I recently had an opportunity to cross-examine a heroin-addict witness who claimed that he had watched my client inject another person with heroin, and then had injected himself. The State's theory was delivery by injection. The witness denied having participated in the alleged delivery—a crucial point because of Texas's Accomplice-Witness Rule. My client hadn't injected the girl, but lack of corroboration would get us to the same

[A] good-faith, case-by-case, consequential ethics approach should be used that balances the greatest good for the greatest number without trampling unduly on individual rights and each citizen’s constitutionally protected liberty interests.Sreenivasan, Frances, and Weinberger, Normative Versus Consequential Ethics in Sexually Violent Predator Laws: An Ethics Conundrum for Psychiatry, J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 38:3:386-391 (2010) (via Karen Franklin, In the News: Forensic Psychology, Criminology, and Psychology-Law; via

Lawyer Danny Lampley got himself jailed by Judge Talmadge Littlejohn for not saying the Pledge of Allegiance in a Mississippi courtroom (NMissCommentor via The Agitator).There, but for an accident of geography, go I—I've shared my feelings about loyalty oaths before.

The Houston Chronicle went out of its way to praise Pat Lykos for "promising to investigate the suicide of a young boy whose parents claim he was the victim of intense bullying at his school"; the newspaper ignores the opportunity cost of fulfilling this publicity-happy promise. Huh, what? asks the Chronicle's editorial board. Opportunity cost?This DA's Office is not playing with unlimited resources. It is cutting corners

In his interview with David Jennings (see my commentary, in five parts, here, here, here, here, and here), Chris Daniel says something downright interesting:There are certain judges who will remain nameless, who have files in their office solely because they’re afraid to send them to imaging because they know that if they send it to imaging, it will be online and it will ruin whoever’s file that

Further in his interview of Chris Daniel (my earlier commentary, in four parts, is here, here, here, and here), David Jennings betrays that Daniel is not the only participant ignorant of the operative facts. He gets the lawyer-window story confused, turning it into a lawyers-only-window story and trying to make of it a story of elitism: "Does that sound like he’s trying to put lawyers above people,

In his interview with David Jennings (my earlier commentary, in three parts, is here, here, and here), Chris Daniel renounces the idea of illegally redacting documents as they are filed, claiming that Chronicle Reporter Chris Moran "unfortunately misquoted" him. (Because, y'know, journalists are misquoting people all the time.) Moran published a clarification on his Houston Politics blog:District Clerk candidate Chris Daniel says his position on redaction of

Lawyers who try cases will get a chuckle out of Chris Daniel's description, in his interview with David Jennings (part 1 of my commentary; part 2) of how to figure out how many jurors to summon to eliminate waste:Well, we could use statistical analysis to see how many people would typically be needed on any given day for a docket size. And so, if we know that

In his interview with David Jennings (part 1 of my analysis), Daniel talks about some of the conceivable problems with making public documents publicly available (he describes online access to documents as “online filing”; two different things). Some of them are nonproblems, because only lawyers have access to the documents (as in family law cases); the rest are problems on which Loren Jackson’s tech people are already

‘Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool . . . .David Jennings (Big Jolly Politics) has conversation with Republican District Clerk hopeful Chris Daniel. The puff-piece interview (Jennings doesn’t even talk with Daniel about the actual duties of the District Clerk, of which Daniel continues to show himself ignorant) demonstrates why Daniel deserves the name “The Lightweight.” Here is the 30-minute audio recording; for