I’ve been meaning to write this piece for a while, either as a blog post or as the framework for a piece of speculative legal fiction. Cindy Henley’s and Jeff Gamso’s comments to my post about the Cameron Todd Willingham case prompted me to do it now, rather than later . . . .If you think I have the law wrong and you can back it up

Cameron Todd Willingham died at age 36. Convicted of capital murder in Corsicana, Texas in 1991 for the fire death of his three daughters, Willingham was executed in 2004. The evidence against Willingham? A jailhouse snitch, Johnny Webb, who alleged that Willingham had confessed to him that he took “some kind of lighter fluid, squirting [it] around the walls and the floor, and set a fire.” According

The Pat Lykos DA's Office has, in the last eight months, shown a marked tendency to act without calm deliberation. See the whale policy, the no-probation-for-illegal immigrants policy, the premature announcement of DIVERT, Pat Lykos calling two of her prosecutors "incompetent", and just about every story on Murray's blog. I wrote here about the Office's desperate-seeming call for witnesses against Judge Jackson. Now I've learned that an

I want to make it clear that I don’t do foolish things like play beer pong or run marathons. But I draw inspiration from the foolish things that other people do. So the next Simple Rule for Better Jury Selection is The Marathon Rule, to wit: Save something for the end. There’s the possibility that, while the game is still afoot, the court will try to artificially

In Beer Pong,The ball is always in play. If the ball hits the floor, ceiling, wall or even leaves the room it can still be, and should be, hit back in the direction of the table. So it is in jury selection, except that “the ball” is the conversation and “the table” is the case. Almost anything that any potential juror says can be hit back toward

Jury selection is not only—nor even mostly—about selecting (or deselecting) jurors. If you use voir dire simply to find the jurors whom you want to strike, you're missing out on most of the value of jury selection. These rules will help you anyway.  

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office is looking for other people who allegedly may have been involved with Judge Donald Jackson.Donna Hawkins, a spokeswoman for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, said investigators in the public integrity division want to know whether there are other people who have any knowledge of similar behavior in Jackson’s court.Someone in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office should have been smart

Thank you for your email complimenting my blog. You are free to link to it, and to quote me with attribution (including, I hope, a link). There are no quid pro quos here, though. I'll link to your blog if I think it's worth reading, but I'm not going to link to you just because you link to me. If you don't think Defending People is worth

We lawyers are analytical creatures. The LSAT doesn't include a section of intuition puzzles. So Simple Rule 8 for Better Jury Selection is The Shrink (as in therapist) Rule:Rule 8: How Do You Feel About That?Jurors decide cases based on their guts, then look for intellectual reasons to support their emotional decisions. As a result of confirmation bias (h/t Dennis Elias of Litigation Strategies for the link),

Rule 7, also from improvisational theatre: Don't block.In improv, blocking is when you take another actor's idea, and negate it:"It sure is quiet here on the moon.""No, this is the bottom of the sea."Your partner looks bad, and you've killed a scene. In improv, if your partner says you're on the moon, you're on the moon (and . . . ).You may not like hearing them (see