I just finished reading Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse by Steve Bogira My rating: 5 of 5 stars. This was my second time reading this book. I read it first in about 2004 or 2005 while in law school, and recently picked it up again when I started [...]
I hardly know what to say to this: A Billings man driving home from work around 5 p.m. Monday spotted his car that had been stolen from him that morning. He chased the car until it stopped on the 2600 block of Fourth Avenue South and managed to hold one of the passengers at gunpoint [...]
Maybe this says something about the public defender organization for which I work: It scheduled its annual “meeting” (at which attendance for all attorneys is “mandatory”) for the same dates as this year’s NLG Law for the People Convention in Seattle. You think?
Congratulations and thank you to the state of New Mexico, which has become the 15th state to abolish the death penalty. Montana may be next. Thanks to DNA exonerations the number of people against the death penalty continues to grow. The SCOTUS effectively suspended the death penalty in 1972, finding its application arbitrary and therefore [...]
The SCOTUS today held in Vermont v. Brillon that delays caused by a public defender do not count against the state in determining whether a defendant’s right to a speedy trial has been violated. High Court Avoids ‘Chaos of Constitutional Proportions’ in PD Delay Case | ABA Journal – Law News Now.
From Skelly quoting The AJB’s and Me: …(T)he State of Montana Office of Public Defender may change how they handle their conflict cases, resulting in a significant decrease in the availability of contract work for us and many of our friends. Basically that’s like getting advance notice that layoffs are coming at your work… We [...]
One might think that Kathy Kelly, of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, jumped for joy upon discovering this blog post by Patrick Frey, a Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney who writes an off-the-clock blog, Patterico’s Pontifications. Not only did Frey build a case for witness misconduct and evidence tampering by two prosecution witnesses in a Louisiana murder trial that landed Kelly’s client, Jimmy Duncan, on death row, but he even conducted an interview with another prosecution expert witness. Given that a post like this one — coming from a prosecutor — could potentially provide grounds for appeal, you’d have expected Kelly to get on the phone with Frey ASAP.Kelly did indeed contact Frey — to threaten him with an ethics complaint!It’s kind of a crazy story and apparently the misunderstanding has since been resolved.
Last Thursday somewhere over 800 associates and staff were laid off from Biglaw. Scott Greenfield thinks it’s inevitable that some number of them will be hanging shingles as criminal defense lawyers.
Two items about what counts as “justice” in our society: First, at the age of 13 Joe Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison for the crime of rape.
Pro: Con: Lying to a cop about your age is a felony!? (See Jeremy’s footnote.)
