Blog Posts

The focus turns this week to the defense of Joshua Komisarjevsky. Good luck, I say. The courthouse has been doused in hatred. The sympathetic fumes of those of think that killing is justice choke the hallways. All it will take now is a spark to light the place afire. That’s what we want,...

My holiday gift card list did not grow shorter this week when an American missile struck and killed Anwar al-Awlaki in a Yemeni desert. He was a top-dog in the rag-tag band of fundamentalist creeps who would just as soon kill me as any of some 300 million other folks just like me. He hated the...

Many years ago, I was invited to give a talk to lawyers. The organizers of the conference called my presentation: “Trying cases outside the box.” I thought the title an odd one. What box? A trial is simple story telling, right? This was before a near professionally fatal flirtation...

What New England state incarcerates its citizens at a rate comparable to the deep South? Is it Maine, with its rural sensibilities? Rock-ribbed New Hampshire? Or how about Massachusetts, home of Boston, a large, festering city? Surely it could not be bucolic Vermont? Or Connecticut, land of the...

Troy Davis is dead. Joan-MacPhail-Harris is happy. And the American criminal justice system is sick. Who do we think we are kidding when we call ourselves the land of the free?
Let me put my cards out on the table straightaway. I am with Thomas Hobbes when it comes to the death penalty....

Confession is good for the soul, we like to say. Police prey upon this instinct, and, when alone with men and women suspected of crimes, police officers rely upon it. “Get if off your chest,” they say. “It will do you good.” They sit and play at priest, social worker and...

Good cross-examiners know that what is unsaid is sometimes more important than the testimony. A question can frame all that follows. Listen to the tone of voice of the questioner. Look, if you can, at his eyes. There are no innocent questions in an effective cross-examination. All is bent to the...

Second verse, same as the first: That will be the theme of the State’s methodical and workman-like presentation in the case of State v. Komisarjevsky. The prosecution has no doubt tweaked a question or two to avoid the sort of juror restiveness that caused one juror to quit in disgust over...

The good folks at Barnes and Noble in North Haven, Connecticut, are sponsoring a book signing for my new book Taking Back the Courts. I will be there next Thursday, September 22, 2011, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. I write here because there is a rumor afoot that the signing is tonight.
Here is the...

I’ve never faced the prospect of going to prison. I’ve not sat with a lawyer and been offered a plea deal: Either take the five years the state is offering or go to trial. If you lose trial, you face decades in prison. I’ve never heard my lawyer say that the state’s case is...