Blog Posts

Cross-examination is the engine of our civil and criminal justice system. When there is a dispute about facts, witnesses are required. Fact-finders, whether they be juries or judges, then make credibility assessments, deciding whom to believe. Yes, mistakes are made – many a...

It is only a matter of days until COVID-19 takes root in one of Connecticut’s prisons, infecting both guards and inmates. The results will be catastrophic. Inmates and prisoner activists are experimenting with lawsuits and administrative requests to provide relief before disaster...

I’m not sure what the new normal will look like for litigators in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, but several things seem obvious enough.
First, I doubt seriously that any juries will be selected until sometime in 2021.
Why? No one is...

Things are tense in the prisons. As the COVID-19 virus sweeps across the land, there are calls to release prisoners, and concerns about the welfare of prisoners, guards and the communities in which the prisons are located.
Have we warehoused men and women in fertile...

Lost amid the chaos of preparing for, and coping with, the Covid-19 pandemic is an honest assessment of what to do with prison inmates. At least it appears that way in Connecticut, where, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, about 16,000 people are imprisoned. (I’ve heard...

How do you represent those people?
The question is common enough for criminal defense lawyers. In the past few weeks, I’ve received variants of the question scores of times. You see, I represent Fotis Dulos, a man suspected in the disappearance of his estranged...

The City of Hamden was rocked this week by protestors angry about the shooting of a young woman, Stephanie Washington, by a Hamden police officer. Here’s my prediction – the City will pay the young woman $2.5 million to avoid a lengthy courtroom fight.
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Pathos is a recognized form of rhetoric. Until today, it had little real place in the law. The Connecticut Supreme Court changed all that with a 4-3 ruling in a case involving guns and the victims of the horrific mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut,...

The panel of judges was uncomfortable. One judge wondered whether the United States government had brought the very issues it was complaining about upon itself by charging the defendant with crimes carrying crippling mandatory minimum prison sentences. Another judge was quick to defend the...

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...