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Recent Blog Posts
Believe in Karma
Last week I wrote about this dog of a DWI case, giving enough information, apparently, that some people were able to identify the prosecutor of whom I wrote.
Today I went to court on this DWI case (trial was continued till August) in another court, only to find that the same prosecutor had been transferred to that case and would be prosecuting my client in this DWI case, which is much closer to the "whale" end than the "dog" end of the defensibility spectrum.
DWI Trial Tomorrow
I have a DWI jury trial tomorrow in Harris County. No NLSes; this time it'll be "Full speed ahead!", David Farragut-style.
Did you know that the Intoxilyzer-5000's margin of error for an unknown solution (i.e. your breath) is +/- 0.020? That means that if your BrAC is.06 and the machine says.08, it's within the margin of error. If that doesn't convince you not to blow in the damned thing, I don't know what will.
Thoughts on Internet Marketing for Lawyers
Having seen my website rise to the top of the Houston Criminal Lawyer, Houston Criminal Defense, Houston Criminal Defense Lawyers, and texas Criminal Lawyer Google organic search results, I have a few thoughts for other criminal-defense lawyers who recognize that potential clients aren't looking in the yellow pages anymore.
First, you don't have to spend money on search engine optimization (SEO) or even on website design. For these particular search terms, my site ranks above those of many of my comrades who have spent lots of money on SEO and website design, and I haven't spent a dime. I got a call the other day from someone at an SEO company who claimed that she had found my site listed 80th in a search. SEO, like every other enterprise that involves cold-calling, is a vile business filled with untrustworthy people selling some form of snake oil. Any SEO firm that takes more than one client for a particular search term is robbing someone. Nevertheless, she may have been telling the truth - if you search the very broad category of Criminal Lawyer on Google my site pops up somewhere on the fourth page. But if I keep blogging about criminal law matters, that'll certainly change.
Some Houston-Area (and elsewhere) Criminal Justice Links
Texas Counties with Criminal Case Information Online:
Brazoria County, Texas Criminal Case Search by Defendant Name
Brazos County, Texas Criminal Case Search by Defendant Name
Collin County, Texas Criminal Case Search (H/T Lars Isaacson)
Dallas County, Texas Criminal Background Search
Dallas County Jail Inmate Lookup (H/T Lars Isaacson)
Denton County, Texas Criminal Case Search
North Texas Criminal Court and Jail Information
Lewisville, Texas federal criminal-defense lawyer Lars Isaacson (my erstwhile second-chair, who learned from me how to take a severe beating, if nothing else) has posted a page of court and jail contact information (telephone numbers, URLs) for state and federal criminal cases in the Dallas area - Denton, Dallas, Collin, and Tarrant Counties and the Northern and Eastern Districts of Texas. It's lots of handy information for both lawyers and clients, all in one place.
Somebody should do the same for this neck of the woods.
Survival Situations: What's at Risk?
I wrote last month about Laurence Gonzales's Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why and promised "much more later." It occurs to me that the start of scavenging Gonzales's work for criminal trial lawyers has to be relating survival to a criminal trial.
When Gonzales is talking about survival situations, he's not referring only to life-threatening situations but, more broadly, to stressful situations.
Some people function better under stress, such as professional golfers, fighter pilots, elite mountain climbers, motorcycle racers, and brain surgeons. And some emotional responses are more easily controlled than others.Elite performers, as they're sometimes called, seek out the extreme situation that make them perform well and feel more alive. At the other end of the scale are people who don't want any excitement at all. It takes all kinds. But it's easy to demonstrate that many people (estimates run as high as 90 percent), when put under stress, are unable to think clearly or solve simple problems. They get rattled. They panic. They freeze.
The Mind and Criminal Defense
The Center for American and International Law is presenting its seminar on The Mind and Criminal Defense again July 17-18, 2008. The program is funded by a grant for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, so you'll wind up paying $185 (or less if you regularly represent the indigent accused) for 13.25 hours of CLE and a couple of good lunches at the CAIL's first-class facility in Plano. I attended last year, and found it eye-opening.
This year I'll be speaking on Friday about free will. Attendance is limited to criminal-defense lawyers and those who directly assist them in criminal defense litigation, so prosecutors will have to wait and read my book when it comes out.
Blind Strikes and Double Strikes
Anne Reed writes at Deliberations about blind strikes:
In a "blind strike" voir dire, both sides exercise their strikes simultaneously. If you get four strikes, you strike four jurors, without knowing (until it's over) whether your opponent struck those same jurors too.
All these years I've been using blind strikes without even knowing it. In Texas state courts, as well as (as far as I recall) in the federal courts in which I've tried cases in Texas and elsewhere, blind-strike jury selection is used. It's so prevalent where I try cases that I didn't even realize there was a name for it until Anne brought it to my attention.
Anne notes what she sees as an important difference between blind-strike voir dire and alternating-strike voir dire:
[In a blind-strike jurisdiction, v]ery often, a few jurors end up on both lawyers' strike lists. Jurors who seem extreme, unpredictable, very opinionated, or just odd can easily seem too risky no matter which side you're on. With alternating strikes, you can delay some strikes you know you'd make if you had to, because you suspect your opponent might strike that juror before you do. With blind strikes, that kind of strategy is off the table; all you can do is make a list and follow it.Moreover, if you count the total strikes used in a "blind strike" trial, they don't match the number of jurors who actually leave the room after voir dire. Four strikes on each side might only really eliminate five or six jurors.
Based on Actual Facts
Suppose that you were a prosecutor prosecuting a first-time DWI case, and that I was defending it.
Suppose further that the accused's husband, an ex-cop, watched her performing the field sobriety tests at the scene, and would testify that she did fine. That the arresting officer claimed that his in-car video camera wasn't working. That the shop records for the car didn't show any video camera repairs till five months later. That the station video officer expressed doubt on the station video about whether the arresting officer's in-car video was in fact not working. That the accused looked and sounded stone-cold sober on the station video.
Suppose, in other words, that the case was a dog for the State.
Suppose also that, according to the offense report, I had appeared at the scene of the DWI arrest and observed his investigation.
Not having an actual case to prosecute and facing almost certain defeat in trial, you might try to bluff me into taking a plea.
Is Only Kelly Siegler Man Enough to Tell the Truth?
Given that Americans' second most common justification for the death penalty's fairness is its provision of "satisfaction and closure" to the victim's loved ones, it's astounding to me that Kelly Siegler ("Prosecutor-for-Hire", according to her tagline) admits in a blog post that there's no such thing as closure (H/T AHCL). A successful death penalty prosecutor concedes that, where closure is concerned, the emperor has no clothes: it's astounding not because of the novelty of the idea, for it isn't novel - anyone not steeped in overwrought victimology can intuit that there can be no "closure" for the death of a child - but because it weakens the justification for a penalty of which the prosecutor is unabashedly in favor.
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