The verdict in a criminal trial is a dismal medium for sending a message. Seldom does anyone outside the criminal courtroom care what has happened inside. Even if people are paying attention, criminal jury instructions don't ask "what message would you like to send?" but only whether the government has proven its case. A verdict that is issued to send a message is not based on the

I have advocated (Lizards Don't Laugh) getting jurors laughing to get them out of their lizard brains and make them less likely to convict. Conventional courtroom wisdom is that a laughing jury does not convict. But humor in the criminal trial has to come with some rules.  Herewith, ten commandments for humor in the courtroom. I Thou shalt probably not. This is a maneuver to be attempted

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Thomas Friedman is a boob. I worry about [another 9/11] even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there

From MySanAntonio.com: A Bexar County assistant district attorney has been fired following an incident in which she was mentioned in a friend's driving while intoxicated arrest report for advising him not to submit to a breath test. She's also accused of badging the arresting officer. And "P then told (him) to take a personal recognizance bond that she had in the wallet that contained her identification and

Chris Green, chosen to be a juror in a non-death capital murder case in the 338th District Court of Harris County, Texas, googled "capital murder" before opening statements began, and didn't like what he found. He decided that there was a "very real danger of retribution" if the jury convicted Amezquita of capital murder and he got the automatic life sentence that is mandatory when the State

Here's baby lawyer Andrew DeLuca's pitch: It is these peo­ple that have grown tired of your eso­teric legal posts, that we as attor­neys rep­re­sent. How do you represent someone effectively when you can not connect with them? The type of perspective that is only learned by life experience or lifetimes of experience and allows us to connect with our clients fears, their hopes and their outlook on

(tl;dr version: Texas prosecutors think that only they know justice; they want to take power out of the hands of the community; they intend to pass an unconstitutional law and apply it unconstitutionally ex post facto to do so; and they don't care what lies must be told to get it done.) Texas's capital-murder sentencing scheme provides for a choice between death and life without parole for all

Alan Dershowitz says that Lois Lerner can be held in contempt for taking the Fifth in response to questions asked by Congress after making prefatory comments about the same subject matter: "You can't simply make statements about a subject and then plead the Fifth in response to questions about the very same subject," the renowned Harvard Law professor said. "Once you open the door to an area

A recent Gallup poll names the Houston, Sugar Land, and Baytown region among the least safe U.S. metro areas, according to resident confidence in the safety of where they live. Only 63 percent of those polled in the Houston area responded that they felt safe walking alone at night in the area they reside. * * * * * Compare that to the 80 percent in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area