Blog Posts

The secret tap came the other day: Caitlin Larimer, Lynne Brachter, Carl Bettinger, Fredilyn Sisson have all been asked to resign. Rex Parris will soon be asked to yield his head to the block. Jude Basile's been making the rounds, trying to trim the body and fill it with folks to his...

My wife and I are lolling about in Europe, but my spies are ever at work. Comes this morning a report from the inner sanctum of the Trial Lawyers College. Blood is soon to be spilled, and, cognoscenti, all is not what it appears.  It feels as though I never left the United States.
First the...

"I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of the day, at the furtherance or knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering."
Robert Louis Stevenson,  The...

When a car accident slows traffic, I am as morbid as any other rubber necker. Something about the harm that an accident can spawn draws me. The same is true of a crime, only more so. Intentional harm and its consequences mesmerizes.
So there I was in the wee hours of the morning reading a mass...

Solomon Moore's piece in this morning's New York Times did less than nothing to advance understanding of the nation's sex offender laws. In fact, it set back understanding. Call it a high-class version of pandering to hysteria.
The headline was jarring enough: "Struggling to Keep Tabs on...

On Tuesday, all Hell will break loose in the State of Connecticut. That is when Joshua Komisarjevsky's interviews will be published in a new book. That's the book in which he tells what really happened when a mother and her two daughters were were raped, beaten and set afire in a Cheshire home in...

I've received private notes and a few public comments asking why I have picked an unnecessary fight with Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College. One infuriated loyalist calls me obsessed, a soul in so much pain I cannot let it go. Another wants to know simply what happened to cause such...

The last installment of top contributors to the Trial Lawyers College yielded two complaints about naming names. Once contributor demanded that her name be removed. No one from the college itself has raised an issue about publication of the list.
I am unaware of any legal principle that is...

Trial lawyers speak of wins and losses. Sometimes the outcome of a case is less clear. I am reeling this morning after yesterday's verdict in a murder case I tried for the past four weeks in Hartford.
There was no disputing that my client shot one woman point blank in the head in the the...

The jury has been out for the better part of two days now. They are considering four charges: murder, attempted murder, assault in the first degree and criminal possession of a firearm. My client was involved in an argument that turned deadly in the kitchen of his home with his common-law wife and...