Blog Posts

FEW THINGS TERRIFY ME AS MUCH as the thought of being kept alive, indefinitely — hooked to machines, monitored, maintained and held in the land of the living long past the point at which the joy of living has ceased.
I worry less about death than I do about pain. It may be appointed unto...

One editorialist at least had the courage to put it bluntly: Jerry Sandusky deserves 400 years in prison. The writer was outraged that the 68-year-old man received a sentence of only 30-60 years in prison after his conviction on 45 counts of child molestation. Sandusky is, so the writer contends,...

The literal and figurative firestorm erupting worldwide over the YouTube film “The Innocence of Islam” provokes the sense of despair one gets watching a couple divorce: The pretext for the latest quarrel is threadbare. Everyone sees that. But the divorce, that’s inevitable....

A client of mine is in the process of being tarred and feathered, and I don’t much like it. Dr. Tory Westbrook has been accused of multiple counts of sexual assault by his patients. His former employer is busy at work interviewing folks. New complainants are springing up like weeds on an...

I posted a video on Facebook of Anthony Sanchez, a 34-year-old California man, using a belt on his stepson in a senseless display of rage. The two were playing catch. The boy didn’t perform up to standards, so the father laid the leather to him. It was ugly. But was it a...

The conventional wisdom holds that you do a client a great deal of good if you spare him a term behind bars. Prison and the loss of liberty is the great evil to be avoided in the criminal justice system. Rare is the individual who actually benefits from imprisonment; rarer still is the crime so...

I was encouraged the other day to see a phalanx of protesters outside the New Haven courthouse on Elm Street. There looked to be 30 or so people, many with signs, standing on the courthouse steps just after 9 a.m. As I got nearer to the steps, I strained to read a row of signs held by five...

The perversity of the trial tax was on display the other day. My client was facing potential decades behind bars, and, as the jury was being selected, he reconsidered his decision to plead not guilty. We went to the prosecutor to negotiate. He held firm on a prior plea offer previously rejected,...

Lock a man up. Put him in a tiny cell. Require him to live with others not his choosing. Regulate when and what he can eat. Limit the times he may leave his cell to exercise in another pen. Restrict his access to family, reading material, and all the signals that might reach him from the external...

"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," Jesus is reported to have said. Somehow, I don’t think he foresaw just how much a threat the truth could be in the courtrooms of the United States. Why knowing the truth just got one juror fined $500 in the New Jersey...