Michelle Bachman talks to God, and she is audacious enough to believe He both listens and heeds what she has to say. She knows His will. She is a change agent for righteousness. For all this I admire her and I envy her. My universe is, and remains, silent. It does so even though I spent time at a place she wishes she had visited. You see, I spent the summer of 1997 at Francis Schaeffer’s retreat in Switzerland. I wanted to know God. I wanted to set the world afire for righteousness. I suppose it is safe to say I also wanted to be president.
Nothing in my life has ever worked...
August 31, 2011
Hurricane Irene did not blow my family and me off the face of the Earth, but it did down power lines running along our property. We’ve been without power, and water, and telephone, and the Internet for days. My office, located just a couple miles from my home has also been cut off from the rest of the world. It’s been a good time to catch up on paper work and to prepare for a busy fall.
Well, almost. Yesterday I hopped a plane, actually a couple of planes, to Charleston, South Carolina, where a client of mine faced a federal sentencing before United States District Judge...
August 31, 2011
The message in New Haven the other night was loud and clear: “We’re from the federal government, and we’re here to help.” It was all I could do to remain in the room. I tried to believe them. But an instinct of mistrust overcame the good will the FBI agent and federal prosecutor tried to generate.
I was the third panelist at the Stetson Library. The topic was “Color of Law” violations. Federal officials were there as part of an aggressive community outreach program, trying to alert the community to federal resources only a phone call away. I am not sure inviting me to...
August 25, 2011
Oh, to be white, wealthy and powerful. To inhabit, if only for a moment, the privileged bubble encasing Dominique Strauss-Kahn. I don’t know whether the geriatric sex machine got away with rape. But I do know this: The rich really do live differently than the rest of us.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office moved today to dismiss rape charges against the one-time director of the International Monetary Fund, a sometime presidential candidate in France, and poster child for the American Association of Retired Persons campaign on “Safe Sex for Seniors.” Were...
August 23, 2011
August 21, 2011
Only two people know what went down in a Manhattan hotel suite in May between the plutocrat and the impecunious maid: Dominique Strauss-Kahn and...
August 18, 2011
I generally avoid writing about the so-called "blawgosphere" – the universe of bloggers who write about the law. There’s an inbred...
August 17, 2011
A juror sent me the following note today with permission to publish it. The note describes her reaction upon learning the sentence the court...
August 12, 2011
It’s been a long time since I could say I was looking forward to cross-examining a DNA expert from Connecticut’s forensic crime labs....
August 10, 2011
When the National Academy of Sciences reported several years ago on the sorry state of forensic sciences in the United States, Dr. Carll Ladd, DNA...
August 9, 2011
I watched videos of the recent rioting in London the other day, and two words sprang to mind: Joseph Schumpeter. And I wondered who, in North...