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Recent Blog Posts
Another Texas Criminal Defense Lawyer Heard From
Please welcome Fort Worth criminal-defense lawyer Shawn Matlock to the blawgosphere. Shawn not only has a great name for a criminal-defense lawyer, but he also has a thoughtful blog, here. I've added him to the blogroll.
Today Shawn wrote about lawyers promising dismissals. It's good to have him adding his voice to the discussion of bad lawyer advertising.
Technorati Tags: blawgs, criminal defense, Texas
Law Group Bites the Dust
I mentioned in passing here the "Defense Groups" that advertise on the internet, claiming to "handle cases in all 50 states." Legalpad has this post about the State Bar shutting down one such group, Criminal Defense Associates (cached by Google).
Criminal Defense Associates was the "nationwide" criminal defense corporation that, while it was circling the bowl back in April, told the mother of a potential client that for a $15,000 fee they would give the client a 99% chance of beating his case.
Good riddance.
Technorati Tags: advertising, criminal defense
The Nature of Freedom
(I promised, on reading SHG's 231 Years and Still Trying, to write about the nature of freedom, the power of fear, and the abandonment of American Ideals. This is the second post in the series; it covers the first topic.)
When we talk about Americans' freedom, what are we talking about? The freedom to shop at Wal-Mart? The freedom to drive Hummers? The freedom to live in safety?
No. Our freedom is the right to speak our minds without governmental censorship. It's the right to practice our religions without governmental interference. It's the right not to have the government searches us and seize our things unreasonably. It's the right to habeas corpus. It's the right to a jury trial. It's freedom from being imprisoned without due process. It's freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. It's the right to vote. It's the right not to serve involuntarily. At last ditch, it's freedom to bear arms to overthrow a government that would deprive us of those rights.
Judges' Voir Dire
Federal criminal-defense lawyers know that the questioning performed by judges in federal criminal cases is, in most cases, worthless at best and devastating at worst. They ask closed-ended questions, lead and use stupid lawyer stuff and otherwise impede the lawyers' efforts to get the jurors' true feelings.
Anne Reed's Deliberations post today is about a Seventh Circuit opinion suggesting that "the better practice is for the district court to ask non-leading questions when examining a juror for bias." The Seventh Circuit affirmed the conviction despite the judge's less-than-helpful voir dire. The real treasure (for me, at least) was Anne's reference to this opinion (pdf) from the Eight Circuit in which the court affirmed and a district court judge from the Northern District of Iowa, sitting by designation, dissented (he would have reversed) because the trial judge's "cursory" voir dire "could not reasonably assure that racial prejudice would be discovered, if present."
How Common is TBI?
Estimates from the "Epidemiology" chapter of the "Textbook of Traumatic Brain Injury" (American Psychiatric Association) (Amazon):
Medically attended brain injury cases in the U.S. per year (hospital admissions + prehospital deaths): 336,000.Of these, 154,000 are "mild," 92,400 are moderate, and 61,600 are severe.100% of the patients suffering mild TBI are discharged alive.93% of the moderately brain-injured patients are discharged alive.42% of the severely brain-injured patients are discharged alive.So 265,804 (154,000 [mild] + 85,932 [moderate] + 25,872 [severe]) brain-injured patients are discharged alive.
Assuming that 10% of mildly brain-injured patients have some neurological limitation, that two-thirds of moderately brain-injured patients are disabled, and that all severely brain-injured patients have residual effect, the total annual number of new disabilities from brain injuries (based on year 2000 numbers) is about 98,560 - about 35 per 100,000 population.
Blawg Review — the Bill of Rights
Fellow Texas criminal-defense lawyer Jamie Spencer of the Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer blog is hosting this week's Blawg Review.
Next week's theme will be criminal defense, and more specifically, the amendments in the Bill of Rights that most effect criminal defendants. But you civil lawyer Blawg Review regulars, don't despair. Trust me, I'll work you in too.
See the Submission Guidelines and submit your favorite post for consideration in the Blawg Review.
Humble Thanks
Many thanks to Capital Defense Weekly for calling me the "best new legal blogger of 2007," and to Deliberations for not disagreeing. This is high praise indeed from either of these blogs.
Thanks also to the State Bar of Texas for forgetting about me and keeping me listed under "Featured this Week" for five (or is it six?) consecutive weeks. There are worse things in life than to be forgotten by one's state bar.
Technorati Tags: blawgs
Lawyer Advertising — the Next Iteration
In the beginning, there were the print media. Criminal defense lawyers who wanted to tell potential clients about their practices would pay for space in the yellow pages, or send letters out to arrestees, or buy ads in weekly newspapers (in Houston, for example, the Greensheet and Houston Press). Space was costly, so ads were terse and attention-getting.
Then came the internet, and static webpages. Criminal defense attorneys who understood the medium realized that the consumers were looking for information rather than advertising. The lawyers could answer accuseds' common questions about the process and the system. Provided with more information provided by the lawyers, clients had a better chance to get a feel for the lawyers' beliefs and experience before even picking up the phone. But, as I wrote here, it is easy for any schmoe with a law license to make himself appear competent on a static website. On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Badvertising
New York Criminal Defense Lawyer Scott Greenfield writes about lawyer advertising:
Before I finally succumbed to creating my own website, I googled to see what others had done. It was, to be kind, shocking. The first half dozen lawyer websites I stumbled across were worse than patently offensive; they were flagrantly false and deceptive. It appeared that the best substitute for competency is the willingness to openly prostitute oneself and the knowledge of how to use google search terms.
He gives the example of a lawyer who would appear from his website to be el chingón, but who Scott, who knows just about every criminal-defense lawyer in New York, has never heard of.
I feel for Scott. When I google "Houston Criminal Defense Lawyer," I see:
that Summit Defense of San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA is wasting its money on Google pay-per-click searches in and for Houston;
Why is Snitching UnAmerican?
Scott Henson (Grits For Breakfast) has written extensively about snitching; he steered me toward his posts on the subject in his comments to my post on the Abandonment of American Ideals. I especially appreciated his post, "Don't Snitch, Jack", in which he gave considerable thought to why "don't snitch" is part of the American culture:
At another level, though, the scene with Jack and Maggie tells me the "Stop Snitching" meme taps deep into the moral foundations of our society. What positive values does it teach?
Loyalty, obviously - to snitch is inherently disloyal.
Trust - if someone tells your secrets, they've broken your trust, even if those secrets were about some sort of wrongdoing.
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