I heard today about a local lawyer who had quoted a $150,000-plus fee to a person accused of a first DWI. In Texas, DWI is a class "B" misdemeanor with a possible 180-day sentence but more likely a probated sentence if the accused is convicted. The lawyer didn't receive the fee (I probably wouldn't have heard about it if he had), but the story had me wondering

Two posts: Scott Greenfield, in Sex Offenders Must Have an Option, calls sex offenders "animals." Gideon, in Sex Offender Homelessness is not an Excuse, says (with, I suspect, more than a hint of irony) that some sex offenders are human. We are all animals, of course. But when people call sex offenders (or any other group of people) "animals," they don't mean that they are animals like

Colin asked, in a comment to this post about criminal-defense lawyers and criminal pretense lawyers, "For those of us who aren't lawyers, how much does a crappy defense lawyer usually cost? How much does a good defense attorney usually cost?" There's no good answer to those questions. The criminal pretense lawyer might ask $250 for a case that requires $5,000 worth of lawyering, or $1,000 for a

What non-legal blogs do you read? Most of those in my feed reader are DIY-related. One of my favorites: Cool Tools.

I wrote here about my theory that airport security measures are intended to remind us that we are in danger, and that we need the government's protection. They are intended to convince us that the government is doing all it can to keep us safe, but that we aren't entirely safe. The government holds out the enticing possibility that if we give it a little more power

Fort Worth criminal-defense lawyer Shawn Matlock blogs about "criminal-defense lawyers" vs. "lawyers practicing criminal law". It seems to me that there must be a better expression to describe the latter (I'll try to find it as I write this) but the distinction between the lawyers who defend people because they have a passion for the fight (the criminal-defense lawyers) and the lawyers who represent the accused because

The closing scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho: What makes that scene particularly creepy for me is the last fraction of a second of the shot of Norman Bates's face. Just before dissolving to the shot of the car being pulled out of the lake, Hitchcock superimposed an image of a skull over Norman's face. I don't know if I would have seen it, or known what I

New Mexico prosecutor Kirk Chavez has started blogging about New Mexico law at Issues and Holdings.

So far today I've had 116 visitors from this post on the Texas District and County Attorneys' Association forum, where the administrator, Shannon Edmonds, posted a link to my Motion to Change the Facts. A couple of visitors to that forum commented -- not on the motion (well, there were secondary and grudging admissions that that was actually funny), but on my philosophy (I give a damn),

Houston's TIRR (The Institution for Rehabilitation and Research) is the fourth-highest rated rehabilitation hospital in the U.S. (No VA hospital even made the top 25.) So why is it that TIRR's Project Victory, designed to help veterans with traumatic brain injuries "reintegrate into family, school, work and community life" with "a three-year, $3 million budget, plus equipment, space, and perhaps most importantly, three decades of institutional experience