I was stunned into something approaching silence the other night as I listened to the audience at a community group meeting in New Haven rage about gun violence. I was the defense lawyer paired with a state and a federal prosecutor to talk to those assembled. Guns are bad news, I said. Get caught with one and there often is little I can do. I railed against mandatory minimum sentences and the loss of hope for those convicted and their families.
The audience was sympathetic, but what they wanted to rail about was how easy it is for their children to get guns. "It’s easier to buy...
May 26, 2011
I don’t know what level of trickery, or simple intellectual dishonesty, permits the Senate to accuse some judges, but not others, of “judicial activism,” but this specious parlor game has got to stop. This week, Senate Republicans killed the nomination of Goodwin Liu to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The claim? He’s an activist.
Judges are activists. Period. That is what we pay them to do, to make judgments about the law as applied to the controversies brought to court. There are no non-activist judges, just as there is no...
May 21, 2011
I was accused by an old friend the other day of getting soft and mellow. He blamed it on my psychoanalyst. You see, I spend four hours a week, mostly at a time when truly mellow folks are getting out bed, free associating about what crosses my mind. I’ve been at it for a couple of years now. There is no apparent end in sight. Those of you who have been reading this column for the past decade of so are no doubt unsurprised by this therapeutic turn.
But losing my edge? I hope it is not so. The great joy of the law, at least for a trial lawyer, is conflict.
No long ago I...
May 18, 2011
About 44 percent of all those we release from prison are expected to return within three years. To many, this high rate of recidivism represents a failure of the criminal justice system. If our prisons aren’t rehabilitating people and deterring them from the commission of future crimes, what’s going wrong? How can prisons do a better job?
Putting the question this way avoids confrontation of the real point: high recidivism rates have less to do with criminal conduct than they do with the use of prisons as social control mechanisms. We incarcerate folks for many reasons,...
May 15, 2011
May 13, 2011
The conventional wisdom is to advise a client contemplating a defamation action against filing suit unless he is sure he can withstand...
May 12, 2011
I poked my head into the courtroom in which jury selection drags along, draining the state’s coffers of needed cash, in the case of State v....
May 8, 2011
I was a little bemused to read the headline on a recent news story reflecting a debate about whether Osama bin Laden had, in fact, been murdered. If...
May 7, 2011
I am not much of a son, so Mother’s Day doesn’t move me. My mother and I are estranged. We both struggled to get what we needed out of...
May 5, 2011
I am going to miss Christopher Droney when he is confirmed as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. As a...
May 3, 2011
Osama bin Laden is dead. Good. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States boasted of the jihad he and his like-minded followers were...