I'm going to be on Reasonable Doubt tonight at 8:00, along with Todd Dupont and Steven Halpert. Watch. Better yet, call in.

The smell of flowers fills the air in the elevator at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center. Is it love . . . or is it The Gruff Marshmallow bringing flowers to his number-three prosecutor for, in her first felony jury trial, convincing a jury to give the defendant a life sentence for DWI? For something that's so wrong on so many levels, I think it's kinda

I wrote last December about cover, and a problem that arose because the lawyer whom I had asked to cover for me hadn't been diligent. Today I learned (H/T A Public Defender) that in L.A. there's a lawyer, Steve Levy, who offers cover to other lawyers for pay. I've read "The Lincoln Lawyer", so I understand how in L.A. County, with its proliferation of criminal courthouses, lawyers

"Semi-nude" means "any state of dress which opaquely covers no more than a human buttock, anus, male genitalia, female genitalia or areola of a female breast." Can anyone tell me what that means? I think it's English, but I'm not certain.

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

. . .

A Harris County prosecutor today (perennially gruff but a marshmallow on the inside) took umbrage at my public statements that until very recently I hadn't seen a Harris County prosecutor conduct a voir dire that was worth a damn. I invited him to tell me when he was picking a jury, and I'd come watch (then, of course, I'd blog it; I thought that went without saying).

The discussion of prosecutors' pet jury selection question, the "One-Witness-Rule" question, continues. Prosecutor SC asks: “People who would require more than one witness to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt (for reasons Biblical or pragmatic) are qualified to serve as jurors.” Why? Why isn’t this scenario the same as having a juror who would require DNA evidence to convict someone? Is that person qualified to be

Prosecutors respond to my post on the single-witness-rule voir dire question.Seeking Justice says that it "sounds like an effective question to discern which jurors have opinions about the burden of proof that are contrary to law": There is nothing about that burden, considered either theoretically or historically and legally, that contains even an implicit caveat, "only upon testimony of more than one witness.To the contrary, there are

When I learned that Hostis Civitas and MacLitigator were both spending July at Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College in Dubois, Wyoming (joining Underdog and In The Moment in the world of TLC-lawyer-written blawgs), I had hopes that one of them would find a way to blog from Thunderhead Ranch, becoming the first lawyer to do so.I still hope to hear from Remy or Peter while they're at

One question that prosecutors in Harris County are overly fond of asking jurors is this: If we only present one witness, but based on that witness's testimony you believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, can you convict him? The prosecutors then gleefully challenge, for cause, all of the jurors who say "no." It is (the courts have held) a legitimate commitment question --