Retired Judge Don Burgess, formerly of the Beaumont Court of Appeals, has been appointed (order—PDF) by Olen Underwood, Presiding Judge of the Second Administrative Judicial Region of Texas, to hear the contempt cases against the two prosecutors and two court reporters whom Judge Susan Brown of the 185th District Court accused (frivolously, in my opinion) of contempt. Judge Burgess knows contempt law better than Judge Brown appears

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people

Matt Brown would have missed out. John Kindley would have baked bread for a living. When I was little, I wanted, thanks to Bravest of All, to be a firefighter.

Last Tuesday six police unions announced a vote of no confidence in Harris County DA Pat Lykos. Last Wednesday retired judge (some might say, former prosecutor who happened to wear a black robe for much of his prosecutorial career) Mike Anderson filed to run against Lykos. Is the timing mere coincidence, was Anderson's filing prompted by the union announcement, or was the union announcement timed to precede

Yesterday Harris County District Clerk Chris Daniel invited me to preview the District Clerk's new efiling system for pleadings in criminal cases, FREEfax. Today I saw the dog-and-pony show, and it's a well-thought-out system that will, if all goes as planned, be very helpful to criminal-defense lawyers and, by extension, to our clients (also, I suppose, to prosecutors). The FREEfax system has been up and running on

It would, as Alexis Madrigal points out at The Atlantic, be a mistake to think that this is all about Lt. John Pike: Let's not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy. Neither should John Pike be let off scot-free.

When I read, at Simple Justice, commenters' rationalization of a grad student's failure to act when he saw a ten-year-old boy being raped by a football coach—typical of which was this:I would like to point out that Mike McQueary was a graduate student back then. Had he done anything more, his entire career would have been over before it even started, and the coverup probably would have

Appellate Squawk. He's been blogging for nearly a year, and I've never heard of him. I've been excising the bloggers-for-profit and the long-defunct noble efforts from my feed reader, so it's good to be able to add someone who blogs for love (though he might say, "for anger"). Who else am I missing? (h/t Greenfield.)

A jury acquitted Crystal Desormeaux of capital murder. A grand jury then indicted her for the offense of injury to a child. Injury to a child is a lesser-included offense to capital murder of a child (In Re L.M.). Desormeaux filed a writ of habeas corpus in the injury-to-a-child case, alleging that the Double-Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment barred her trial for injury to a child

Before we try tough cases clients often ask, “if things don’t go well, we can appeal, right?”Well, sure. If we lose, we can appeal, but the appeal isn’t about retrying or even revisiting the facts of the case. If the appellate court finds that “no rational trier of fact” could have found proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the case will be reversed for legally insufficient