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Recent Blog Posts
Chris Daniel's Interview, part 2 (in which he waffles on terror and fudges on jury duty)
In his interview with David Jennings (part 1 of my analysis), Daniel talks about some of the conceivable problems with making public documents publicly available (he describes online access to documents as "online filing"; two different things).
Some of them are nonproblems, because only lawyers have access to the documents (as in family law cases); the rest are problems on which Loren Jackson's tech people are already working ("Jackson said his office is working to develop a system that does on-screen redaction without altering documents," Houston Chronicle, September 23, 2010).
Oh, and Daniel seems to have abandoned his role in the Global War on Terror (after Jennings told him it was stupid?) in favor of a little sexual-predator hysteria, always popular with the SWRVs. But Mr. Daniel, if you're not going to fight the GWOT as District Clerk, who will?
Chris Daniel's interview, part 1 (in which he removes all doubt)
‘Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool....
David Jennings (Big Jolly Politics) has conversation with Republican District Clerk hopeful Chris Daniel. The puff-piece interview (Jennings doesn't even talk with Daniel about the actual duties of the District Clerk, of which Daniel continues to show himself ignorant) demonstrates why Daniel deserves the name "The Lightweight." Here is the 30-minute audio recording; for those who would rather waste five minutes of their lives than 30, a rough transcript is here. I recommend it highly for aficionados of unintended irony.
It starts out like this:
Chris Daniel's Endorsement Lies
Dear Chris Daniel:
I see that you made the correction to your website that I noted in the last paragraphs here. I appreciate that.
On the front page of your current website, you list *Welcome Wilson Sr. as endorsing you. The asterisk leads to a footnote that says, "Primary Only."
The primary is over. If someone endorsed you for the primary only, he doesn't endorse you.
Further, at least one of these precinct chairs endorsed you for the primary only, and does not endorse you now:
You know it, and you keep the name or names up there. (I'll leave it to you to figure out which one (or ones) I know about.)
Mr. Daniel, is the office of Harris County District Clerk really worth all the lies?
Amusedly,Mark.
Blawg Review #284
In recognition of the 40th anniversary of her October 4, 1970 death, this edition of Blawg Review is dedicated to Texas*-born blues wailer Janis Joplin.
If freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose, where in America would we look for free people? In our prisons, perhaps? At Balkinization, guest blogger Sharon Dolovich explains why the Supreme Court's Farmer v. Brennan distinction between prison conditions and punishment takes the teeth out of the Eighth Amendment's protections for prisoners: "Farmer's holding encourages and even rewards a prison official's utter failure to pay attention. This is Farmer's legacy: a no-liability zone where inhumane and even brutal conditions create no constitutional liability."
Those serving life sentences in prison have less to lose than other inmates (arguably, those who can expect, with good behavior, to get out in this lifetime have the most to lose and are therefore the least free). In Britain, murder is punishable by a sentence between some minimum term (after which the murderer could, if he satisfies the Parole Board, be released) and life. David Osborne (The Barrister Bard) proposes reforming the system so that the courts have (once again) the power to impose the appropriate sentence in each case.
Be Careful What You Ask For
DA will look into Cy-Fair student's suicide (Peggy O'Hare, Houston Chronicle):
Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos said her office will investigate what led to the suicide of a 13-year-old Cypresswood-area boy whose parents said he suffered two years of intense bullying from other students at school.
....
Lykos said her office will examine whether there were instances of "egregious conduct" before Brown's death. "I'm very concerned about this," she said.Brown killed himself around 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 23 at the family's home in the 11700 block of Cypresswood after arriving home from school. He shot himself in his stepfather's upstairs bedroom closet using a 9 mm Beretta that had been kept on a shelf there.
The death of a child is a terrible tragedy, for which it is natural to seek an explanation. It is normal for those who lose a loved one to seek to place blame (whether on themselves or on others) to try to make the tragedy less unfathomable. But suicide often defies any explanation beyond the facile. There might be plenty of blame to go around, or there might be none; only one person knew why he killed himself.
Today Only?
In the markets of South and Southeast Asia, where I learned to haggle, one of the gambits used by vendors is to claim that the offered price has to be accepted right now: "for you, today only, fifteen Rupees!"
They never mean it. Turn and walk away, and the price goes down. Leave and come back the next day; the merchandise is still there, and the vendor is one day more interested in unloading it.
