Blog Posts

A friend recommended several films as classics about trial, so my wife and watched one of them over the weekend, Otto Preminger's, Anatomy of a Murder. The film won seven Academy Awards in 1959, and is based on the book by Robert Traver. (You can get a used copy of the book on Amazon.)
I find...

Was anyone really surprised that 15-year-old Omar Khadr was lied to and threatened with what amounts to sadistic torture by U.S. interrogators? Our courts condone police lying. Police departments tolerate it. Officers do it all the time, and then lie about doing it. Only defendants are held...

A geriatric army marched on Washington, D.C. today and tried to appropriate language long since deprived of its historic force: Glenn Beck is no freedom rider. The civil rights of the aggrieved white upper middle class don't carry the blood stain of centuries of slavery. That anyone would think the...

On Monday, I'll start jury selection in a murder case I tried for the first time last September. The jury could not agree unanimously on whether my client was justified in shooting two women who rushed at him in his kitchen. So we'll do it all over again. As is so often the case in Connecticut, I...

When I heard the news some part of me stopped cold. A former client's sister called late yesterday. She had horrible news. Her brother, Tony, was murdered. Would I please return her call? She needed to talk. I heard the message this morning. Getting to court suddenly seemed less important than...

The law of supply and demand influences almost everything, including legal services. There is only so much chaos to go around. In a bad economy, few clients can afford the legal services they need. Lawyers straining to makes end meet may resort to sharp practices to gain competitive advantage....

Perhaps the most impressive lawyer I ever met no longer appears in court. But that does not stop me from seeking his advice from time to time. Remarkably, F. Lee Bailey is also a man of tremendous generosity. So I spent the afternoon with him yesterday talking about the law and life.
Talking...

One of the hardest things about being married to a woman far smarter than I am is that I never really get to enjoy a movie: We'll be sitting there watching the plot unfold. About the time I sense that there is an issue to resolve, my wife has already figured it out and solved it. It happened last...

We've come a long, long way from the era of the founding in the United States. Federal grand juries, which were once a means of protecting people from the infamy attendant to being investigated for a crime, are now the secret tool of prosecutors free to rummage with subpoenas through virtually...

Lee Stonum called me on a point that is worth pondering in a comment yesterday about my post wondering whether good lawyers can learn from good doctors. The premise of that piece was an analogy between cancer and a criminal charge: In both cases, professionals help those dependent upon them to...