My Harris County colleagues may have seen this already -- it was my President's Letter in the Winter 2008-09 HCCLA Defender -- but I think it might be worth publishing a little more broadly.To the Harris County Judiciary:    Wow. That was a surprise, wasn’t it? Who’d’ve thought that remaining judge in Harris County might require more than the imprimatur of the local Republican Party? Granted, the process

National Law Journal (H/T Omar Ha-Redeye)notes the decline of business for contract attorneys:As law firms downsize, laid-off attorneys and new law school graduates unable to find jobs have been turning to an option they may never have imagined at law school: becoming contract attorneys -- hired guns [or, more aptly, cannon fodder] for $35 an hour.Yet in the past couple of months, even that field appears to

I've learned that Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, in a continuing legal education program (I'm not giving the State Bar of Texas $90 even to rip a copy of the video for this post), attacked the motives of all criminal defense blawgers, who in his view are "only out to make a name for themselves" in order to "get clients." As exhibits, he used an image

New York criminal-defense lawyer Scott Greenfield and I usually agree on things, and he's a lot older and somewhat wiser than me (though still spry), so when he seems to disagree with me I take a careful look to see if maybe I'm wrong.The client charged with a crime has three (in Texas, four) decisions that only he can make: whether to plead guilty (more broadly, the

Austin criminal-defense lawyer Dax Garvin laments in a comment to my Advice to a Young Criminal Defense Trial Lawyer post, "I just wish more cases would go to trial… it seems most clients justdon’t want to take the risk, and I fully understand and respect that."Miami criminal-defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum, fresh out of a federal drug conspiracy trial, shares his thoughts on trials, including this:None of us

Lots of new criminal-defense lawyers have discovered Defending People since this early post, Advice to a Young Criminal Defense Trial Lawyer. I'm bumping it back to the top because it's one of those posts that I think people might find helpful, and might not happen upon otherwise.

I wrote here that “Mock trial” is to trial as ballroom dancing is to gladiatorial combat(which inspired my choice of Pollice Verso as the art for this blog).Dallas criminal-defense lawyer Robert Guest has found another metaphor, which he applies to pro se litigation, but which I shall misappropriate in a moment:The problem: proceeding pro se isn't real criminal defense anymore than I am really on tour with

A year and a half ago, I wrote:Walking the halls of the Harris County Criminal Courthouse, I smell fear. The accused are often afraid, as you might expect, as are their loved ones, but theirs is not the fear I smell. The fear I smell oozes out from under doors leading to the judges’ chambers, locked to keep the outside world away, and from the robes of

. . . and not a single comment.

Here (JDSupra) is a sentencing memorandum that I wrote for a man convicted of a federal crack cocaine conspiracy (this case). He had suffered a horrible childhood, and then lived a law-abiding life for about 25 years before It did the trick, and it has received good reviews from those who have read it; I hope you enjoy it too.