As soon as I get a mention on Fark.com, my website crashes. Thanks so much, Lunarpages. I'll be looking for a new ISP.

The following was sent to me by a prosecutor who wishes to remain anonymous. (No, it's not AHCL.) I disagree with him -- I think he's missing at least one essential point (that jury nullification is the law, so that a nullifying verdict is a verdict "according to the law") -- but he's not entirely crazy, and I thought I'd toss it out for discussion. Enjoy and

This is one of those things. If you do know it already (like Jon Katz), I don't need to tell you, and if you don't know it already, it's not going to make any sense to you and you're going to fight it. So here goes: Our anger is almost always based on our fear. "Hey, waitaminute!" you say. "When that guy cut me off in traffic

I said yesterday that what's important about the Chronicle writing that Kelly Siegler admonished other lawyers to "make people afraid" is that jurors know about it. Why? Because I think people are much less likely to be manipulated if they know that someone is going to be trying to manipulate them. If a prosecutor gets up in voir dire and says, "now, during this trial, I'm going

PJ's first comment here made me think of this, from Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology book, On Human Nature: Lawrence Kohlberg, an educational psychologist, has traced what he believes to be six sequential stages of ethical reasoning through which each person progresses as part of his normal mental development. The child moves from an unquestioning dependence on external rules and controls to an increasingly sophisticated set of internalized

Heat stroke (sun stroke) represents the complete breakdown of the heat control process . . . This is a true emergency. . . . The patient will be confused, very belligerent and uncooperative . . . . Spray with water or other suitable fluid and fan vigorously to lower the core temperature through evaporative cooling. This is the one time in medicine when it may be justifiable

Yesterday I received a couple of complaints that Defending People was loading slowly. I looked at my traffic stats, and saw that, while my overall numbers weren't high enough to explain the slowdown, I was getting three times as many total page loads as unique visitors; usually it's less than twice as many page loads as unique visitors. How do you account for that?

When I pointed yesterday to the fact that Kelly Siegler's advice to other prosecutors to "make people afraid" it was intended to be a Sunday-afternoon placeholder until I had time to deal with Kelly's admonishment in more depth. Judge Caprice Cosper says that there are people whom we punish because we're mad at them, and people whom we punish because we're afraid of them. Make people afraid

Email delivery of Defending People through Feedburner is slow -- posts are sent out in a daily digest, so there might be almost a daylong lag between when I post and when subscribers receive it via email. So I'm trying something new: the Subscribe2 plugin for Wordpress. There's an email subscription box in the sidebar; try it out and tell me what you think. Thanks.

The Chronicle reports that, "in a 2002 trial skills presentation in Austin, [Harris County DA candidate Kelly] Siegler's worksheet on final arguments included, 'Make jury afraid.'"