Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | July 27, 2007
Thanks to Grits for Breakfast for calling my attention to this Houston Chronicle article about former Harris County District Attorney Johnny Holmes (Scott Henson calls it a “puff piece” and a “hagiography”). In the article Houston criminal-defense lawyer George “Mac” Secrest gave Holmes a compliment, as much a shot at other elected DAs as praise [...]
Mark Bennett | July 27, 2007
The day before yesterday evening I was out with my family when the cell phone rang. A man called because his wife had been arrested that evening for DWI in Harris County. I could tell immediately that he was frantic. I calmed him down, reassured him, and explained how to get her bonded out of [...]
Mark Bennett | July 27, 2007
Houston Chronicle reporter Mary Flood has a blog entitled “Legal Trade: A blog about lawyering” (is “to lawyer” a verb anywhere but inTexas?); today’s post is about lawyers’ salaries in Texas. (Thanks to Luke Gilman for the heads-up.) The median salary for all Texas lawyers is $113,500. The post links to a story in today’s [...]
Mark Bennett | July 26, 2007
Yesterday we attended a pretrial conference on a 19-defendant federal cocaine conspiracy case. Such cases are few and far between in Houston nowadays; the 15 lawyers in the room were in high spirits. When we were making our appearances on the record, the appointed lawyer for one defendant announced that he was asking to withdraw [...]
Mark Bennett | July 26, 2007
A very short list of must-read books for the budding criminal-defense lawyer (just those that pop into my head right now) “To Kill a Mockingbird” (Harper Lee) “Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae” (Steven Pressfield) “Wilkes: His Life and Crimes” (Winston Schoonover [Charles Sevilla]) “The First Rumpole Omnibus (Rumpole)” (John [...]
Mark Bennett | July 25, 2007
Libertarian ex-prosecutor and anti-drugwar mouthpiece Robert Guest writes about Mothers Against Drunk Driving stealing our tax dollars. It seems that the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency has given MADD $400,000 to watch DWI court proceedings in New Mexico. Here’s New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s press release about the “contract.” In part: The court monitoring project [...]
Mark Bennett | July 25, 2007
I wrote here about the new Texas law permitting prosecutors to carry guns to court. An English magistrate picked up on the story here: The idea of knowingly allowing weapons to be taken into court is stupid enough; but by prosecutors? Most of the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] I deal with are people I would [...]
Mark Bennett | July 25, 2007
The first of Adam Levin’s questions that I’ll tackle is, “What practical advice do you have for maintaining boundaries in your life?” As a criminal-defense lawyer who has gone from practicing out of an “executive suite” straight out of law school, to a series of fancy offices downtown, to an office in my house (an [...]
Mark Bennett | July 25, 2007
I wrote back in April about Advice to a Young Criminal Trial Lawyer. Yesterday I got an email from Adam Levin of the Southern Criminal Law and Justice blog, asking for answers to specific questions that new criminal-defense lawyers might have. (Adam sent the email to nine other criminal defense bloggers as well; Jon Katz [...]
Mark Bennett | July 24, 2007
“How many cases have you won?” I hate the question, because for the answer to mean anything, the person asking and the person answering have to mean the same thing by “won,” and that can rarely be ensured. If my client is acquitted, that’s a “win,” right? In most cases it would be. But what [...]
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