From a sexual-assault appeal I'm working on: I want to ask everybody on the panel the following question: How likely do you think a child would be to lie about being sexually abused? One is very likely; two, likely; three, unlikely; four, very unlikely. As a criminal-defense lawyer who has represented people who have been falsely accused of sexually abusing children, my answer is "four, very unlikely."

House Bills 101, 496, and 603, which I wrote about here and testified against in Austin, have been left pending in committee. Senate Bill 1135, "UNLAWFUL DISCLOSURE OR PROMOTION OF INTIMATE VISUAL MATERIAL," was voted out of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. (I didn't go to Austin to testify; I considered my public duty done, and my right to say "I told you so" earned, the first

Dear PNC (we call you PNCs, for "Potential New Clients"; it's redundant, I suppose, but "PC" is already assigned to "probable cause" and "personal computer" and "politically correct"):You have told me repeatedly that you are innocent. You don't mean "legally innocent"—that is, unconvicted—but "factually innocent." I don't know whether you're telling me the truth or not (people lie to me all the time), but please know that

There are three nonconsensual-pornography-criminalization bills before the Texas House of Representatives' Criminal Jurisprudence Committee tomorrow: HB101 (Guillen) and HB603 (Davis of Harris) are identical: (b) A person commits an offense if the person: (1)  intentionally displays, distributes, publishes advertises, offers, or otherwise discloses visual material depicting another person engaged in sexual conduct; and (2)  knows or should have known that the depicted person has not consented to

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that

Suppose that a client comes to you with a problem: he has a computer hard drive full of child pornography, and he wants to know what to do with it. What do you tell him? It's illegal for him to continue possessing the images. So you can't advise him to do nothing (and keep breaking the law). The smart thing for him to do would be to

Justin McBrayer laments the fact that our public schools are teaching our children that there are no moral facts, and therefore no moral truths. He gives seven examples, from online fact vs. opinion worksheets, of facts that kids are taught are opinions: — Copying homework assignments is wrong.— Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior. — All men are created equal. — It is worth sacrificing some personal

… I've got your back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ombfa6dKoec& (Eat your heart out, Reposa.)

What do you do if you're a District Attorney running an office that is under fire for prosecutorial misconduct and in the middle of a hearing (in which current and former prosecutors contradicted each other, themselves, and the documentary evidence) over whether the office hid exculpatory evidence of alternate suspects in a murder case? If you're Devon Anderson, you hire a former Dallas County ADA who is

There are two types of advocates of revenge-porn criminalization: there are those who actually propose and try to defend unconstitutional statutes, and those who dispense with First Amendment objections with a wave of a hand, but don't offer any statutory language that might pass First Amendment Muster. Mary Anne Franks is an example of the former. She will write (and rewrite) her model statute and defend it