Read owencenli's May 12, 2007 post understanding the enemy part II. Read the comments too. Read this post by commentator chiashurb. These people are law students. I am heartened. There is hope.

Today's big criminal defense story is this: two of Houston's best lawyers, Stanley Schneider and Robb Fickman (no good link to Robb), prevailed in the trial of a bus driver accused of manslaughter for accidentally running over and killing a 9-year-old girl. The driver was acquitted. In a post-loss interview the prosecutor washed his hands of prosecutorial discretion, claiming, "All we ever wanted to do in this

About a month ago a man hired me to replace his previous lawyer (someone who advertises extensively on the Web) on his felony (this actually happens fairly often -- not everyone gets the "hiring a criminal-defense lawyer" thing right the first time). I drew up a motion to substitute counsel, got the client's signature on it, and sent it to the former lawyer along with a letter

In Texas, almost everyone accused of a crime is entitled to bail. In some counties, attorneys serve as their clients' bondsmen. This may be a good idea for the lawyers, but it creates a potential conflict of interest harmful to the clients. Why? Suppose that a client pays a lawyer to represent her and make her bond. The lawyer has two interests in the case: (1) defending

In the past 48 hours this blog has had visitors from: Abu Dhabi, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, China, Dubai, Egypt, France, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco,Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, Norway, Peru, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and Viet Nam.(Most of these visitors come to us via the Texas State Bar, which has us as the featured blog on its blog

It is ridiculous to think that a person might choose a lawyer based even in part on a number spat out by a secret algorithm. Yet that's the premise behind startup avvo.com. Out of a very limited number of data, Avvo's algorithm creates ratings for "experience," "industry recognition," and "trustworthiness" and assigns a number between 0 and 10 -- "Avvo's assessment of how well a lawyer could

"Probable Cause? Probable Cause? We don' need no steenkin' probable cause!" -A Houston defender, arguing to the jury in a drug case that the search was illegal and its fruit should be disregarded. Technorati Tags: criminal defense, jury trial, argument, Texas

I mentioned in a teaser here that in Texas we can have the jury decide contested fact issues related to the suppression of evidence. That right comes from Article 38.23 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, which says in relevant part: (a) No evidence obtained by an officer or other person in violation of any provisions of the Constitution or laws of the State of Texas,

Gideon, following Doug Berman's train of thought here, asks, Why don’t we have jury sentencing in non-capital criminal cases? In Texas, we do have jury sentencing in non-capital cases. The accused can elect before trial to have the jury set punishment in the event of a conviction (and we get jury trials for everything). If the accused doesn't elect jury punishment the judge sets punishment. In almost

A few recent blog posts about pro bono representation . . . • Carolyn Elefant's (Legal Blog Watch) recent post on Arbor Hill v. Albany, in which she comments on (among other things) my post about that case: The problem here was that Gibson Dunn took the case pro bono, and as such, its fee agreement may not have provided for compensation by the plaintiff -- which