John Wesley Hall brings to our attention a new article: Fred Zacharias, Fitting Lying to the Court into the Central Moral Tradition of Lawyering, 58 Case West. L. Rev. ___ (2008). Professor Zacharias focuses on what he calls Professor Monroe H. Freedman's "most interesting illustration" of circumstances in which zealous representation might "require a lawyer to make a false statement to a court or a third person,

Today a Harris County jury gave my 26-year-old client six years in prison for stealing $780,000 worth of material from his employer, 3M. The prosecutor's last plea offer was 15 years. Six years is not the longest prison sentence I've ever considered a win, but it's not the shortest. We've filed a notice of appeal -- I am certain that the evidence that the complainant owned the

I just compared notes with the prosecutor on my trial case. In picking a jury of 12 out of a panel of 65, exercising 10 peremptory challenges each, we made one double strike.

I can win this trial. I can! I can!

Are you collectively really so brainwashed that you think it's okay to advocate "empowering" judges by taking sentencing power away from juries in felony cases belongs in the same document (the Texas GOP 2008 Platform . . . the image ought to be a live link) as "Preserving American Freedom" and "Limiting the Expanse of Government Power"? I'm just askin'. . .

I'm in trial* on a white-collar criminal case. It is not an easy case, but sometimes we have to try the tough cases. I've got to wonder why the prosecutor left on the jury two jurors who admitted that they couldn't consider the top end of the statutory punishment range (i.e. life in prison). Maybe he wants to give me a fighting chance? Nice of him. A

One thing I can say for Ollie the Cabdrivertising Attorney: unlike this lawyer, he relinquishes representation of a client to a new criminal-defense lawyer with perfect equanimity; he's got no problem at all being subbed out, and will even thank you for taking a case off his hands.

A team of federal inspectors is checking out the Harris County Jail. Harbingers of adult supervision for the Harris County Criminal Justice System? Widow charged 23 years after her husband's murder. She claimed at the time that an intruder had entered the house, tortured her, and shot him with her pistol. The dead guy's daughter contacted cold case investigators every year until they reopened the case. ("No

Blakely at Judgment Day says that the legal profession can be a dangerous one: While many attorneys—especially those practicing criminal defense—have received threats from clients, more often than not it’s just empty talk. I think many attorneys become numb to threatening phone messages and letters, primarily because everything has worked out fine in the past. Two stories over the last week, however, remind us to take these

Miami criminal-defense lawyer David Markus blogs about a fight between criminal-defense lawyers on the steps of the jail (H/T Arkansas criminal-defense lawyer John Wesley Hall's Law of Criminal Defense). I think that might be a natural extension of lawyers treating clients as property. (I wonder if I could take Ollie in a fight.)