Add this to the list of reasons that Texas is a better place to practice criminal defense law:Art. 38.075. Corroboration of Certain Testimony Required(a) A defendant may not be convicted of an offense on the testimony of a person to whom the defendant made a statement against the defendant's interest during a time when the person was imprisoned or confined in the same correctional facility as the

Harris County District Clerk candidate Chris “Lightweight” Daniel still (Chris Moran, Houston Chronicle) wants to build another County parking garage.Also, he wants to use the office of District Clerk to fight the Global War on Terror:”Online filing is today putting at risk the citizens of Harris County,” Daniel said. Those files could have Social Security numbers and other information that could be stolen by identity thieves, or

D.A. Confidential describes some of the rules he follows when writing blog posts:Do not write about ongoing cases. If I want to draw attention to one of my cases, say it’s going to trial, then I let people know it’s going to trial and I post a link to a news story about the case, without commenting on the facts myself. This can be tough because I’d

Chief Disciplinary Counsel Mark DuBois regards the issue I submitted on behalf of the Twittergate Committee, composed of a few bloggers who felt strongly about the controversy mentioned above, as frivolous, suggesting that both I and Mark Bennett have too much time on our hands. Case closed. No ethics violation, not even probable cause to believe there was one. That ends the matter for me. But I

Yesterday’s news: the Supreme Court of Mississippi is considering forcing lawyers to provide 20 hours of pro bono representation each year. It’s not suprising: Mississippi’s poor have great difficulty getting a basic education to the poor; I shudder to imagine the quality of representation they get. Scott Greenfield, noting lawyers’ protestations that mandatory pro bono is forced servitude, says: Lawyers are given a monopoly to practice law. 

I told an anonymous document review whiner in this post that I would gladly spread his name if he was interested in representing human beings in their common disputes for little money. He didn’t take me up on it (it now transpires that he has actual clients, not just pretend ones, which one would never guess from the desperate tone of his blog), but another lawyer did.

A sweep by either party in Harris County’s 2010 elections will be disastrous. The people of Harris County can no more afford to lose Vanessa Velasquez (Republican incumbent for the 183rd District Court), or Mike McSpadden (Republican incumbent for the 209th District Court), or Larry Standley (Republican incumbent for County Criminal Court at Law Number 6) than to elect John “Years of Trial Experience” Clinton (Republican running

Arizona criminal-defense lawyer Matt Brown writes about judging a “client counseling competition,” (!) and advising a struggling competitor who was concerned about asking the mock client too many questions, because he “didn’t want to know too much. Matt gave a nuanced answer: To know what to ask and what not to ask, you need intimate knowledge of the area of law in general and of the issues

In court, a prosecutor, big black Sharpie in hand, redacts identifying information page-by-page from a copy of an offense report. After he redacts the driver's license numbers, phone numbers, cops' payroll numbers, and so forth from a page, he passes it to the defense lawyer, who, reading from the original offense report, is handwriting the redacted information back on his copy.Life in the criminal courthouse: Some days

Last Friday was Constitution Day, a day when, by law, every educational institution receiving federal funds has to educate its students about the constitution (Ruthann Robson, Constitutional Law Prof Blog). Or, as I call it, the thinking person’s Patriot Day. Constitution Day has been around since 2004, but blog posts including the phrase “Constitution Day” are up almost 300% between September 12-19, 2009 and September 12-19, 2010.