Blog Posts

I called one of the law’s great septuagenarians just after the new year to commiserate about the passing of New Haven attorney William Gallagher.


“I didn’t see this coming,” he said, noting that Gallagher, like him, was in his 70s.
Death is...

I’ve never fully understood just why prostitution is a crime. Our courting and mating rituals as a species are complex. Prostitution seems, well, a more direct and sometimes honest, if pathetic, route to certain primal satisfactions.


Yet prostitution cases are...

The publicist describes Kiese Laymon as a "black 21st-century Mark Twain," a curious sort of notion I was eager to test, and now, having read the book, am just as eager to reject. Laymon isn't some reconstituted version of a white man. Did the person who wrote this description even bother to read...

Ethan Couch caught a break the other day in Fort Worth, Texas. It didn’t outrage me at all. In a left-handed way, it almost made me hopeful.


The 16-year-old was charged as a juvenile in a vehicular homicide that killed four people. He was drunk while driving a car....

NOTE: I WOULD NO LONGER GIVE THIS ADDRESS. RECENT EVENTS HAVE MADE BE WARY OF ISLAM. TERRORISM MAY NOT HAVE A RELIGION, BUT THERE ARE PLENTY OF TERRORISTS AMONG MEMBERS OF THIS FAITH. MY MESSAGE NOW WOULD BE: IF YOU WANT A WELCOME, POLICE YOUR OWN -- YOU HAVE LOST MY TRUST. NOVEMBER 14,...

Michael Connelly never practiced law a day in his life, but his fiction best approximates the gritty reality of the private practice of law. His Mickey Haller series continues to amaze me. I repeatedly find myself underlining sentences in the book that capture exactly the sense of creative chaos...

Friends were surprised that I crossed the line to represent Jason Zullo, an East Haven cop accused of harassing Hispanics while on duty. And when he was sentenced to two years in prison by a federal judge, some of those same friends thought he wouldn’t be going to prison long...

I am not sure there are any larger lessons to learn from the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Mental illness isn’t the answer: Millions of Americans suffer from such maladies, few become shooters. The over-abundance of firearms...

Only once have I had to take the witness stand to plead the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
I was seeking permission to withdraw from representation of a man on death row. My former partner and I were handling his appeal, trying to keep the state from killing him. When a...

Former Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim was convicted by a federal jury and served seven years in prison for his role in a racketeering conspiracy that extorted some $800,000 from contractors seeking to do business in the Park City. That verdict was returned in 2003. He’s done his time. Now...