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Let Squawk Do The Job
The client is the job. Without the client, you are not an attorney. You are an unemployed person with an expensive law degree. You exist as a lawyer for the benefit of those whom you represent.
The job is taking care of the client. Not "social justice." Not "justice." Not even "clients." The job is the client, singular. Usually, if you are a criminal-defense lawyer, the job is maximizing the client's freedom.
If, in representing the client, you think for a moment about being guided by anything-the interests, for example, of society-other than the client's interests you have a conflict of interest.
That's not catastrophic. We often have conflicts of interest-sometimes I'd rather be reading a good book than writing a brief-and we resolve them in the client's favor. Yes, Tai-Pan is engrossing, but the H.C.V. brief needs writing. So I write.
If you think it's okay to put your own interests before your clients' and, say, report a client to your boss for sexual harassment, you have no business representing human beings, much less human beings in extremis. And if you are a manager of lawyers and you think it's okay for them to put their own interests before their clients that way, shame on you. You deserve ridicule.
List of Harris County Jail Inmates Entitled to Immediate Release
Article 17.151 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure provides:
A defendant who is detained in jail pending trial of an accusation against him must be released either on personal bond or by reducing the amount of bail required, if the state is not ready for trial of the criminal action for which he is being detained within... 90 days from the commencement of his detention if he is accused of a felony....
The State is not ready for trial if the defendant has not been indicted. If a defendant was in jail for ninety days without being indicted, he is entitled to release either by bail reduction or by personal bond.
The problem is not corrected by an indictment after the ninety days is up. If the defendant is indicted on day ninety-one, he still gets bail that he can make.
It's not automatic, of course: A lawyer has to call the issue to the attention of a judge, usually with an application for writ of habeas corpus.
The masochist says “Beat me!” …
It is hard not to pay attention to people who are screaming for your attention. It's hard to manage your own attention in the best of circumstances; sages have for thousands of years been directing our attention to attention, and still we are easy marks for those who would control our minds by misdirecting our attention.
We pay attention: The metaphor is important. When we pay attention we give a share of one of our limited resources to someone or something else. We can get something in return, or not. Largely we get to decide what we want to pay attention to.
This resource - attention - is valuable to others. Your attention is valuable to your spouse, to your children, to your friends; they are likely to appreciate it and to repay you in their own attention. Your attention is also valuable to people trying to sell you things (if they don't have your attention, they can't), to people who crave attention for its own sake, and, in a negative sense, to those who want you not to notice certain things. These people are not going to give you a fair return on your attention.
Such an Alpha, He Even Piddles Himself Dominantly
Trump offers a submissive palm-up hand to Putin.
"Trump ‘won' Putin handshake: body-language expert."
Erm. No.
Submissive dogs reveal their throats.Humans show their palms.....The opposite of the dominant handshake is to offer your hand with the palm facing downwards... symbolically giving the other person the upper hand, like a dog exposing its throat to a superior dog."....When two dominant people shake hands, a symbolic power struggle takes place as each person attempts to turn the other's palm into the submissive position. The result is a vice-like handshake with both palms remaining in the vertical position and this creates a feeling of equality and mutual respect because neither is prepared to give in to the other.
Body Language - the Leverage in Your Hands.
This never was really debatable. In fact, here's Judi James, the same hack who told the New York Post that Trump "won" the handshake, a year ago talking about another Trump handshake:
Small Progress Against Implicit Corruption in Harris County Courts
I took Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg to task here for not stepping aside from the decision whether to retry David Temple for the murder of his wife. I saw it as a disappointing example of implicit corruption in the Harris County criminal justice system - behavior that a spocklike visitor would recognize as corrupt, but that we don't see as corrupt only because it's the way things have always been done.
A couple of weeks ago, after reviewing the file for four months, Ogg made the decision to ask for appointment of a special prosecutor.
Good for her.
The judge mentioned in my original post on implicit corruption returned the campaign contributions he had solicited from lawyers practicing in his court.
Good for him, too. The war against implicit corruption will be won, ever so slowly, in a thousand little decisions like these.
Meet the ACLU's Free-Speech Trojan Horse [updated]
"I'm what you'd call a true believer in the First Amendment," Rowland announced. "It's foundational.
I've criticized the staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project before for giving up the First Amendment struggle too easily. So when I saw that she claims to be a true believer, ((You are the inheritor of a rich legacy of protecting speech. You damn well ought to be a true believer.)) I went to ACLU's website to see what that once-great organization is doing with the untold millions it has gathered from the public
Friends, I'm here to tell you: It's bad. It starts out good - universities shouldn't have speech codes, more speech is the answer, "Defending First Amendment rights for the enemies of civil liberties and civil rights means defending it for you and me."
Theory: Direct or Indirect Criminal Trial Advocacy
In hypnosis, there are two basic styles of inducing trance: the direct, or "authoritarian" style, and the indirect, or "Ericksonian" (named after Milton Erickson) style.
The direct: "Close your eyes." The indirect: "You might find yourself wondering whether you can go into trance, and thinking about your doubts you might discover a time when you could feel more relaxed than possibly at any time before you go into trance you might find your eyes trying to stay open or maybe they want to close and you can let them close now... that's riiiiggghhht...."
Neither is better than the other. A good hypnotist will have both available as tools (requisite variety!).
It occurs to me that there are direct and indirect styles of trial lawyering, as well. As well there might be - hypnosis and trial lawyering are just different forms of communication, so they might as well share categories.
Thinking specifically about jury selection (which, if you can get it, matters more than any other part of trial) the direct style would be telling the potential jurors why your client wins (what your defense is). The indirect style would be leading them to tell you why your client wins.
Old-School Ethical Heresies
JBD asked for an outline of my TMSL talk on avoiding old-school ethical heresies.
"Ethics" training for lawyers usually focus on the disciplinary rules. But the disciplinary rules are law, not ethics. Sometimes the rules have nothing to do with ethics. Sometimes the rules provide no ethical guidance (so that what the rules allow is unethical). And sometimes what the rules require may be unethical.
For example:
Depositing client money into your operating account, while keeping meticulous track of it. This violates the rules (client funds cannot be commingled with lawyer funds), but is not unethical. (The rule is required because of the "keeping meticulous track" part - despite best efforts, lawyers screw this up and client money disappears.)
Revealing client confidences, to the client's detriment. The rules allow it in some instances, but it may not be ethical.
Criminal Defense and the Societal-Good Heresy [updated]
[Updated to include David Hardaway's name, at his request.]
A defense lawyer appeals his client's second DWI conviction, arguing that the client should be punished for a first DWI because the State did not plead or prove the first conviction (which acted to enhance the class-B misdemeanor first DWI to a class-A second) in the culpability phase of the jury trial.
He wins: The Court of Appeals holds that the first conviction is an element of the class A. His client gets some advantage. Future DWI-second defendants have to face juries that know that they have been convicted before of DWI (because if it's an element and the State has to plead and prove it, the jury knows about it before finding the accused guilty or not guilty).
And the DWI-defense bar ((Bless their hearts.)) loses its collective mind. How dare the lawyer appeal this case? Every defendant with a second DWI in Texas just got screwed! Lives irrevocably damaged! A disaster! Blown away!
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