Blog Posts

Jury selection starts Tuesday in a New Haven, Connecticut courtroom in the case of State v. Hayes. If the name means nothing to you, that's because you have been seduced by the symbolism of it all: Most folks refer to the matter as the Petit case, using the name of the three victims of the July...

Prison. Say the word aloud. Prison. There. You have said it. What associations emerge? Is it a place of punishment and anger? Is it a place of quiet redemption? Or is it no place at all? A sort of black hole into which what we fear is thrown and, with less effort than we imagine,...

Cameras in the courtroom are a stupid idea. We've been dabbling with the televised court proceedings in Connecticut. My experience to date suggests that, at least at the trial level, all the public really wants is a picture of the person accused of a heinous crime. This is titillation, not...

Sometimes the things you learn in school are a whole lot more important than the lessons a teacher thinks he is teaching. Sometimes what you learn is that it can be scary to stand alone, apart from the crowd. I think you learned about how mean crowds can be this week when the Mesquite school board...

Sometimes the beast doesn't merely roar. Sometimes it listens.
The writ I posted yesterday did not need to be filed. The Department of Correction has agreed to provide the client with individual transportation to court in the mornings, thus making it possible to get a good night's sleep. And,...

RETURN: JANUARY 19, 2010
GEORGE LENIART : SUPERIOR COURT
:
VS. : J. D. OF NEW LONDON
:
DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION, :
BRIAN K. MURPHY :

V E R I F I E D C O M P L A I N T
1. ...

The last time I saw Judge Gerry Esposito he was presiding in Juvenile Court in Torrington, a hard-scrabble, hard-luck city in the Northern part of Connecticut.
"What are you doing here?" he asked with a twinkle in his eye. I rarely appear in juvenile court.
"It's a sex case, judge," I said....

"If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us."
C.G. Jung
I keep reminding myself that Jung is right. The line...

Alexandra Natapoff's new book on the use of informants in criminal proceedings is a must read. Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, (New York University Press, 2009) It is not that she tells us anything new and really startling; what impresses is that she has managed...

From United States v. Reeves, decided last week by the Second Circuit:

"This appeal requires us to consider the validity of a condition of supervised release [following a prison term for possessing child pornography] that obligated Reeves, upon entry into a “significant romantic...