Sometimes I browse other lawyers' websites to see what's out there. It looks like some of these folks are spending a lot of money on fancy advertising; their websites make my websites, Bennett & Bennett and Fight the Feds, look . . . homemade. Should I spend some money on having a professional design and maintain my websites? What do you think? One thing I've seen other

A local criminal court judge said to me, "I could never do what you do [that is, defend the accused]. I'm not creative enough." It is true that defending people well requires creativity. It also requires imagination, curiosity, flexibility, adaptability, and a willingness to take risks. In other words, it takes a childlike mind. A defense lawyer who thinks like a grownup, suppressing the ideas that are

Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzales's White House Liaison, has chosen to plead the Fifth rather than testify before Congress. This is good news. When a highly-placed Department of Justice official, who knows exactly how the system works, avails herself of her constitutional right to remain silent, it sets a good example for the rest of us. Goodling's lawyer said that his client would not testify because "certain members

The Brownsville Herald had an article last Thursday about a proposed bill to allow felony prosecutors to bring concealed weapons to court. The notion came about because of unfounded fears that a violent gang would try to break one of its members out from the courthouse during his sentencing. Like any policy decision made based on fear, this seems like a bad idea to me. I support

In case you couldn't already tell . . . I'm fascinated by the things other fields have to teach us (criminal trial lawyers) about what we do. For example, theatre: Keith Johnstone's books, Impro for Storytellers and Improvisation and the Theatre contain lots of nuggets of wisdom that my brain translates into ways of thinking about trial. I know a good deal about the use of psychodrama

A classic mistake made by inexperienced lawyers is to write out the questions to be asked in direct examination. When the questions are written out, the answers don't matter because the lawyer knows what the next question is regardless of what the witness says. Likewise, an inexperienced lawyer (or one who has not unlearned the bad lessons of the DA's office) will write out yes-or-no questions to

In Keith Johnstone's Impro for Storytellers he relates: "A Japanese swordsman wrote that if you fight someone who has no plan, you'll be thinking, I'll do such and such! as your severed head bounces down the temple steps!" (Then Johnstone adds, "(Well, he didn't put it exactly like that.)") Johnstone is talking about how being "in the moment" (the theatre term for mindfulness) makes actors improvise better.

In another sentencing hearing (the defendant had pled guilty to theft and was seeking probation from the judge), the prosecutor argued that the defendant, who was mentally ill (diagnosed but unmedicated at the time of the theft, which was followed by two suicide attempts; medicated now; a thousand pages of medical records in evidence) had "chosen" to steal and was being "manipulative." Her mother must be very

In a sentencing hearing the other day (I was observing a colleague's injury to a child case), I heard a prosecutor argue something that made me do a double take: "This man used his position of power to hurt other people." Isn't that a pretty fair description of what prosecutors do when they put people in prison? Technorati Tags: argument, criminal defense, jury trial, prosecutors

I'm a criminal-defense lawyer in Houston, Texas. I represent people accused of all sorts of crimes in state court all over Texas, and in federal court all over the country. In this blog, I plan to talk about anything that relates in any way to the practice of criminal defense law. In my mind, that's a very broad category, encompassing not only law and current events but