Blog Posts

We say that the criminal justice system assigns responsibility for deviant conduct to those who violate communal norms. Of course, not all communal norms carry penal consequences. Only some violations carry a criminal sanction. And because of the gravity of that sanction, we take pains to avoid...

Although I grew up in Chicago and Detroit, I became a New Englander the day I started to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Decades later, I still see the paperback pages recounting his planting of peas and beans. Something like destiny led me to my current home, situated well off the beaten...

"It would be a disgrace to us if amongst us men should burn a rattlesnake or a mad dog. The badness of the victim is not an element in the case at all. Torture and burning are forbidden, not because the victim is not bad enough, but because we are too good.... It is evident, however, the public...

I don’t write about it much here because, frankly, I don’t get to spend much time at it, but one of my avocations is as bookseller. My wife and I own a used bookstore called Whitlock Farm Booksellers in Bethany. We have a great staff of bookworms who keep the inventory flowing and the...

If you want to see an independent judiciary in action, look West, to France. The nation’s judges went on strike last week. Jurists laid down their gavels and refused to attend to all but the most serious cases. Why? France President Nicolas Sarkozy played the Willie Horton card. Go ahead and...

Scores of folks have sent me emails generated by a group called Citizens for Change, America. They want me to hear their cries for justice, and to sign on to the fight to have the courts declare retroactive application of the federal sex offender registration act unconstitutional. My first response...

My sense of things is that most jurors struggle to do the right thing. They work at the decisions we ask them to make. They try to follow the law. There are failures, to be sure. But in general, I trust a jury far more than I trust the weary eye of a judge. Lay jurors bring common sense...

My sense of things is that most jurors struggle to do the right thing. They work at the decisions we ask them to make. They try to follow the law. There are failures, to be sure. But in general, I trust a jury far more than I trust the weary eye of a judge. Lay jurors bring common sense...

One of the legislative geniuses in the Virginia State Senate thinks he has found a sure-fired way to reduce the cost of dealing with violent sex offenders. Rather than spend scarce funds holding them in psychiatric hospitals, he proposes a simple and more elegant solution:...

The law's senseless cruelty was on display again last week in a Bridgeport federal courtroom.  No matter how many times I see a person ground to dust by the impersonal imperatives of rules applied without reason, I still am outraged by each new life undone. Behold this new sorrow:
J.M. is a...