Blog Posts

There is a season for everything, and this is the season of plenty. We are carrying armloads and baskets of produce from our garden and freezing enough to feed a small army, well, actually my wife and I, for a good time to come. Indeed, this is the first year I have succeeded in getting pumpkins...

I am a come-and-go member of the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. I say come and go because I from time to time quit in a huff about one thing or another. Just now, I am on the cusp of taking my dues elsewhere. But first, I would like some answers from the CCDLA executive...

A friend and I both began jury selection this past Monday. His case was in Texas; mine is in Connecticut. By Friday, he'd not only picked the jury, but had obtained an acquittal. (Congratulations to Mark Bennett.) By week's end in Connecticut, we were a little more than half-way through the process...

Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute sends me an email from time to time alerting me to a piece his think tank has published. I almost always find the pieces interesting, and I am grateful to Tim for thinking of me. Yesterday, when a piece arrived regarding indigent defense, I didn't open it right away....

There was quiet rumbling in the office of the United States Attorney when the new regime seized power. “Beware the Southern District,” some folks whispered; “lawyers feed on their own in Manhattan.” There is an ambitious new kid on the block. David Fein, Connecticut’s...

I have my doubts about whether Steven Hayes can get a fair trial in New Haven, Connecticut. He stands accused, after all, of the horrifying rape and murder of a physician's family in the affluent bedroom community of Cheshire, located just north of the Elm City. He and a co-defendant were caught...

If you have ever tried to get the personal address of an FBI agent in an ongoing criminal case, you know what futility means. This sort of information is kept confidential. It is personal, off limits, and even asking for the addresses will yield a storm of consternation. I used to accept that as...

A friend recommended several films as classics about trial, so my wife and watched one of them over the weekend, Otto Preminger's, Anatomy of a Murder. The film won seven Academy Awards in 1959, and is based on the book by Robert Traver. (You can get a used copy of the book on Amazon.)
I find...

Was anyone really surprised that 15-year-old Omar Khadr was lied to and threatened with what amounts to sadistic torture by U.S. interrogators? Our courts condone police lying. Police departments tolerate it. Officers do it all the time, and then lie about doing it. Only defendants are held...

A geriatric army marched on Washington, D.C. today and tried to appropriate language long since deprived of its historic force: Glenn Beck is no freedom rider. The civil rights of the aggrieved white upper middle class don't carry the blood stain of centuries of slavery. That anyone would think the...