I am pleased to report that, in a process more resembling democracy than the usual oligarchy, Houston DWI lawyer Gary Trichter has been elected president-elect of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.

New second-career criminal-defense lawyer desperately in need of a mentor Joe Attorney writes:[Reptile] is not a technique I could comfortably embrace.  It suggests we should manipulate the more primitive emotions and parts of the brain to gain the desired result.  To me it suggests that lawyers should worry more about ends than the means.Joe is inspired by Stephanie West Allen, Jeffrey Schwartz, and Diane Wyzga's article in

For some reason, it happens in May: criminal-defense lawyers' fancies turn to . . . getting paid. This time 'round, Norm Pattis started it with Flat Fees, Black Holes, and the Value of Chaos: There are cross-cutting incentives in a flat-fee case. The client has paid for a lawyer and wants her expectations, no matter how unreasonable or unnecessary from the perspective of the experienced lawyer's judgment,

It's hard to find Beaumont senior district court judge Larry Gist's party affiliation. He gave $250 to Republican Ted Poe's reelection campaign in 2009; he has a jail named after him; he jokingly refers to his progressive son as "my son the communist." I would guess "Republican," but he may be some species of East Texas Democrat. I mention this because the Houston Chronicle's UGOI have already started

Five things that make me want to cover my ears and shout "la-la-la-I'm-not-listening" over and over instead of blogging: What Texas wants to teach my kids—and yours (New York Times). Eric Holder hinting that the administration might support expanding the Quarles "public safety" exception to Miranda (WSJ). Arizona's new immigration law (New York Times). Great public support for Arizona's new immigration law (Miami criminal-defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum).

From a civilian’s comment on this post about “John R.,” the anonymous Rochester, New York personal injury lawyer who dabbles in criminal defense and scoffs at the Bill of Rights:I understand John R.’s position as it relates to United States of America jurisprudence. The legal system is heavily stacked in favor of the government especially when it deals with those citizens that have less than adequate means

Here's why I don't allow anonymous comments here: In my opinion there's only one way to reliably win for a criminal defendant at trial: you have some evidence that is devastating to the prosecution's case, you disguise it so that neither the judge nor the prosecutor knows what its significance is, you get it into evidence on some other ground, and you don't say another word about

Why have I been repeating for three years (okay, for a lot longer than that) that lawyers should not waive detention hearings without good reason and that good reason means "because having a detention hearing will prejudice the accused"? Because better representation in a federal criminal case begins with a detention hearing, and for some quixotic reason I want to improve the quality of representation that people

Some years ago I got a call from a bureaucrat with the federal courts here in town: would I like to help handle the illegal reentry docket? By "handle the illegal reentry docket," I thought she meant, "defend people charged with illegal reentry"—I'm one of the few federal criminal-defense lawyers in Houston who speak Spanish well, so it made some sense for the court to ask me

Old-time West Texas judges used to travel the circuit with a single law book (and they were still better-read than most modern Texas judges. . .). If you had to preserve a single criminal-law volume so that the American criminal justice system would survive, what would you choose? If civilization were crumbling around our ears (if? who am I kidding?), I had to bug out to terra