Harris County Assistant District Attorney Rachel Palmer has filed an assumed-name certificate declaring that she will be doing business as Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center. Someone else has been doing business as Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center for about four years: Murray Newman, who started a blog by that name on 8 January 2008, and who has not been gentle with

Last Friday 15 TSA agents joined officers of the Houston Police Department, the Harris County Sheriff's Office, the METRO Police Department, and the Precinct Seven Constable's Office in "a synchronized, counter-terrorism exercise that focused on bus stops and shelters and transit centers." (Write On Metro, Multi-Agency Sting Operation on Rail & Bus Successful, h/t @frankbynum.) No actual terrorists were found in this exercise, in which officers "performed

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison," wrote Henry David Thoreau in Civil Disobedience. In April 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. sat in a Birmingham, Alabama jail cell, arrested for participating in nonviolent protests. Forty-nine years ago today, he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail. I republish it here in its entirety because, while it is

I am opposed to employers holding the fact of petty non-moral-turpitude convictions against job applicants. Unless you are hiring drivers, you shouldn't care whether a prospective employee has had a DWI. I can't think of any job (from the office of the President right down to me and you) for which never having smoked marijuana is a reasonable qualification. (It's not like the drunk driver or the pot

When two of his prosecutors got caught hiding Brady Material, Oklahoma County DA David Prater issued a press release, reading in part: I recognize that this is not a one-time occurrence. There is no telling how many cases have been tainted by Pam Kimbrough and Stephanie Miller's concealment of exculpatory evidence. There is no telling how many people have had unfair trials in this county because Pam Kimbrough

Mike asks, Mark, do you have any authority to cite to support your interpretation that an IAC claim is not a "controversy between the lawyer and the client"?  Just wondering because it certainly seems like one to me. I know of no authority directly answering the question, "does an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim in a motion or writ for post conviction relief create a controversy between the lawyer and

One of my colleagues responded to this post, All attorney's know, that once an ineffective assistance claim is made, the defendant essentially waives attorney-client privilege and the attorney has right to defend their actions and decisions. This is an incorrect statement of the law. Everything a lawyer learns in the course of representing a defendant is privileged. Texas Disciplinary Rule of Professional Conduct 1.05(c) describes when a lawyer

I am hosting Blawg Review next Monday. The theme is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he penned forty-nine years ago Monday. Please read the letter. If you haven't read it lately, reread it. It's a brilliant work, deserving of regular rereading along with the Declaration of Independence. I'm a little intimidated by my chosen theme. So if you have any suggested links for

Update 2: A week after the facts chronicled, I've been able to get my ego out of the way(a little bit) and look at the situation (a little bit) objectively. I lead the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association Lawyers Assistance Strike Force. When a lawyer gets himself into trouble with a court, we swoop in and get him out. We have an excellent track record—if a criminal-defense

Do you think, based on this video, that the judge's impartiality in a DWI case might reasonably be questioned?