Blog Posts

Hurricane Irene did not blow my family and me off the face of the Earth, but it did down power lines running along our property. We’ve been without power, and water, and telephone, and the Internet for days. My office, located just a couple miles from my home has also been cut off from the...

The message in New Haven the other night was loud and clear: “We’re from the federal government, and we’re here to help.” It was all I could do to remain in the room. I tried to believe them. But an instinct of mistrust overcame the good will the FBI agent and federal prosecutor tried to...

Oh, to be white, wealthy and powerful. To inhabit, if only for a moment, the privileged bubble encasing Dominique Strauss-Kahn. I don’t know whether the geriatric sex machine got away with rape. But I do know this: The rich really do live differently than the rest of us.
The Manhattan...

Only two people know what went down in a Manhattan hotel suite in May between the plutocrat and the impecunious maid: Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Nafissatou Diallo. Was there a rape? Consensual sex? Neither?
At its core, this is a garden-variety criminal case. A complaining witness, Ms....

I generally avoid writing about the so-called "blawgosphere" – the universe of bloggers who write about the law. There’s an inbred quality to such writing that destroys interest in the subject matter. It is said that those who can’t do teach. What of the cast of lawyers who write...

A juror sent me the following note today with permission to publish it. The note describes her reaction upon learning the sentence the court imposed on a young man convicted of murder, a conviction for which she voted.
I have been interested in the criminal justice system all of my life....

It’s been a long time since I could say I was looking forward to cross-examining a DNA expert from Connecticut’s forensic crime labs. But those days are over. Thanks to the recent audit by analysts from the National Institute of Justice and National Forensic Since Technology Center,...

When the National Academy of Sciences reported several years ago on the sorry state of forensic sciences in the United States, Dr. Carll Ladd, DNA Supervisor of the Connecticut Department of Public Safety, was quick to point out what he thought were "methodological problems" in the NAS report. Now...

I watched videos of the recent rioting in London the other day, and two words sprang to mind: Joseph Schumpeter. And I wondered who, in North America, will throw the first brick. These thoughts filled me with dread, exhilaration and hope.
Schumpeter was an Austrian economist active in the...

Unconfirmed reports suggest that the Connecticut Department of Public Safety forensic laboratory is at the eye of a storm. A federal review of the lab, its policies and procedures has resulted in a 160-page report highly critical of the lab. Recent DNA tests, the so-called gold standard of the...