Blog Posts

Derrick Todd Dunn can't catch a break, and the good people of Georgia will make sure he never does.
Dunn was convicted of statutory rape in 1996. In other words, he had sexual contact with a person deemed unable to give consent. This can mean any number of things. Did he make love to the girl...

Derrick Todd Dunn can't catch a break, and the good people of Georgia will make sure he never does.
Dunn was convicted of statutory rape in 1996. In other words, he had sexual contact with a person deemed unable to give consent. This can mean any number of things. Did he make love to the girl...

When common sense fails, claim some variant of exceptionalism. That's what Kenton Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Sanders in Ohio has done. You see, he wanted to convict Nicole Howell, a teacher in her mid-twenties, of first degree sexual assault. He wanted her in prison. He wanted her registered...

When common sense fails, claim some variant of exceptionalism. That's what Kenton Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Sanders in Ohio has done. You see, he wanted to convict Nicole Howell, a teacher in her mid-twenties, of first degree sexual assault. He wanted her in prison. He wanted her registered...

Matthew Boutilier was sentenced to 27 years in prison last week by a Hartford, Connecticut judge. He was sentenced for shooting a woman in the midst of a domestic dispute. She survived the shooting; he shot another woman in the course of the fracas. She died. A jury could not decide whether the...

"The implied purpose of the sex offender registration act, public safety, is not served by requiring an otherwise law-abiding adult to be forever branded as a sex offender because of a juvenile transgression involving consensual sex during a Romeo and Juliet relationship."
Finally, some words...

I've been in trial in a murder case for the past few weeks. Because we are in Connecticut, picking the jury inevitably lasts longer than presentation of evidence. It took eight days to pick jurors: under state law, we question each potential juror outside the presence of the others. We needed 12...

The anonymous comments on this blog raise interesting questions: Who is sending them? What agenda is being served in each instance? I often don't comment on anonymous posts. Why bother? But one did catch my eye today.
A writer going by the name "John" raised an interesting point about former...

Hugh Keefe has a gift for superlatives. As one of the deans of Connecticut’s defense bar, he has earned the right to make pronouncements as he tap dances through his twilight years. He may not yet have made the cover of Super Lawyers magazine, but he grabs as many front pages of the daily...

I read an interesting essay on judging the other day. The author noted that the image of a federal trial judge sitting dispassionately at trial calling balls and strikes should be supplanted by a new image: the manager, sitting by his or her computer checking out case reports and researching case...