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Recent Blog Posts
More Diverse Juries
During Blomberg's jury selection, 64 people were summoned and were divided into four groups of 16 each. The jury panel size varies on the amount of people a judge requests. Typically, for a misdemeanor trial such as Blomberg's, approximately 100 people are summoned to jury service, Daniel said. After potential jurors are summoned, the selection process is up to the district attorney and the judge presiding over the case.Individuals were called in to the judge's chambers for questioning by the judge and district attorney, in a process called voir dire. Defense attorney Jolanda Jones said the use of voir dire was not necessary since the separation from other potential jurors intimidated minorities and poor people."I don't think it should have been granted in the Blomberg case," she said.Typically, voir dire is used for capital murder cases, but it most likely was used in the Blomberg trial because of the notoriety of the case, Daniel said.
DA Primaries
Tomorrow-Tuesday-Harris County voters will choose Democratic and Republican candidates for District Attorney. The Democratic candidates are Zach Fertitta and Lloyd Oliver; the Republican contenders are Mike Anderson and incumbent Pat Lykos.
I sat down to lunch with Fertitta and Anderson for short interviews. I didn't get to interview Lykos because she didn't respond to requests, and I didn't interview Oliver because I think his Reasonable Doubt interview said enough.
Both Anderson and Fertitta said some interesting things. As a criminal-defense lawyer and resident of Harris County, I have mixed feelings about the Lykos DA's Office. There is no foreseeable outcome to this election that will hurt my feelings. I haven't felt inspired to turn my interviews into posts.
Depending on who wins the primaries tomorrow, I probably will.
Where's Your Soulcraft?
I wonder if this rings true for any of my friends in the Harris County District Attorney's Office:
To begin with, Jackall finds that though the modern workplace is in many respects a bureaucracy, managers do not experience authority in an impersonal way. Rather, authority is embodied in the persons with whom one has working relationships up and down the hierarchy. One's career depends entirely on these personal relationships, in part because the criteria of evaluation are ambiguous. As a result, managers have to spend a good part of the day "managing what other people think of them." With a sense of being on probation that never ends, managers feel "constantly vulnerable and anxious, acutely aware of the likelihood at any time of an organizational upheaval, which could overturn their plans and possible damage their careers fatally," as Craig Calhoun writes in his review of Jackall's book. It is a "prospect of more or less arbitrary disaster."
Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft 138-39.
Blog-About-Brett-Kimberlin Day
I'm in a continuing legal education program all day today, but if I weren't I would write more about Brett Kimberlin, the "Speedway Bomber" who terrorized the town of Speedway, Indiana and went to prison for it 30 years ago, and whose critics are subjected to
harassment, including: complaining to the victim's workplace, defaming the victim online, "Googlebombing" the victim, publishing the victim's address online, filing phony reports of criminal activity by the victim[,]
filing vexatious lawsuits, and "SWATing," which is spoofing the victim's home phone number and calling the police from that number with a report ("I've just killed someone") intended to bring SWAT in.
Read Patterico's post, which I've linked to above.
…And Besides, Intellectual Honesty Doesn't Win Elections
Here's how bonds work in Texas:
D is arrested. Unless his case fits into a few narrow exceptions (capital murder, habitual felony, felony while on bond, deadly-weapon felony after felony conviction, or violent or sexual felony while on parole or probation) he is entitled to bail. High bail can't be used as an "instrument of oppression"; if a person is entitled to bail (and almost everyone is), he's entitled to reasonable bail. Bail should be high enough to reasonably assure that D will come to court and won't break the law.
(In Harris County the judges have agreed to a bail schedule (PDF)-$50,000 for murders, $30,000 for other deadly-weapon felonies, $20,000 for other first-degree felonies, $10,000 for other second-degree felonies, and so on.)
The purpose of bail is to reasonably assure that D will come to court when told to.
Bail can be made in the form of a bail bond or a personal bond. A bail bond is a promise by D to pay the bail amount if he fails to come to court. A bail bond can be a surety bond, secured with the signatures of sureties (typically a bonding company, which charges around 10% of the bail amount for accepting the liability) or a cash bond, secured with the bail amount deposited with the court.
