I wrote about John C. Osborne here: The lawyer who promises to get the accused in a federal cocaine conspiracy case out on conditions of release is unethical and a liar.. . . .What happens next? My bet is that once the lawyer has been paid and four weeks have passed and the client is still incarcerated, the lawyer will “discover” some reason that the accused cannot get

I think the Apostle John might have left it out of Revelations, but isn't one of the signs of the pending Apocalypse (or at least TEOTWAWKI) that the only person in Washington DC making any sense is Ron Paul?:On Wikileaks (h/t Paul Kennedy): And on the TSA:

I can imagine the ribbing in the police locker room: "Man, Bill, that Joel Rosenberg guy really punked you. He schooled you on the law on video, then got the county to start investigating you for assault, and rubbed it in across the internet. I wish I'd been there, I'd have…" followed by one of those fantasies that are so easy to come up with five minutes

Fun with Google:Federal criminal conduct usually falls under one of seven categories.Never mind the outrageous grammar; I'd like to know who is stealing from whom. These are websites by Scorpion Design, by Net Media Markets, and by this guy, who seems to have rolled (stolen?) his own:(Yes, Mr. Newcomb did in fact manage to misspell his firm's name in the masthead.)When you look at that guy's page

Channel 11 is reporting that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has ordered that the hearing in the John Green case on the unconstitutionality under the Eighth Amendment of Texas's death penalty procedure be stayed. The parties have 15 days to brief the issue.Here's the State's Request for Reconsideration, which prompted the court to act:John Green State Request for Reconsideration of Mandamus And here's Green's Brief in

When asked for a newspaper-safe synonym for "chickenshit," the best I could come up with was "disrespectful."

I spent a good part of the day today watching the hearing in Judge Fine's court on the constitutionality under the Eighth Amendment of Texas's death penalty procedure; read my tweets on the subject (hashtag #VIII) here.The issue, as I discussed here, is whether death-penalty practice in Texas creates such a significant risk of executing an innocent person that the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Elaine Sharp is quoted in Lane Wallace’s shallow and amateurish Are All Murderers Mentally Ill? article (which somehow made it into the Atlantic):You see, I truly believe that murderers are mentally ill. … Their brains don’t work like the rest of ours do. To deliberately kill someone requires crossing a profound boundary. Most of us couldn’t do it. We couldn’t even think about it. But they can.

Here is a list of the expert and other opinion witnesses the defense intends to present in the hearing, beginning Monday, on the constitutionality under the Eighth Amendment of Texas's death penalty procedure: State v. Green Hearing Expert Testimony Gerry Goldstein (who says that the criminal defense lawyer in a death penalty case has to be like a cockroach—"all over the government's shit") and Barry Scheck will

The government wants the job of dealing with bullies; it doesn't want our kids to learn to stand up for themselves or others because it wants a monopoly on lawful force. But society needs people who stand up for others, even—no, especially—when the government is the bully.Government wants people to depend on the state for their safety. Even if it succeeds and trains the rest of us