Blog Posts

Delay is often the best friend of a criminal defense lawyer: witnesses move away, their recollections fail, the state loses evidence. Things really do go bump in the night. Criminal cases, unlike wine, rarely get better with age. So I should be in favor of delay, right?
As a tactical...

"There is no such thing as justice – in or out of court." The words are Clarence Darrow’s. The same Clarence Darrow who once said:"Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom. Justice is what comes out of a courtroom."
These are decidedly antinomian...

I was in New Haven just as day broke. Much to my surprise, there were few media wagons in front of the courthouse on Church Street. Only one ghastly looking antenna reached into the gray morning sky. All at once it struck me: death is now passe.

It was opening day of jury selection in...

One could be forgiven for believing that the walls wept in the West Hartford, Connecticut, home of former endocrinologist Dr. George Reardon. The reason for those tears will soon be on public display in a lawsuit filed by one of the nearly 150 plaintiffs against the St. Francis Hospital and Medical...

Another lost weekend is behind me. It was spent fussing over a manuscript, reading the same words for the umpteenth time, trying to force the garbage out of my prose, and hoping to catch errors before they see the light of day in the form of a book. It strikes me now, and with fury, that there is a...

Call someone a victim, and they are at once framed in a sympathetic light. Bad things happen to victims, we are drawn to them, wanting to help them in any way we can. It is horrible to be a victim.
We don’t feel the same way about accusers. These folks are suspect. They point a...

Everyone plea bargains in the criminal courts; sometimes the bargaining resolves a case. It is part of the process. But not all parties approach the bargaining process as equals. Indeed, one party is never present at all. I learned that lesson again today in a case that was set for trial, but ended...

I understand that times are hard for lawyers statewide. Receipts are down, the public defender’s offices of the state are swamped, and judges are concerned lest the judicial system be capsized by a tsunami of pro se litigants. We aren’t immune from the ebbs and lows of the business...

"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...

If you cannot imagine enjoying, of even finding wise counsel, in a book recommending a return to something like polytheism, you are not alone. I have difficulty enough contending with the lingering specter of monotheism: one god, or, more precisely, the loss of any sense of one God, is heartache...