Back to METRO
On Friday morning at 9am, please join me and other freedom fighters at METRO headquarters, 1900 Main Street, Second Floor, to continue the discussion with METRO about METRO police chief Victor Rodriguez's inviting TSA VIPR teams into our community.
Shout It From The Rooftops
The position of most adherents of the death penalty is that there are enough procedural safeguards built into the system that nobody has ever been executed for a crime he did not commit, and that the probability that someone factually innocent could be executed is so small that it does not merit chucking the penalty altogether.
It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case-not one-in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.
Kansas v. Marsh (Scalia, J., concurring).
Prepare for that to change. Shout it from the rooftops: Carlos DeLuna, executed in Texas for the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez.
Murdered by the state.
Another Victim of the Wars on Terror and Drugs
Armed rentacop Tyler John Duhon is accused of sexually assaulting a woman after arresting her for possessing a marijuana cigarette at Houston's downtown Greyhound bus station. (PDF of criminal complaint.)
From the criminal complaint, it appears that Duhon's defense is that the woman consented to have sex with him.
Usually "she consented" would be a tough defense for the state to overcome.
But a "sexual assault...is without the consent of the other person if [among other things]...the actor compels the other person to submit or participate by the use of physical force or violence...." Restraining and handcuffing a person is, at least arguably, the use of physical force (civil-rights cases discuss handcuffing as reasonably necessary force).
On Fictionalist Craig Malisow
Credulous fabulist Craig Malisow, never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, continues to publish fiction in the Houston Press on my friend Shawn Roberts.
When his first short story on the subject was published last year, I wrote a letter to the Houston Press, which the Press didn't deign to publish.
It follows:
To the editors:I was representing Shawn Roberts when a jury found him not guilty of delivering heroin to Tara Sganga.When Craig Malisow and I talked about his story before it was published, he mentioned to me one "fact" that he seemed to think important to the story. I told him that it was not true, and that someone was giving him bad information.That particular "fact" didn't make it into the story. Unfortunately, Mr. Malisow wouldn't share any other details of the story with me before going to press. If he had, I could have told him that many other details, some of which Mr. Malisow tried to sell as significant in the published story, were also incorrect. For example, it is not true that only one witness testified for the State at Shawn's trial; it is not true that there was a knife found in the apartment sink.What would a nonfiction writer have done with this story? Would he have talked to the paramedics who responded to the scene about how they found Ms. Sganga? Talked to Mr. Hayes (whose name Mr. Malisow couldn't even get right), who was present when Ms. Sganga passed away? We can only imagine; it was easier for Mr. Malisow, rather than take these obvious steps, to take as truth the account of Ms. Sganga's aggrieved family.If you were to remove from Mr. Malisow's story the lies and half-truths that he was fed by unnamed family members, and the innuendos Mr. Malisow drew from these fictions, what would be left? The unfortunate deaths, from suicide or drug overdose, of four people with whom Mr. Roberts was close. What did these four people have in common? Mr. Malisow sees only Shawn Roberts; I see drug abuse and mental illness. If you hang around heroin abusers for long enough, some of them are going to die.Mark Bennett
The Best Tradition…and Bad Judgment
One of these things is not like all the others:
A. Wilmington criminal-defense lawyer Eugene Maurer accuses the complainant in an assault case of using the incident to seek attention.
B. Menlo Park family lawyer Jack D. Berghouse sues the school that punished his client for cheating because "the school's policies regarding punishment for cheating are vague and contradictory and shouldn't be enforced."
C. Chicago criminal-defense lawyer Cheryl Bormann wears hijab to her client's arraignment at Guantanamo and asks the court to order the other women present at the hearing to dress more modestly.
Each is an example of lawyering that is at least arguably reasonable to lawyers but outrageous to nonlawyers. Maurer calls a spade a spade; Berghouse attacks the law applicable to the case; Bormann focuses attention on something other than her client's alleged bad acts.
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