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Recent Blog Posts
Lost Patience
I lost patience with a client today.
Some might call him a former client, actually. He came to me with a real legal mess, and I steered him through it. Not a magic-wand result, but a favorable agreed resolution that included a misdemeanor probation in felony court. For a lot of lawyers, that would be the end, but I believe in providing continued maintenance to pleased clients.
Today he made an appointment to come in to the office to talk. He wanted me to fix some things that I didn't think could be fixed. In fact, I thought that his focus was wrong.
After waiting 40 minutes for him to turn up and then trying to get him to come to the point for half an hour and then finding half an hour later that the first point wasn't really the point and then finding out another half hour later that the second point wasn't really the point either, all the while trying to get a straight answer from him, I stood up, unceremoniously announcing that our meeting was over. I told him that I would try to resolve the second point, but that with regard to the first and third points I thought he was out of luck. I told him that he needed to just face the fact that he had screwed up and focus on getting through his probation, rather than the things that it was interfering with.
Anonymous Bloggers
I'm in favor of people in sensitive positions being able to blog anonymously so that they can bring us insights that we wouldn't otherwise [edit: receive]. But - and maybe this is just me - I think if you're going to blog anonymously you should treat people with at least as much respect as you would give them were you face-to-face.Dick DeGuerin is one of the respected leaders of the Harris County criminal defense bar, and a lawyer who could very well clean up a courtroom with AHCL. When Dick's on a case, the Office puts Kelly Siegler up against him; the cases Kelly brags about on her website are the ones in which she beat Dick DeGuerin. He is that good.I doubt very much that AHCL would call Dick DeGuerin "Sore Loser of the Year" to his face. I doubt, also, that she would refer to as "Dickie" in person.Pat Lykos is fair game - maybe - because she's running for office. She's put herself out there. But by taking shots at Dick DeGuerin from behind the cover of anonymity, AHCL drops her blog to a different level, and makes herself out to be just another anonymous coward.
The Mack Arnold Trust
Yesterday Mack Arnold's daughter Angela and HCCLA President Pat McCann opened bank accounts for the "Mack Arnold Trust".
Pat writes:
As you may know, Mack was felled by a stroke recently, and will be a long time in recovery. To my knowledge he has no medical insurance and as anyone who has dealt with a catastrophic illness or injury knows, even if you do it never covers enough. His daughter wished to express her thanks to all who have sent their kind wishes, but I am asking you all to dig a bit and please consider donating to the trust so that we can help defray at least some of his expenses.If you can help, please make out the checks to "The Mack Arnold Trust." While Angela is busy finishing up school out of state, I will make deposits to the account. Mail them to me or stop me in the hallways and write the check out then. Let's show folks that we take care of our own here.
Pat's address is:
909 Texas Ave, Ste 205 Houston, texas 77002 713-223-3805
DA Traits: Arrogance and Viciousness or Humility and Compassion
I had an email conversation recently with a friend who's a prosecutor. I wrote:
Our next DA needs to know that he or she is not part of a dynasty, is only temporary, is human and fallible, and answers ultimately to the families of the accused, who greatly outnumber the families of the victims.
He wrote:
I've felt compassion for defendants from DWI offenders to murderers. But their families?.... I don't think I owe anything to a defendant's family.
I tagged this as part of the problem with the Harris County DA's Office. If the DA's minions don't see themselves as answering to the families of the accused as well as the victims, then the DA himself likely doesn't see himself in that role.
But the DA, you see, is an elected official, and another word for the families of the accused is "voters."Now the probable Republican candidate for Harris County DA, Kelly Siegler, spoke to the Houston Chronicle about the anticipated appointment of AUSA Ken Magidson to the interim position of Harris County District Attorney (Houston Chronicle):
DA Magidson
Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken Magidson is reportedly Governor Perry's choice for interim Harris County District Attorney. His appointment is supposedly contingent on his getting the U.S. Department of Justice's approval to run the Harris County DA's Office for 9 months and then return to his job at the U.S. Attorney's Office, but this sort of announcement seems to me not to be the sort that a governor makes without being pretty darn sure the appointee is going to take the job.
I think Ken is a good choice to run the office during the election. He is an outsider who worked at the Office some 20 years ago; he strikes me as an honorable man who will have the support of both sides of the criminal bar in trying to fix what he thinks needs immediate repair at the Office while keeping it on course.Assistant District Attorneys can breathe easy for a few more months (though a backup plan is probably still a good idea).
New Blogging Software
I've moved from Blogger to WordPress. There's still much to do to get the blog looking the way I think it should, but at least now the "recent comments" widget works.
Wire Writers Speak
AHCL's post on the "war on drugs" and my response started with AHCL's question on the overall message of The Wire with regard to that "war." Was the message intended to be that the WoD is unwinnable but worth fighting? Or was it that the WoD is unwinnable and self-destructive?
Now (with a hat tip to Washington State Criminal Defense, a blawg that somehow escaped my attention for six months, and via Time magazine) we get the answer straight from the horses' mouth:
Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. - and 1 in 15 black men over 18 - is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime - murder, rape, aggravated assault - have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.
The Wire
What we've been doing since the DEA was created 35 years ago has resulted in more drugs being available at lower costs. We can all agree that the "war on drugs" is an abject failure. Although one frustrated DEA agent suggested to me that what we need is Malaysian-style drug laws, most of us know that we're never going to win this "war," even if we start executing dealers.
(Why is "war on drugs" in quotes? Because it's not a war. War is armed conflict between nations or states or groups within a nation or state. You can make war on a group of people [the "WoD" is arguably a war on brown people], but you can't make war on a thing; you also can't make war on a tactic (like terrorism) or a philosophy or an emotion. "War on drugs" is an inapt metaphor that was designed to secure the compliance of the populace.)
Even AHCL agrees that the "drug war" can never be won. But, he says, it's "worth fighting." AHCL points to the vignette in one of this season's episodes of the wire in which an infant cried over the body of its mother, who had overdosed on heroin, as conveying the message "illegal drugs destroyed lives, taking its toll on the littlest of victims."
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