Blog Posts

This just may be what comes of the triumphant cry of the warrior who knows but one truth, and who is determined to destroy all those who stand in its way: Salman Rushdie, laying in a pool of blood on a stage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. He was getting ready to speak to a group...

Darnell Moore was charged with murder. He was black. Almost every potential juror was white. We made an issue of it. After his conviction, the Courts must now decide whether he was deprived of a representative...

I wonder what Isaiah Berlin would have had to say about artificial intelligence. This occurred to me as I sat listening to presentations on big data and the Fourth Amendment at a recent conference in New York City sponsored by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. It turns out...

I can’t say I am surprised by Dylann Roof’s decision to conduct his own defense. What, really, has he to lose?
Mr. Roof is standing trial in a South Carolina federal court, accused of 33 crimes — ranging from murder to obstruction of religion to firearms charges and to hate...

“No man is a hero to his valet,” an old proverb has it. I think of it often when making a difficult recommendation to a client. Folks want their lawyers to be heroes. Sometimes lawyers are able to fulfill that role; more often, especially in the context of criminal plea-bargaining,...

I have a confession to make. It’s not pretty. Indeed, given the argot of the day, it’s pretty terrifying. You see, I’ve been ”radicalized.”
Why, I am even going to take a course to qualify for a pistol permit, this coming from a guy who once wrote, and still...

I imagine John Grisham, the best-selling author of plot-driven legal thrillers, channel surfing late one night on his 100-plus-acre farm in Oxford, Mississippi, and settling on an episode of "Better Call Saul." The author of books selling 275 million worldwide must have felt a pang of regret on...

The numbers are hard to believe, even if the source of them, The Washington Post, is highly credible. As of August 10, 2015, 598 people have been shot and killed by police officers in the United States during 2015 alone. That’s an average of almost 2.7 people killed each and every...

Only once have I had to take the witness stand to plead the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and that was after I felt compelled to betray a client on death row. You see, I came into the possession of plans for a violent escape from the Northern Correctional Institution in...

Jesus wept at the gravesite of Lazarus, the Gospel of John reports. Theologians debate the meaning of those tears. Some take it as source of sorrow over the tyranny of death, a master over us all. Others see it as his frustration over the blindness of those who failed to recognize his divine...