kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings… ⇒

Former CIA Director George Tenet on 60 Minutes tonight said several interesting things, but here’s the best: The standard of proof for going to war should be beyond a reasonable doubt b/c obviously the preponderance standard is only good enough when life and liberty are not at stake.

Ok, so Tenet did not say that exactly. He said something like the amount of evidence he had showing that Iraq had nuclear or biological weapons might have allowed him to win a case in civil court, but not criminal court. In other words, we went to war on a preponderance of evidence. Really, really bad idea.
[tags]war, Iraq[/tags]

Since February, the Pentagon has notified about 85 inmates or their attorneys that they are eligible to leave after being cleared by military review panels. But only a handful have gone home. ⇒

Is it a sign that you’re going to have a bad Monday when you get up early so you can get to work early but you waste the morning at home surfing the internets instead?

Oh, hey there, I just stopped by for some Kung Pao Chicken after my pap smear. ⇒

A few weeks ago I mentioned all the trials I had coming up soon and how I expected to have little time for blogging during that period. Correction: That was six freaking freaking weeks ago! Needless to say, I’ve been busy, but not in quite the ways I thought.

The biggest thing that’s happened is that I lost my first ever jury trial. My client was charged with two counts of misdemeanor assault for a fight in her workplace where she allegedly punched two coworkers. The prosecution had a string of five eyewitnesses and an investigator who all said the same thing: My client lost her temper and basically hit two people. We had cross examination and an admittedly thin theory of self-defense.

Along the way we ended up winning a small victory by convincing the judge that she should give the self-defense jury instruction despite the fact that we had not put on any witnesses. Because self-defense is an affirmative defense, we had a burden of proving it by putting on evidence; the prosecutor argued that meant we had to at least call a witness, and prior to trial, all the experienced lawyers I talked to basically agreed with the prosecutor. Of course, we argued that we did put on evidence via our cross-examnation of the prosecution witnesses. The judge went our way and my slim hope that we might have a chance remained alive.

Of course, that tiny victory was short-lived. I knew going in that we were unlikely to win, but it was still a huge disappointment to hear that double “guilty” at the end of a 13-hour day. (The trial was only about 8 hours from voir dire to verdict, but I started the day long before the trial began.)

The good thing is that I no longer have to wonder if I can get through a trial without throwing up on my shoes. I can. And I learned an incredible amount, all of which I will have to apply in a couple of weeks when I have my first felony trial. Although only one of the four trials I was contemplating six weeks ago actually happened, I know that this one coming up is definitely going, so I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Frolics and Detours for her big win in her first felony trial, despite having a rotten judge.

There’s a technique [lawyers] learn somewhere that I think of as messing you up every way they can think of until you give up and give them what they want, and it’s usually money. It’s legal blackmail. They can do it to anyone at anytime. ⇒

But what bothers them most is the fact that Turnitin archives submitted work in order to build up its database. These student papers are then used to look for plagiarism in future submissions. The students allege that this is copyright infringement. ⇒