Posted on October 14, 2010 in Uncategorized

... to vote for the blind.

There are great Republican candidates for Harris County criminal benches in next month's elections: Vanessa Velasquez, Marc Carter, Mike McSpadden, Larry Standley. A straight-ticket sweep either way would be about equally bad, but an honest man familiar with the Harris County courthouse could, with a straight face, call for Republican voters to vote straight-ticket to keep these incumbents in office.Namby-pamby liberal* Murray "Murph" Newman wrote of Republican Chris Daniel's candidacy: "Only a die-hard Republican who was completely unfamiliar with the job Jackson is doing would think of voting against him." Daniel found just such a die-hard Republican in David Jennings, who blogs at Big Jolly, and who is an enthusiastic supporter of Daniel's Peterian quest for elected office.

Now Jennings is calling for a Republican sweep but, instead of holding up as a paragon of Republican judging one of those judges with a track record of knowledge, fairness, dignity, and respect, Jennings picks John Clinton, a guy who is running for criminal judge with no criminal-law experience and no judging experience, to carry the straight-ticket banner.

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 Posted on October 14, 2010 in Uncategorized

R obert S. Bennett... has a problem.

The Houston consumer lawyer (who... "does some criminal work"-records show him as counsel of record on a grand total of nine federal criminal cases in the Southern District of Texas, and no state criminal cases in Harris County) took on representation of R. Allen Stanford in March, after Stanford had been represented by "lawyers with a Washington firm, a Houston civil lawyer, Houston criminal defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin,... court-appointed public defender [Mike Sokolow] and most recently Houston criminal defense lawyers Kent Schaffer and George ‘Mac' Secrest." (Mac was partners with Robert C. "Bob" Bennett until that Bennett's retirement; Robert S. is not related, as far as I know either to Robert C. or to Robert C. Bennett's son Robert Todd Bennett.) For those of you keeping score at home, that brings the fired-badass count up to four.Allen Stanford Documents

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 Posted on October 13, 2010 in Uncategorized

I recently had an opportunity to cross-examine a heroin-addict witness who claimed that he had watched my client inject another person with heroin, and then had injected himself. The State's theory was delivery by injection. The witness denied having participated in the alleged delivery-a crucial point because of Texas's Accomplice-Witness Rule. My client hadn't injected the girl, but lack of corroboration would get us to the same ending point: if the jury believed-or had a reasonable doubt-that the witness had participated in the charged offense, they could not convict my client based on the his uncorroborated testimony.

I knew that the witness wasn't going to admit that he was the one who did deed, but I thought that I might be able to get him to say that he had helped deliver the heroin.

In planning a cross-examination, we start with statements that the witness can't deny without appearing dishonest (or being impeached), leading to statements that the witness could credibly deny but for the first level of admissions, then to statements that the witness could credibly deny but for the first two levels of admissions, and so forth. Just like building a pyramid. The objective at every step is to make a statement that the witness has to either agree with or appear dishonest.

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 Posted on October 09, 2010 in Uncategorized

[A] good-faith, case-by-case, consequential ethics approach should be used that balances the greatest good for the greatest number without trampling unduly on individual rights and each citizen's constitutionally protected liberty interests.

Sreenivasan, Frances, and Weinberger, Normative Versus Consequential Ethics in Sexually Violent Predator Laws: An Ethics Conundrum for Psychiatry, J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 38:3:386-391 (2010) (via Karen Franklin, In the News: Forensic Psychology, Criminology, and Psychology-Law; via Pam Lakatos)

In Texas, the question that a psychologist might be asked to answer in a Sexually Violent Predator committment proceeding is whether, to a reasonable scientific certainty, the respondent "suffers from a behavioral abnormality that makes the person likely to engage in a predatory act of sexual violence," where "‘Behavioral abnormality' means a congenital or acquired condition that, by affecting a person's emotional or volitional capacity, predisposes the person to commit a sexually violent offense, to the extent that the person becomes a menace to the health and safety of another person."

