We recently had a contested election for the office of President Elect in our association. Both candidates were gracious and treated each other with respect; however, some of us were not so gracious. Statements were placed in emails and blogs that did not reflect well on us or our association. One member published a blog in which he called one candidate a liar based in part on

Who is this a picture of?Step back from your computer ten or fifteen feet; who is it a picture of now?

I had just explained to the jury all the reasons that the government's star witness couldn't be believed (based on his criminal history): he's a thief, and thieves lie; he's a robber, and robbers lie; he's an organized criminal, and organized criminals lie; etc. Government lawyer Connie Spence gets up for her closing argument. "You know who else lies?", she screeches. "LAWYERS lie!" And she writes the

Before I euthanized my account there, I had hundreds of "friends" on Facebook. Most of them I knew only slightly; some of them I didn't even really like. Precious few of them were genuine friends.Someone (I wish I could find a link to give proper credit) coined the term "frends" to represent those online acquaintances—similar to friends, but not quite—a variance that makes all the difference in

I've been on a tear about Hartley, R.D., et. al.'s Do you get what you pay for?Aside from their sloppy writing and questionable conclusions, the collaborators wrote a couple of things that really ticked me off.First, they consistently wrote about what happens to human beings in a criminal courthouse as "case processing," as in:Public defenders, like prosecutors and judges, want to ensure the smooth and efficient processing

Those who are released on bail [I think Hartley and his colleagues mean "released on recognizance"] and represented by a private attorney are twice as [they got it right this time] likely to be incarcerated as those released on bail [again, "recognizance"] but being represented by the public defender.This is an interesting fact. Recall what I've written about the plight of the working poor. Is it possible

The data for this study are from Cook County (Chicago), Illinois, and are a random sample of 2850 offenders convicted of felonies in Cook County Circuit Court.Hartley, R.D., et. al., Do you get what you pay for? Type of counsel and its effect on criminal court outcomes, Journal of Criminal Justice (2010).I asked here, if you don’t know whether hired lawyers beat more cases outright than PDs,

Here are some conclusions that can be drawn from Hartley’s data: In Cook County, Illinois, in 1993, convicted defendants were: 1.81 times as likely to have been released on their own recognizance if they were charged with a class 1 felony as if they were charged with a class X felony. 2.10 times as likely to wind up incarcerated if they were hispanic as if they were

Various readers generously sent me copies of the Hartley article I mentioned here (Hartley, R.D., et. al., Do you get what you pay for? Type of counsel and its effect on criminal court outcomes, Journal of Criminal Justice (2010)), and I'm puzzling my way through it, giving myself a crash course in statistics on the way.That crash course is not simplified by the fact that, throughout the

Black defendants who retain a private attorney are almost two times more likely to have the primary charge reduced than black defendants who are represented by a public defender. That's a quote, according to Miller-McCune, from a research paper by Richard D. Hartley. (Hartley wrote his doctoral dissertation at University of Nebraska on the same subject.) The paper costs $20, and I'm probably not going to spring