Bennett & Bennett are back from seven days in Paris. A few of the things the French do exceedingly well: Food and drink. Subterranean transport. Historic preservation. Clothing. Something the French do less well: Technology. While the hotel at which we stayed in the 7th Arrondissement provided, in theory, a high-speed internet connection, that mostly-theoretical connection didn't work well enough to stay online for long enough to

Defending People is taking a brief well-deserved break. I will not post much, and may not post at all, in the next seven days.

Scott Greenfield is having a conversation (of sorts) with Rahul Jindal about legal outsourcing. Rahul, who is in Noida (a suburb of Delhi) is an advocate of LPO -- variously, "Legal Process Outsourcing," "Legal Process Offshoring," or "Legal Services Offshoring." Mention of Delhi drew my attention because that's one of my hometowns. Until I was 20 or so, the address at which I had lived at the

How, without putting your client on the stand, might you counter the government's "nobody would trust another person with x dollars worth of drugs unless the other person knew he had the drugs" argument in a trial in which knowledge is at issue? I'm looking for novel and useful approaches.

From McClung's Texas Pattern Jury Charges: You are instructed that our law provides that the failure of the defendant to testify shall not be taken as a circumstance against him, and during your deliberations you must not allude to, comment on, or discuss the failure of the defendant to testify in this cause, nor will you refer to or discuss any matter not before you in evidence.

In our (if you help someone with a trial for long enough, it becomes your trial too) federal cocaine conspiracy trial, which involves eight kilograms of cocaine in a sealed Barbie dollhouse box in a suitcase at Houston's Intercontinental Airport, yesterday we learned that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) keeps no record of the suitcases it has opened and inspected unless it finds something. Nor are inspections

Gideon brings us this atrocious story out of Illinois about a juror coming forward, 15 years after his jury duty, to testify in a postconviction proceeding that he and two other jurors had believed that the defendant was innocent of the armed robbery but after deliberating for over nine hours, had changed their votes to guilty under pressure from the other jurors. One can see how this

It's audio-video day here at Defending People. Here's a 9-1-1 tape from the City of Pasadena, a suburb of Houston in Harris County: Note to self: If you have time, before shooting someone in the back, to explain to the police that you understand the recent changes in the law of self-defense, then it probably isn't really self-defense.

Criminal defense lawyer Randy England of Jefferson City, Missouri brings us this post about Brett Darrow, a 20-year-old St. Louis kid who drives around town wired for sound and light, deliberately antagonizing cops by refusing to play along with their attempts to pry into his personal life and intimidate him. The police conduct in the first video Randy links to might shock most middle-class white folk who

Defending People had a lot of traffic yesterday from Harris County computers; last night at the HCCLA Holiday Party a prosecutor asked me if I was really blogging during trial. From these two data I conclude that Harris County prosecutors are reading my blog from the office. Welcome, prosecutors! If you see any unnamed prosecutor in here whom you believe to be you, you're wrong. Anonymous prosecutors