Blog Posts


Pimp-Walking For Justice At The DEA

A pre-dawn telephone call usually means one thing: federal agents have just come storm-trooping through someone’s home, making an arrest before the Sun comes up. A rattled mother, lover or spouse is usually making the call. They are terrified and upset. What happens next? they want to...

9/11, Loss and Ceremony

We’ve survived the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The media reports no shocking new acts of terror. We’ve waved flags, declared both the victims of the attack and those victimized by their response to the catastrophe heros. We’ve stood by while those who lost so much in the wake of...

Jim Crow Takes Denise Nappier Out On A Date

If you don’t think race and class matter in policing, consider the case of Denise Nappier in Hartford, Connecticut. She was stopped and detained by the police the other night for driving a nice car in a housing project. She is a woman of color. The cops claimed that she could not produce...

Forgive Me If I Sit Out 9/11

Call me distracted, but when a note appeared on my computer screen from the editor of this newspaper reminding me that the 9/11 anniversary approached, it caught me by surprise. Was I intending to write about the tenth anniversary of the attack? For a week, I’ve been trying to muster some...

Komisarjevsky: The Real Trial In Cheshire II

Evidence is set to begin on September 19 in the trial of Joshua Komisarjevsky, the second of the two men accused of engaging in the brutal home invasion and slaughter of all but one member of the Petit family in Cheshire, Connecticut, in July 2007. The first trial ended in the conviction of Steven...

Punishing The Mentally Ill Mocks Justice

You wouldn’t lock up a person and punish them for being ill, would you? The very notion is obscene, an insult to our natural sense of justice and what is fair. Yet we lock up the mentally ill all the time in this country. One estimate puts at 350,000 the number of mentally ill men and women...

Summer Ends With Quiet Resolve

“Ever and ever have I been casting my line into the great unknown sea, and generally drawing it up with the hook as bare as when I threw it down; and still this in no way keeps me from dropping it in again and again, for surely sometime something will come along and bite. We are all fishers,...

Old Wounds Still For Sale At The Slave Mart

The South terrifies me. It always has. It seems like a region steeped in suppressed violence. All is politeness by the light of day, but when the Sun sets I worry about the things unsaid. The South seems like a place where ghosts linger, awaiting the gloam to finish work left...

Updated: An Odd Form of Patronage

I operate on what I call the first-date rule when it comes to potential clients. It cost me a client the other day. I am blaming an unlikely matchmaker.
The first-date rule operates in the following manner: A client is referred to you. You meet the client, or speak with them on the...

Michelle Bachmann, Francis Schaeffer and a Lost Dream

Michelle Bachman talks to God, and she is audacious enough to believe He both listens and heeds what she has to say. She knows His will. She is a change agent for righteousness. For all this I admire her and I envy her. My universe is, and remains, silent. It does so even though I spent time at a...

© Norm Pattis is represented by Elite Lawyer Management, managing agents for Exceptional American Lawyers
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