The general counsel for the Harris County DA's office says that the DA's operations manual provision related to diversity and equal employment, which has been policy since 1993, is "pretty much ignored as far as our actual hiring practices are concerned."

The Houston Chronicle has an interesting column today by Lisa Falkenberg, in which she suggests that when Kelly Siegler described the 45,000 members of Houston's Lakewood Church as "screwballs and nuts" she might not have been being entirely candid with the court. The context: Kelly was trying a capital murder case. The defense made a Batson challenge, alleging that it appeared that Kelly had used a peremptory

Veteran prosecutor, to veteran defense lawyer, in the wake of the moral collapse of the Harris County DA's office: Now we're all sleazy lawyers.

Defending People has received lots of hits today from the Language Log. It's a good match, I think; words are criminal-defense lawyers' tools, and at Defending People we love words and are not shy about using them. We're not even above making up a word, on occasion, when there isn't already one that works.Criminal lawyers (on both sides of the bar), like many other professionals, have their

I've referred here a time or two (okay, at every opportunity) to the Chuck Rosenthal-Kelly Siegler DA's Office. An anonymous commenter on Defending People (a prosecutor whose identity is known only to her and me) says that's not fair -- that Kelly doesn't share responsibility for the missteps of the Chuck Rosenthal administration. I told her that I was willing to be convinced, but that it sure

The prosecutor whose "Canadians" email I wrote about here and here responds: Vivian King knows NOTHING about "the real story." It is probably a waste of breath to defend my reputation since it sounds like a portion of the defense bar has made up their minds, but to me it is never a wasted effort to defend my reputation. So let's start with the factual inaccuracies in

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram brings us this story (H/T: Isiah Carey) of a 32-year-old Arlington, Texas man who believed that his 18-year-old stepson had anally raped the man's 8-year-old daughter. After the man's wife (the stepson's mother) made bail on her son's aggravated sexual assault charge despite the man's warning that he would hurt the lad, the man picked his stepson up from jail and then allegedly

I wrote a bit here about an email that circulated through the Rosenthal / Siegler DA's office mentioning "Canadians" on the jury. "Canadian", as it turns out, is a cryptoracist code word for "Nigger". (Others may coyly write "the N-word" instead: it seems to me that when we use that circumlocution we insulate ourselves, to our discredit, from the full horror of the word.) There is more

In response to this post about prosecutors advising witnesses who wish to take the Fifth, an anonymous Harris County prosecutor wrote: Before you are too hard on the D.A.s for telling a witness that they can't plead the 5th on the stand, you should realize how often that comes up for us. Too many witnesses believe that a lack of interest in testifying means that they can

Twice recently I've had people -- potential witnesses in criminal cases -- tell me, "the prosecutor said I couldn't take the Fifth because I'm not testifying to anything incriminating." One of them, an alleged complaining witness, even told me, "the prosecutor said I didn't need a lawyer because he's my lawyer." Hogwash. First, the prosecutor isn't the witness's lawyer. He shouldn't be giving legal advice to the