Blog Posts

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 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...

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...