Blog Posts

It is not uncommon in the practice of criminal law to counsel a client unable to make a choice. The alternatives are frequently too bleak. Regardless of whether your client has committed the act that results in prosecution, what's passed is past: Should the client plead guilty to a fifteen year...

I often marvel than I escaped Detroit and am living now in tranquil Connecticut. Life was scary in the Motor City. I am happy to have outrun parts of my past,
But not everyone I know has been so lucky. I have friends who didn't make it. I have a friend or two doing serious time for one thing or...

Getting into a criminal court is very easy for defendants. Look at someone funny, and get arrested for breach of the peace: lawmen will strip you down, cuff you, and shuffle you in through the back door. But suppose you are a lawyer, a juror or a loved on coming to view the proceedings? In that...

There is a season for everything, and this is the season of plenty. We are carrying armloads and baskets of produce from our garden and freezing enough to feed a small army, well, actually my wife and I, for a good time to come. Indeed, this is the first year I have succeeded in getting pumpkins...

I am a come-and-go member of the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. I say come and go because I from time to time quit in a huff about one thing or another. Just now, I am on the cusp of taking my dues elsewhere. But first, I would like some answers from the CCDLA executive...

A friend and I both began jury selection this past Monday. His case was in Texas; mine is in Connecticut. By Friday, he'd not only picked the jury, but had obtained an acquittal. (Congratulations to Mark Bennett.) By week's end in Connecticut, we were a little more than half-way through the process...

Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute sends me an email from time to time alerting me to a piece his think tank has published. I almost always find the pieces interesting, and I am grateful to Tim for thinking of me. Yesterday, when a piece arrived regarding indigent defense, I didn't open it right away....

There was quiet rumbling in the office of the United States Attorney when the new regime seized power. “Beware the Southern District,” some folks whispered; “lawyers feed on their own in Manhattan.” There is an ambitious new kid on the block. David Fein, Connecticut’s...

I have my doubts about whether Steven Hayes can get a fair trial in New Haven, Connecticut. He stands accused, after all, of the horrifying rape and murder of a physician's family in the affluent bedroom community of Cheshire, located just north of the Elm City. He and a co-defendant were caught...

If you have ever tried to get the personal address of an FBI agent in an ongoing criminal case, you know what futility means. This sort of information is kept confidential. It is personal, off limits, and even asking for the addresses will yield a storm of consternation. I used to accept that as...