Blog Posts

“You are confusing me,” he said. “You’re telling me I should really consider the state’s offer, and that you are ready to go to trial. Which is it?”
We were standing on the courthouse steps. Jury selection was set to begin in less than an hour. The client had...

“[T]he great emancipatory gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below.” Thus concludes James C. Scott’s brief celebration of the...

I’ve a serious case of cross-examination envy as I read about the trial of United States v. James “Whitey” Bulger, now pending in Boston. I mean, how often, if ever, do you get to go toe-to-toe with the likes of John Martorano in the well of an open court? Martorano scored...

No good deed goes unpunished. Ask Charla Nash. When she helped her friend and employer, Sandra Herold, try to recapture Herold’s pet, Travis, and get him back into Herold’s home, Travis turned surly. He attacked Nash, nearly killing her in a frenzy in which Nash was blinded, her face...

There is so much to like about Chris Hedges's and Joe Sacco's, Days of Destruction Days of Revolt (Nation Books, New York, 2012), I hardly know where to begin.
What's not to like when a book that speaks the unvarnished truth? Corporations flourish, ordinary people languish; the super rich get...

It’s been along time since I first saw in open court the power of the surveillance state. A client of mine was accused of rape. When the victim turned up dead, the state accused him of killing her. Prove it, we said. The state did, with the help of cell tower evidence. It wasn’t really...

Edward Snowden will soon be prosecuted by federal authorities for disclosing top secret Government surveillance programs. While he styles himself a whistleblower, he is really something far more radical: He represents a new, and in my view, welcome, version of civil disobedience. He’s the...

If you’ve not watched the video interview of Edward Snowden posted on the Guardian’s webpage, do so. He makes a persuasive case that the American people are being lulled into a false sense of security. We’re moving, inexorably, in the direction of what he calls “turnkey...

Oh, Edith. Did you really say these things? Do you believe them? If so, what justifies your sitting on the federal bench, deciding issues of great importance to Americans of all colors and ethnicities? Edith Jones, the 64-year-old jurist, sits on the prestigious United States Court of Appeals for...

There aren’t enough prison cells in the federal Bureau of Prisons for all the police officers who have pushed a detainee, and then lied about it in a police report. So it's hard for me to fathom why federal officials singled out Meriden’s Evan Cossette for prosecution. But there he was,...