The business of the criminal courts never stops. When Harris County criminal-court judges want to take a day off, if they don't want to come back to a greater mess than they are leaving they have to get someone to sit in for them. If the time off is planned in advance (a vacation, say, or a judicial conference), a sitting judge can schedule fewer cases on

I wrote here about Houston lawyer John C. Osborne's travails with the State Bar of Texas. He's still serving a probated suspension until December 2013, but the Commission for Lawyer Discipline nonsuited the first disbarment petition. Now the Commission has filed a second disbarment petition (PDF) against Osborne, this time alleging that he overdrew his IOLTA account, the account in which he was supposed to be keeping

Defending People started five years ago today. In that five years, I've written some 700,000 words in 1,700+ posts and been told 643 times that people don't understand me. In commemoration of the day, the traditional fish-related video:

US News and World Report says of my alma mater, University of Houston Law Center: Students can get hands-on legal experience through the school’s clinics, which provide training in immigration law, criminal defense, and more. UH says: The Criminal Defense Clinic allows students actually represent defendants under the supervision of a practicing defense attorney. Misdemeanor and felony cases are handled from start to finish, including plea bargains,

Harris County Republican Party Executive Committee resolution on the PD's office, "the official Harris County Republican Party position on this issue" as of October 2009, announced by HCRP Chairman Jared Woodfill a few days ago: RESOLUTION SUPPORTING THE PRESENT HARRIS COUNTY PRIVATIZED INDIGENT DEFENSE SYSTEM WHEREAS, Harris County for years has had a privatized outsourced indigent defense system that is effective and cost efficient; and, WHEREAS, Harris

Nobody ever won a national election based on "love." Fear or hope (which is just the sunny side of fear): these are the things on which presidential campaigns are built. Not "love."

If I think that my friends in the media are about to report a story inaccurately, I don't caution them against reporting the story; I point them toward the facts. That's because I'm not TSA thug Sari Koshetz, who told journalists that they shouldn't cover blogger Jonathan Corbett's demonstration that nude scanners don't work, because Corbett "clearly has an agenda" and should not "be aided by the

Meanwhile, crime victim advocate Joe Wamback, a Newmarket resident and former federal Conservative candidate, supports the omnibus legislation. His son, Jonathan, was beaten into a coma in 1999. The Smickle ruling is “the reason we need minimum sentencing in our legislation”, he said. Defence lawyers who criticize mandatory minimum sentences are in a conflict of interest, he argued, since they derive their income from repeatedly representing people

I am, in case you didn't know it, interested in innovation in the practice of law. I don't believe that "because lawyers have always used yellow legal pads" is a good reason for using yellow legal pads. I went to the Trial Lawyers College, where I learned to use psychodrama in trial preparation and trial; I have studied improv, hypnosis, NLP, and various other disciplines that might be useful

The City of Houston wants to regulate feeding the homeless—to make it a crime for anyone to feed the homeless without registering with the city and jumping through a bunch of other hoops (PDF of proposed ordinance). In a lively online discussion among criminal-defense lawyers, Laurie Payne (not a CDL; I've no idea how she wandered into the discussion) interjected: I TOTALLY SUPPORT SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND