when she reads: Defending People is about protecting the people, one at a time, from the only viable threat to their liberty: their government. … “They hate us for our freedom,” the President says, justifying our embroilment in a war without end that in turn serves as rationale for the curtailment of our rights — to free expression (“There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do….”), to be secure in our homes and persons (the malevolently-named USA-PATRIOT act), to habeas corpus, counsel, due process and jury trial (Guantanamo) . . . .
Mark Bennett | March 26, 2008
This is one of those things. If you do know it already (like Jon Katz), I don’t need to tell you, and if you don’t know it already, it’s not going to make any sense to you and you’re going to fight it. So here goes:
Our anger is almost always based on our fear.
“Hey, waitaminute!” [...]
Mark Bennett | March 25, 2008
I said yesterday that what’s important about the Chronicle writing that Kelly Siegler admonished other lawyers to “make people afraid” is that jurors know about it.
Why? Because I think people are much less likely to be manipulated if they know that someone is going to be trying to manipulate them.
If a prosecutor gets up in [...]
Mark Bennett | March 24, 2008
When I pointed yesterday to the fact that Kelly Siegler’s advice to other prosecutors to “make people afraid” it was intended to be a Sunday-afternoon placeholder until I had time to deal with Kelly’s admonishment in more depth.
Judge Caprice Cosper says that there are people whom we punish because we’re mad at them, and people [...]
Mark Bennett | March 23, 2008
The Chronicle reports that, “in a 2002 trial skills presentation in Austin, [Harris County DA candidate Kelly] Siegler’s worksheet on final arguments included, ‘Make jury afraid.’”
Mark Bennett | September 21, 2007
Jon Katz writes about Giving Unpleasant People the Benefit of the Doubt. His message is that we should seek to eliminate anger by eliminating fear. As Paladin said, “Never draw in anger. It slows the hand.”
Jon tells a Zen story as an example of a life lived without fear:
A man is chased in the wilderness [...]
Mark Bennett | July 12, 2007
(I promised, on reading New York criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield’s Independence Day post, 231 Years and Still Trying, to write about the nature of freedom, the power of fear, and the abandonment of American ideals. This is the third post in the series; it covers the second topic. I discussed the nature of freedom [...]
Mark Bennett | July 6, 2007
(I promised, on reading SHG’s 231 Years and Still Trying, to write about the nature of freedom, the power of fear, and the abandonment of American Ideals. This is the first post in the series, though it covers the third topic.)
When I was growing up, my dad worked for the CIA. I was curious about [...]
Mark Bennett | June 1, 2007
Scott Greenfield, in Simple Justice, writes here about the TB-infected man who, despite being on the watch list, made it through customs and into the U.S. Scott suggests this theory of airport security:
Why is it they check the bottoms of my shoes, and won’t let me go through the magnetometer, because I have a fourth [...]
