When I wrote last week about seeing a jury panel in Norwich from which black males were entirely absent, I assumed there must be some reasonable explanation. So this week, when I subpoenaed state officials to an evidentiary hearing, I was stunned by what I learned. No one, apparently, has a clue about how and whether the state is doing more than playing lip-service to producing juries that represent a fair cross-section of the community.
How, I asked senior jury administrators from the Judicial Branch, am I to explain to my client, a young black man accused of murder, the fact that not...
December 6, 2012
Call me a racist, but Connecticut does not do enough to assure that criminal defendants face a jury of their peers.
I’ve just finished jury selection in a murder case in Norwich. We finally picked a panel after six full days of jury selection. One hundred and fifteen men and women sat through some portion of voir dire. As near as I can tell, there was not a black-man among them. My client, charged with murder, is African-American. What am I to tell him about a jury of his peers?
One answer is that race doesn’t matter at all. We’re all Americans. We believe in...
November 29, 2012
FEW THINGS TERRIFY ME AS MUCH as the thought of being kept alive, indefinitely — hooked to machines, monitored, maintained and held in the land of the living long past the point at which the joy of living has ceased.
I worry less about death than I do about pain. It may be appointed unto us once to die, but needless suffering seems avoidable. Hence, my support for assisted suicide, an issue that strikes at the root of how and why we govern ourselves, and whether there is any collective response to an individual’s death that seems just.
Connecticut lawmakers are poised to...
November 29, 2012
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., might be one of those understated legal geniuses who see things in life’s tawdry fact patterns the rest of us miss. Or maybe he’s just the son of a famous man, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who rode his daddy’s coattails all the way into a job that’s just too big for his meager talents. Gauging by his office’s performance in the Anna Gristina case, I am not checking the genius box when it comes time to cast a ballot for Vance.
Ms. Gristina was charged by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office...
November 21, 2012
November 15, 2012
Secession anyone? The last time there was a groundswell of support for the states to secede from the union, we ended up fighting a bloody civil war....
November 14, 2012
I’ll be starting trial this week in Norwich. My client is accused of murder. The victim was shot to death, point blank, with a hand gun. The...
November 12, 2012
So we’re to have four more years of Barack Obama in the White House. Good, I say. Better him than a throwback to a 1960s sitcom. Once the...
November 8, 2012
Even if you are in mourning about the results of the presidential election, and I am not, you will agree that there is one occasion for rejoicing:...
November 8, 2012
I did not get a chance to head out to Milford to watch any of the trial of Jason Anderson, the former Milford police officer involved in the...
November 6, 2012
I did not feel like much a sovereign when I walked out of the polling place this morning. No, I felt as though I’d just been tossed from a...