This is going out today to Nico LaHood, the District Attorney of Bexar County. Similar letters are going out to Kim Ogg, the District Attorney of Harris County; and Sharen Wilson, the District Attorney of Tarrant County. I think Wilson has done the most to fix the problem—her office sent out letters notifying people that they might be entitled to relief from convictions under the void section

On Friday, I sprung a guy from a Texas prison. "Carl" had been in for nine years on an online-solicitation-of-a-minor case when his mom hired me to file an application for writ of habeas corpus on his behalf. Just after Christmas the Tarrant County District Attorney agreed that relief was appropriate, and agreed to Carl's release on his own recognizance. The court bench-warranted Carl back from prison

At the outset we reject the view that freedom of speech and association, as protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, are ‘absolutes,’ not only in the undoubted sense that where the constitutional protection exists it must prevail, but also in the sense that the scope of that protection must be gathered solely from a literal reading of the First Amendment. Konigsberg v. State Bar of Cal., 366 U.S. 36, 49 (1961) (citation omitted). What

Texas's Online Impersonation statute, Penal Code Section 33.07: (a) A person commits an offense if the person, without obtaining the other person's consent and with the intent to harm … any person, uses the name or persona of another person to: (1) create a web page on a commercial social networking site or other Internet website; or . . . (c) An offense under Subsection (a) is

If jurors decide cases based on beliefs reached early in the case, how can we best affect their decisions? Ideally we will show them two things before the evidence begins: A story, and credibility. Maybe we'll talk some other time about telling the story—what makes a good story, and how to tell it. Credibility is something that we should be attentive to every moment of trial. Every

These many cognitive biases we all have—confirmation bias, fundamental attribution bias, and so forth—were once our friends. They helped our species reach the top of the food chain by allowing us to make snap judgments that, at the time, were right often enough to justify how often they were wrong. But "at the time" was before they built the Harris County Criminal Justice Center. Before we started

Fundamental attribution bias is the cognitive bias that leads us to attribute people's actions, good or bad, to their character rather than to circumstances. A person of whom we have no opinion and for whom we have no ingroup/outgroup associations leading to an opinion, but whom we learn has done a bad thing, we generalize ((Remember: When we form our cognitive map of the world we generalize,

(Please forgive typos in this and surrounding posts. I'm traveling, and  writing on an old iPad and a bluetooth keyboard, so there is some lag between the typing and the appearance of words on screen. I may come back and clean up later.) What if there were a secret about the way that jurors decided cases, the knowledge of which would give you an advantage over almost

Criminal trial lawyering is a subcategory of trial lawyering, which is a subcategory of persuasion, whihc is a subcategory of communication. So the criminal trial lawyer, to be better at her craft, could study the lessons of other trial lawyers (personal-injury lawyers, for example). That's obvious. The good thing about personal-injury lawyers is that they are fighting over money. ((It's also the bad thing about them.)) Because

I decided near the end of last year that my word for this year would be "attention." I would pay attention to what I was paying attention to, and to what I was getting in return f0r these payments of the scarcest asset I possess. I pretty quickly realized that I couldn't stand watching sitcoms, or tv generally, or listening to commercial radio, or watching popular media.