Blog Posts

I’ve never faced the prospect of going to prison. I’ve not sat with a lawyer and been offered a plea deal: Either take the five years the state is offering or go to trial. If you lose trial, you face decades in prison. I’ve never heard my lawyer say that the state’s case is...

A pre-dawn telephone call usually means one thing: federal agents have just come storm-trooping through someone’s home, making an arrest before the Sun comes up. A rattled mother, lover or spouse is usually making the call. They are terrified and upset. What happens next? they want to...

We’ve survived the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The media reports no shocking new acts of terror. We’ve waved flags, declared both the victims of the attack and those victimized by their response to the catastrophe heros. We’ve stood by while those who lost so much in the wake of...

If you don’t think race and class matter in policing, consider the case of Denise Nappier in Hartford, Connecticut. She was stopped and detained by the police the other night for driving a nice car in a housing project. She is a woman of color. The cops claimed that she could not produce...

Call me distracted, but when a note appeared on my computer screen from the editor of this newspaper reminding me that the 9/11 anniversary approached, it caught me by surprise. Was I intending to write about the tenth anniversary of the attack? For a week, I’ve been trying to muster some...

Evidence is set to begin on September 19 in the trial of Joshua Komisarjevsky, the second of the two men accused of engaging in the brutal home invasion and slaughter of all but one member of the Petit family in Cheshire, Connecticut, in July 2007. The first trial ended in the conviction of Steven...

You wouldn’t lock up a person and punish them for being ill, would you? The very notion is obscene, an insult to our natural sense of justice and what is fair. Yet we lock up the mentally ill all the time in this country. One estimate puts at 350,000 the number of mentally ill men and women...

“Ever and ever have I been casting my line into the great unknown sea, and generally drawing it up with the hook as bare as when I threw it down; and still this in no way keeps me from dropping it in again and again, for surely sometime something will come along and bite. We are all fishers,...

The South terrifies me. It always has. It seems like a region steeped in suppressed violence. All is politeness by the light of day, but when the Sun sets I worry about the things unsaid. The South seems like a place where ghosts linger, awaiting the gloam to finish work left...

I operate on what I call the first-date rule when it comes to potential clients. It cost me a client the other day. I am blaming an unlikely matchmaker.
The first-date rule operates in the following manner: A client is referred to you. You meet the client, or speak with them on the...