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Recent Blog Posts
Bad Lawyer. No Cookie.
Paraphrased actual letter from lawyer to first-time DUI client:
Dear X,You have told me that you can't afford to pay me to try your case. This forces me to ask the judge to allow me to withdraw from your case. Three bad things might happen as a result.First, the judge might revoke your bond and take you into custody.Second, the judge might not allow me off your case. As you haven't paid me to prepare for trial, I obviously can't do so, and you will probably lose.Third, if the judge allows me off your case, the judge will probably not appoint someone to represent you. So you'll either have to hire somebody else, or proceed pro se, in which case you will probably lose.
In Texas a judge can't legally revoke a person's bond for firing her retained lawyer. Not that the illegality would stop some Texas judges from doing so, but the particular judge whose court this client's case fell in wouldn't revoke the client's bond for firing the lawyer. Maybe the lawyer isn't familiar enough with the court to know this, but at least a nod to the fact that the judge would be acting outside her authority in doing so might have put the client's mind to rest a little bit.
Ethos
Murray Newman laments what he expects to be the loss of prosecutorial discretion in the Harris County District Attorney's Office under the Lykos / Leitner regime.
Murray misses the old days. Ah, those glorious Rosenthal / Siegler days, when prosecutors had discretion - discretion enough to run amok... when 29-year-old misdemeanor chiefs with no life experience were the ones providing critical ethical training to 25-year-old misdemeanor threes.
As a result of all that discretion, and absent meaningful adult supervision from the top down, a culture of arrogance prevailed in the Harris County District Attorney's Office. Many young prosecutors (most of whom are still employed there) proved themselves in need of a more structured work environment. That's what you get when you give 27-year-old children who've never had their butts kicked by the world the power to decide who deserves what: a culture of arrogance.
Newspeak of the Day
I went to visit a client at the "IAH Adult Detention Facility" (which I thought was a private jail) in Livingston, Texas today and was greeted by a sign at the front desk with a globe logo and the legend, "Community Education Centers":
Apparently my client isn't incarcerated; he's just being educated.
(Because someone will inevitably find this post and ask for directions to the IAH Adult Detention Facility [which is nowhere near IAH]:
IAH Secure Detention Facility3400 FM 350 South[Just SW of the corner of FM 350 and Mangum Road]Livingston, Texas936.967.8000
HPD and Video Redux
HPD Officer Paul Lassalle comments on this long-ago post about his communications with Harris County Assistant District Attorney Warren Diepraam (who will likely be at the coronation on Thursday) concerning whether HPD has to actually use the videotaping equipment that the statute requires them to have and maintain.
When a man with a gun and a badge tells me, "I would hope that you would edit your article or remove your abuse of the emails from your website entirely", I have a difficult decision to make: should I tell him to go perform unnatural sex acts with himself with his ASP, or should I just republish the offending material? Since I've always been fond of Officer Lassalle (ever since I defended a friend's brother whom he arrested for minor in possession) I'll take the latter route.
Here are the emails we're talking about, and here's the money quote: "Now, it states that we have to purchase and maintain the equipment of video taping a person charged with certain crimes but there is no requirement to actually do so, correct?"
All for Want of a Horseshoe Nail
Houston criminal-defense lawyer Sharon Levine has passed away.
Sharon was a great and caring warrior for each of her clients, but the case for which she'll always be remembered in the Houston criminal defense community was a piddly little class B misdemeanor evading arrest case of little interest to anyone but her and her client. Sharon's client's refusal in that case to cave in, to pay his one-dollar fine and move on down the road, set the stage for the civil lawsuit that revealed to the public the rot in the Chuck Rosenthal DA's Office. Houston DUI lawyer Paul B. Kennedy has the story.
Services for Sharon will be tomorrow, Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 1:00 p.m. at the Chapel at Woodlawn Cemetery, 1101 Antoine, Houston, Texas.
Sharon was 38 years old. Please keep her family in your thoughts.
RIP
The following blogs on my blogroll bit the dust in 2008:
Bad Court Thingy
Curia Advisari Vult
da blog
HCSO Blog
Norm Pattis's blog
They made my blogroll because they had something interesting to say, or an interesting way to say something.
I miss them.
The Coronation Poll
For those Harris County ADAs who want, very anonymously, to express their feelings about being ordered to Pat Lykos's coronation ceremony on January 1, Miami criminal-defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum has posted a poll.
Memo to Future Lawyers
Don't go to Marquette Law School.
According to David Papke, law professor at Marquette Law School,
We don't want law school to be lawyer-training school. When we cave in to demands of that sort from the ABA and assorted study commissions, we actually invite alienation among law students and lawyers. Legal education should appreciate the depth of the legal discourse and explore its rich complexities. It should operate on a graduate-school level and graduate people truly learned in the law.
If you want to be "truly learned in the law", Marquette will try to graduate you. Being truly learned in the law is nice. Just nice. Not once have I had a potential client ask me if I was truly learned in the law; my "truly-learned-in-the-law in Houston" webpage never had a hit.
Being truly learned in the law qualifies one to teach other people to be truly learned in the law, just as a PhD in philosophy qualifies one to teach philosophy, but it doesn't pay the bills.
Are You Man or Mutton?
Hearing about Harris County District Attorney-Elect Pat Lykos's command that all Assistant District Attorneys appear dressed in court clothes on a national holiday for her coronation, Miami criminal-defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum raised a good question:
You all gonna take a stand and not show up, or be sheep?
(I think "you all" is Floridian for "all y'all". My question was, "what did you expect, working for The Machine? Compassion?"; I like Brian's better.)
Wrong is wrong. Taking you away, on short notice, from your family plans on New Year's Day is wrong. You can whine about it all day long, but you are the only ones who can do anything about it.
You can do something about it by saying "no."
No, you won't change the plans you've had for months on the momentary whim of an elected official.
You're real lawyers, trial lawyers, and no, you're not going to bounce like puppets for someone whose only prosecutorial experience is... (what did she say her prosecutorial experience was, again?)
Lykos, Meet Streisand
The following was posted on Murray Newman's blog yesterday, but after Murray was double-plus-unhired from the office he took it down. I'm reconstructing it as nearly as I can here (with my own flourish), not because I think Murray has no backbone, nor because it's particularly good (it was created in collaboration among Murray's commenters), nor because it's particularly nice (it trends toward the nasty), but rather because information wants to be free:
On the 12 Days of Christmas, Pat Lykos gave to the Harris County Assistant DAs:12 jurors chosen witout a preemptive strike used by the state;11 free "crooked cop passes" from Mr. Police Integrity himself......Clint Greenwood;10 internal memos re: unprofessionalism of reading toxic, antiregime blogs at work;9 new ashtrays for the 6th floor smoking lounge;8 days of Lykos Hell every single week;7 insulted yarmulka-wearing witnesses; 6 emails from my family wanting an explanation for why I won't be visiting as planned for New Years;5 new pantsuits;4 free tickets for a reception on January 1, 2009 that I'm forced to attend;3 washed out judges;2 Leitner balls; and A little troll from a spider hole....
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