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Recent Blog Posts
Internet Marketers and Other Scoundrels
I wrote a couple of posts over at Social Media Tyro about the ethics of ghostblawging (something I'd scribbled about here before). One ghostblawger's response raised broader issues that fit better here at Defending People.
In an email, Jenni Buchanan of LegalGhostblogger.com invited private discussion of the ethics of ghostblogging, and asked that I remove my link to her testimonial page:
[P]rofessional responsibility is not something I take lightly, and I feel it is my professional responsibility to be the "front man" in this debate, and bear the brunt of this particular criticism.
There are entire industries that depend on the ignorance of their potential clientele: the CPN industry, the personal-sovereignty industry, the A/C-duct-cleaning industry, the brake-repair industry, the extended-warranty industry, to name but a few.
“Awesome” Indeed.
It's easy to respect the rights of the pretty people, the popular ones, the charming folk, the nice guys. No one's going to run roughshod over Mr. Rogers' rights. We probably don't need a Constitution to protect the Prom Queen. It's the assholes we need to write the rules for. It's harder to treat them well, to be fair to them, to refrain from punching them.
Three Questions for Kerrville Lawyer Guy James Gray
This is going to remind many of you of David Martin's conduct in the Cameron Willingham case, but this isn't normal for Texas criminal-defense lawyers. Really. I promise.
After Matt Baker got sentenced to 65 years in prison for the murder of his wife:
Baker's Kerrville-based attorneys, Guy James Gray and Harold Danford, said they respect the jury's verdict. They tried to withdraw from Baker's case less than a week before his trial started, citing ethical reasons.Gray clarified those reasons after trial."We discovered (the affair) about six weeks ago, and we finally figured out that Matt was being untruthful with me, and I asked the judge to let me and Harold get out, but the judge didn't want to delay the trial," Gray said. "He was being untruthful, mostly, about Vanessa Bulls. But once you get untruthful about one part, you naturally begin to question all the other parts, too."Gray said he probably could have done a better job representing Baker but thought the evidence did not rise to the level of a conviction."He fooled me about the affair, but I really think there was probably some reasonable doubt there," Gray said. "There was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence that they proved. But the credibility of Vanessa Bulls was pretty low, and to get to the drugs and the pillow and the suffocation, you have to believe her."While my opinion of Matt is pretty low right now, I do believe that there was technical reasonable doubt."
16 Simple Rules, All Together
The American Society of Trial Consultants has published my Sixteen Simple Rules for Better Jury Selection in its online newsletter, The Jury Expert, along with responses from several jury consultants.
Read the rules and responses here.
The Four Most Powerful Words in the Criminal Courthouse
Try this:
Stand up. Raise one foot off the ground. Now shift your weight forward. Don't set your raised foot down. What happens?
You fall down.
But if you do the same thing and set the raised foot down to stop your fall, you take a step. Raise the other foot off the ground, shift your weight forward, and set your raised foot down to catch you. String a series of these events together, and you're moving across the ground. Walking.
The walking metaphor is so common that it is easy to stop noticing it (when you choose your path in life, know that you can't walk on water, but you can walk the walk and march to the beat of a different drummer-Soundtrack: I Walk the Line). Walking is a model for much of human existence, including the practice of law (which begins, after all, when we pass the bar): a series of controlled falls.
Losing Sucks
I've said before that I would choose a lawyer who sometimes loses over one who always wins. But today I was reminded how much losing a criminal trial sucks.
The case: a "DWI-first no test no accident" in the argot. That is, a driving while intoxicated case, which was my client's first, and in which she had no accident and did not blow in the breathalyzer. (She did perform the field sobriety tests, which made hers a "no test" rather than a "total refusal" test in the lingo.)
I was assisted by up-and-coming criminal-defense lawyer Nathaniel Tarlow, who provided me with many invaluable suggestions.
The postmortem: Assistant District Attorney Angela Mecca, the new prosecutor trying the case, did an excellent job trying a case with a cop who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and a DWI video that I thought could go either way. She fought hard, and generally fair (a couple of foul shots, I was able to take care of before the jury; I don't think they helped the State).
Petty Attorney Bullshit
The receptionist was okay with me perusing their wardrobe, but the public defender herself came up and asked me who was going to get the clothes. Not just a public defender, but the public defender, the county official in charge of the office. She told me she would not let my client wear one of her office's shirts because he "dissed" one of her lawyers. I got to spend a morning recess shopping for my client.
(Chandler, Arizona criminal-defense lawyer Matt Brown, Trial Reflections.)
The Question: Seven Answers
Here is The Question: Why do you defend people who you know to be factually guilty?
The question is often phrased as "How..." or "How can you sleep at night when you..." but those demand smartass answers like "very well" or "on a pillowcase full of hundred-dollar bills."
Typically, the laypeople (in which group I include civil lawyers and prosecutors) asking the question don't understand the niceties of legal and factual guilt, so the question is usually "... people you know to be guilty," which demands the answer, "they aren't guilty till they're proven guilty," which is not smartass but will be seen as such by people who don't understand that "guilty" is a term of art.
The Question assumes something that is true only rarely, if ever: that the criminal-defense lawyer knows what happened. Some reject the premise. It's not the criminal-defense lawyer's job to decide whether his client is guilty or not. Even if a client swears to have done the deed, the lawyer can and should doubt-clients lie to us, and do so for the strangest reasons.
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