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 Posted on October 07, 2010 in Uncategorized

Lawyer Danny Lampley got himself jailed by Judge Talmadge Littlejohn for not saying the Pledge of Allegiance in a Mississippi courtroom (NMissCommentor via The Agitator).

There, but for an accident of geography, go I-I've shared my feelings about loyalty oaths before.

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 Posted on October 07, 2010 in Uncategorized

The Houston Chronicle went out of its way to praise Pat Lykos for "promising to investigate the suicide of a young boy whose parents claim he was the victim of intense bullying at his school"; the newspaper ignores the opportunity cost of fulfilling this publicity-happy promise.

Huh, what? asks the Chronicle's editorial board. Opportunity cost?

This DA's Office is not playing with unlimited resources. It is cutting corners where they shouldn't be cut-denying comp time after it has been worked, ordering prosecutors to alter their timesheets to conceal the comp time, and firing prosecutors who refuse to comply (see Murray's post here).

So-setting aside the issue of the elected DA ordering public servants to violate the law on pain of firing, which the Chronicle seems to think is not "news"-we can all certainly agree that when the DA's Office is in such dire financial straits that it can't even afford to pay prosecutors with comp time for the work they've done, Pat Lykos shouldn't be launching yet another frivolous investigation intended only to make her look good in the press. Every minute spent determining why the child killed himself is a minute that could be spent actually prosecuting people.

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 Posted on October 05, 2010 in Uncategorized

In his interview with David Jennings (see my commentary, in five parts, here, here, here, here, and here), Chris Daniel says something downright interesting:

There are certain judges who will remain nameless, who have files in their office solely because they're afraid to send them to imaging because they know that if they send it to imaging, it will be online and it will ruin whoever's file that is reputation. And these are folks that have since had their lives repaired, they've moved on, and they're living normal lives. And yet if that file gets put online, it ruins their life.

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 Posted on October 05, 2010 in Uncategorized

Further in his interview of Chris Daniel (my earlier commentary, in four parts, is here, here, here, and here), David Jennings betrays that Daniel is not the only participant ignorant of the operative facts. He gets the lawyer-window story confused, turning it into a lawyers-only-window story and trying to make of it a story of elitism: "Does that sound like he's trying to put lawyers above people, voters?"

To appreciate the unintended irony of the question and of Daniel's response, recall the first words of Chris Daniel that I included in part 1: "In investigating the needs and wants of the legal community...." Making it quicker and easier for lawyers to file and retrieve documents in the public-service section at 1201 Franklin satisfies those needs and wants.

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 Posted on October 05, 2010 in Uncategorized

In his interview with David Jennings (my earlier commentary, in three parts, is here, here, and here), Chris Daniel renounces the idea of illegally redacting documents as they are filed, claiming that Chronicle Reporter Chris Moran "unfortunately misquoted" him. (Because, y'know, journalists are misquoting people all the time.) Moran published a clarification on his Houston Politics blog:

District Clerk candidate Chris Daniel says his position on redaction of court documents was misrepresented in today's story on the race....My notes from the interview show that Daniel told me the clerk's office should use technology to redact documents as they are entered into the system. There's no mention of online redaction, at least according to my notes.

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 Posted on October 05, 2010 in Uncategorized

Lawyers who try cases will get a chuckle out of Chris Daniel's description, in his interview with David Jennings (part 1 of my commentary; part 2) of how to figure out how many jurors to summon to eliminate waste:

Well, we could use statistical analysis to see how many people would typically be needed on any given day for a docket size. And so, if we know that the docket has X number of cases that we were statistically going to need X number of people to show up and, therefore, we only need to send out X number of notices and not just a standard every day we're going to send 10,000 notices and every day we're going to get 400 people to show up.

First, the District Clerk is sending out 11,600 jury notices a week (not "a day") and getting 2,500 people to show up. (These numbers are not hard to discover, Mr. Daniel.)

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