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Please Don’t Hesitate, Lady
According to Law Enforcement Targets’ flacks, I found while speaking with officers and trainers in the law enforcement community that there is a hesitation on the part of cops when deadly force is...
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Texas SB 91—The Discovery Bill
Texas Senate Bill 91 would provide for formal discovery in criminal cases, both from the State to the defense and from the defense to the State. Texas Defender Service, which litigates capital cases,...
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Reciprocal Discovery: Federal Rule 16 vs. Texas SB 91
Grits for Breakfast asked, in a comment, “Do you find reciprocal discovery a hindrance in your federal cases? If not, what’s the difference?” Before I answer that, let me say that the federal criminal...
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Prosecutor Exceptionalism
Rob Kepple giving a pep talk, under the guise of “ethics,” to the Harris County DA’s Office: Now let’s go back to my original analogy because I really want to wrap this up and bring it around, because...
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Why You Gotta Be So…Mean?
My guy was taking a five-year prison sentence, and had arranged for a few weeks to get his affairs in order. The deal was that if he didn’t show up on the appointed day the judge could consider the...
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TCDLA’s Position on Reciprocal Discovery
Letter from Bobby Mims of Tyler, President President-Elect of the Texas Criminal-Defense Lawyers Association, to the sponsor of Texas Senate Bill 91 and his Chief of Staff: Senator Rodney Ellis &...
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Rand Paul Surrenders
It’s good enough for Rand Paul: White House Press Secretary Jay Carney quoted from the letter that Holder sent to Paul today. “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an...
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Microsoft Word 2011 Bloated PDFs
I’m documenting this here in case someone else has the same problem. Today I wrote a ten-page response to a government motion, and when I saved it (from MS Word 2011) to PDF format it was over 5...
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Is This How Kid Lawyers Think?
Unemployed Kid Lawyer writes to small-firm-owning Young Lawyer (obviously not me) after four on a Friday afternoon: I am a recent cum laude graduate of [third-tier law school], and write to express my...
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“I really thought you were the real deal…”
After reviewing your website, I really thought you were the real deal. I didn’t ask for your opinion earlier Mark. [Link to article about rich guy’s 1990s bankruptcy.] Maybe if my dad had managed his...
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The Relationship Card
There were probably criminal-defense lawyers before me who marketed themselves as never having been prosecutors—who made a virtue, in the minds of potential clients, of a lawyer never having put people...
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Yo Ho Yo Ho The Pirate’s Life For Me
In a recent discussion amongst criminal-defense lawyers about the murder of the Kaufman County District Attorney, and whether we would represent the person charged with the murder (assuming that anyone...
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Mea Maxima Culpa
Last week I was in trial (my first bench trial in federal court; we came in second). I was also excited to be scheduled to speak to Professor Ray Moses’s “Opening and Closing” class at South Texas...
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The Sandwich Theory
Quoth Papa Greenfield: Shortly after an instructor first arrives at Cardozo’s Intensive Trial Advocacy Program, after settling in with a bagel and coffee, Ellen Yaroshefsky would give a speech about...
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Justice and Revenge, Rosenbaum Trolling
I heard Thane Rosenbaum on NPR yesterday, and was instantly struck by how juvenile this law professor’s understanding of justice and human nature is. (Greenfield wrote last week about Rosenbaum’s...
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Spousal Privilege, Illustrated
This is from the arrest warrant affidavit in the case of Kim Williams, the wife of Eric Williams, the former justice of the peace who is suspected of murdering three people in Kaufman County, Texas: On...
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Quarles and its Progeny: Tsarnaev
Everyone knows the Miranda warnings. We have heard them ten thousand times on TV. Not everyone knows their significance—clients often ask me whether it’s significant that they were not read their...
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Limitations and the Ken Anderson Prosecution
Former Williamson County prosecutor (and now Williamson County District Judge) Ken Anderson has been charged by a court of inquiry with 1) criminal contempt of court; 2) tampering with or fabricating...
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Lawyernomics 2013
Read Scott Greenfield’s closing keynote address for Lawyernomics this week in Las Vegas. There’s a race to the bottom in lawyer online marketing—“ultra-competitive business landscape,”* as Lawyernomics...
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Texas SB 834: The Star Chamber Bill
One of the few great virtues of American criminal justice is that it is committed in the light of day. Courts are open to the public, and generally—not always; anonymous juries are becoming more...
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