Blog Posts

I was sitting with a client, a federal prosecutor and a FBI agent the other night. We were engaged in what is known as a “reverse proffer.” That’s where the government tells a defendant what it intends to prove at trial. The government’s goal is to persuade the accused to...

I've been reading the press reports about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's jury selection in Boston with a growing sense of ambivalence. Tsarnaev, you will recall, is the surviving suspect in the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon.
I have for decades been opposed to the death penalty, and the specter of...

Robert Ferguson's book on the American criminal justice system, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment (Harvard University Press, 2014) ought to be must reading for every legislator, judge and prosecutor in the United States. You will note that I did not include criminal defense lawyers in the...

One measure of our humanity is how we treat the least among us. The future will judge us harshly, I am afraid. This is especially so regarding our prisons. We’ve taken a punitive turn in social philosophy, and have created penal colonies in our midst. What’s worse, we’ve fallen in...

The process, criminal defense lawyers like to say, is the punishment. Nowhere is this so true as in the low-level criminal courts in Connecticut, known among the cognoscenti as the “GAs,” or Geographical Areas. All criminal cases make their courtside debut in the GA courts. Only the...

I was in the chambers of a judge I respect a great deal trying to reach a plea bargain in a complex case the other day. Well before trial, he made an offer of a given period of years in a case involving many alleged victims. After a trial in several of the cases, a trial in which my client was...

Ethan Couch caught a break the other day in Fort Worth, Texas. It didn’t outrage me at all. In a left-handed way, it almost made me hopeful.


The 16-year-old was charged as a juvenile in a vehicular homicide that killed four people. He was drunk while driving a car....

It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence. The colonies rebelled and cut loose from England because King George III was “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.”
Put another way, there was a time in this nation’s history when jury...

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...

Imagine my surprise tonight when a reporter from a local paper sent me an email asking to see a copy of my sentencing memorandum in the Jason Zullo case. I told them I had filed one today, too. They asked for a copy. Can't you get it on-line, I asked?
No, the reporter responded. The...