I've added to my Scribd collection of documents from the John Green case the defense's initial brief in opposition to mandamus, filed before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' first order denying mandamus. Green Defense Brief in Opposition to Mandamus

Here are three briefs filed today in State ex rel Lykos v. Fine, the mandamus proceeding in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals arising out of the defense’s efforts to show that there is an unreasonable risk that a factually innocent person will be executed, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. First is the defense’s brief. An amicus brief oppposing mandamus by more than 50 current and

[M]andamus relief is available only when the relator can establish two things: first, that no other adequate remedy at law is available; and second, that the act he seeks to compel is ministerial. An act is ministerial “when the law clearly spells out the duty to be performed … with such certainty that nothing is left to the exercise of discretion or judgment.” That’s the Texas Court

From: John Pistole, TSATo: Robert Mueller, FBIBob,Kudos to you for that Oregon thing. You are getting really good at fabricating terrorist plots to bust would-be bombers. I’ll tell you, FBI is looking good in the War-on-Terror field.Actually, that’s why I’m writing to you—I have to ask you to do me a big favor.

They didn't tell us this in law school, but the University of Chicago Law School has a Manual of Legal Citation that is, in many ways, much simpler and therefore more useful to the practitioner than The Bluebook. It's also free.Bryan Garner, in The Elements of Legal Style, commends The Bluebook and the ALWD Citation Manual and notes that "allowing discretionary forms of citation, as [the Chicago

In the wake of Padilla v. Kentucky, the DOJ's Office of Immigration Litigation has prepared a monograph on immigration consequences of criminal convictions. Download it here.

A Google Mobile search for turns up my post on Texas's non-sex sex-offender-registration offenses as the second result. This may make perfect sense to you, buy I am, quite frankly, baffled. I mean, sure, but ?On the topic of non-sex sex-offender-registration offenses, Texas has a stupid rule, but Wisconsin is the state that I know of that has been stupid enough to actually make someone register as

I’ve mentioned Scared White Republican Voters a few times here. The idea is that Republican politicians play on fear to get people to comply with their plans in a way that politicians of other parties do not. I didn’t mean to say that all, or even most, Republicans are scared, but it turns out that there is science correlating traditional “conservative” Republican rightist attitudes with fearfulness:

Here, they have a party for the assistant District Attorney …. They have cake and cookies and speeches, lots of clapping and back slapping, and then, a gold coin is given to that prosecutor to memorialize their “Queen for a Day” status. The prosecutor is given a gold coin to hang on their wall and everyone is made to recognize the happy occasion. (Montgomery County, Texas criminal

Did you know that US Government-Paid mercenaries at DynCorp are in the business of procuring young boys to be raped by Pashtun warlords? (John Nova Lomax, Houston Press, H/T Ravings of a Feral Genius.) DynCorp officially denies that there was anything dirty going on. You probably didn't  hear about it at the time because the Afghan government formallly asked that our government cover up the nothing-dirty-going-on, and