The words aren't literally true; they don't contain any information beyond, "I am willing to sell this to you for fifteen Rupees"; they're just part of the ritual, the game.
I heard the same line the other day in court: a prosecutor told a criminal-defense lawyer, "this offer is only good for this setting." (For you, today only, fifteen years!)Did the words mean what they purported to, or was this just part of the ritual? Put in practical terms, what does the criminal-defense lawyer tell his client when the client asks if he can have some time to think about the plea offer?
There's Always a Prosecutor
Mike (Crime and Federalism) writes:
I blog about prosecutorial misconduct more than anyone else. People are too busy creating Twitter norms. Because criminal lawyers should be more worried about whether some moron is duping lawyers into signing marketing contracts. (!)
Fair criticism? Possibly. In the scheme of things, whether prosecutors are cheating and putting people in prison (or death row) who shouldn't be there is more important than whether lawyers are getting ripped off by marketers or saying stupid things on Twitter. Prosecutors are cheating and putting people who don't belong in prison and on death row. The public must be told.
To criminal-defense lawyers, though, this is not news. Of course prosecutors cheat.Not all (any prosecutorial reader is free to pretend that he and all of his friends are exceptions to the rule), but many-and maybe most-prosecutors cheat at least a little bit. They hide exculpatory evidence, they lie to judges, they lie to defense lawyers, they encourage witnesses not to talk to the defense. Where does their ethical compass come from? We've got 27-year-olds with no real-world experience supervising 25-year-olds with no life experience. They learn to cheat when they're baby lawyers, and never learn any better. In a case I tried recently, a senior Harris County prosecutor had told a cop he could interrogate someone in jail despite knowing that I represented him. In ways large and small, prosecutors treat what they do as a game, and they bend the rules of that game as far as they can get away with. Prosecutors cheat, and we have to watch them vigilantly to try to keep their cheating from hurting our clients.
Sometimes the Texas Legislature Gets it Right
Add this to the list of reasons that Texas is a better place to practice criminal defense law:
Art. 38.075. Corroboration of Certain Testimony Required(a) A defendant may not be convicted of an offense on the testimony of a person to whom the defendant made a statement against the defendant's interest during a time when the person was imprisoned or confined in the same correctional facility as the defendant unless the testimony is corroborated by other evidence tending to connect the defendant with the offense committed. In this subsection, "correctional facility" has the meaning assigned by Section 1.07, Penal Code.(b) Corroboration is not sufficient for the purposes of this article if the corroboration only shows that the offense was committed.
(We already had informant-corroboration and accomplice-corroboration statutes. What I'd really love to see, though, is a cop-corroboration statute.)
Scared White Republican Fear of the Day: Third-World Document-Review Terrorists
Harris County District Clerk candidate Chris "Lightweight" Daniel still (Chris Moran, Houston Chronicle) wants to build another County parking garage.
Also, he wants to use the office of District Clerk to fight the Global War on Terror:
"Online filing is today putting at risk the citizens of Harris County," Daniel said. Those files could have Social Security numbers and other information that could be stolen by identity thieves, or worse, he said. Daniel said he wants to introduce a technology that would redact compromising information as the documents are filed."If someone from a Third World country that's a terrorist wants to steal your identity, we want to make it as hard as possible," Daniel said.
This appeal to Scared White Republican voters is stupid (also shameless, but "stupid" is more salient).I don't know where I'd look to find Social Security numbers on the District Clerk's website. My best guess would be "in divorce decrees," but family-court documents are available only to Texas lawyers. So unless these Third-World Document-Review Terrorists who want to steal your identity are also licensed to practice law in Texas, they're not going to get your Social Security number there.
Blogging Rules
D.A. Confidential describes some of the rules he follows when writing blog posts:
Do not write about ongoing cases. If I want to draw attention to one of my cases, say it's going to trial, then I let people know it's going to trial and I post a link to a news story about the case, without commenting on the facts myself. This can be tough because I'd love to blog about what happened last week, I've been asked to do so, but I'm going to put some time between the event and my account of it.
Do not generate, encourage, or participate in topics of controversy. Thus you won't find discussions about the death penalty, immigration, drug policy, or the Dallas Cowboys here.
Treat everyone with respect. If I have a funny case where someone did something silly, or said something amusing, I will never tell you about it to humiliate that person and so won't identify them. We see so many funny things in court it's tempting to give every last detail but I try to be more respectful than that. The one time I will name someone is if they have done a really good job and warrant some attention.
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