Mark Bennett | April 23, 2008
The more I think about it, the more inclined I am to side with Adam Reposa. From the April 17, 2008 Austin American-Statesman article about The Reposa Affair (H/T Bad Court Thingy for calling my attention to the highlighted bit that I missed): Saying that Austin defense lawyer Adam Reposa tarnished the dignity of the [...]
Category: dignity, Uncategorized |
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Mark Bennett | April 23, 2008
From the letters to the April 14, 2008 Houston Chronicle: Justice here isn’t partisan I write in response to the letter written by Dana Lejune that was published in the Chronicle Thursday. (Please see “The way to get new judges.”) I am particularly disturbed at the characterization that justice in our county is dispensed with [...]
Category: judges, politics |
3 Comments »
Tags: judges, politics
Mark Bennett | April 22, 2008
Austin criminal-defense lawyer Keith Lauerman, on his sparse blog, gives his take on the winners and losers of last week’s contempt hearing in which Adam Reposa got 90 days in jail for making masturbatory gestures toward a judge. Keith, who was there, explains how the County Attorney’s Office, Mr. Reposa, and the Austin Bar were [...]
Category: ACDLA, Austin, HCCLA, The Reposa Affair |
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Mark Bennett | April 22, 2008
The title of this post is, according to Terry MacCarthy (buy the cross-examination CDs!), the criminal-defense lawyer’s credo. I had always thought of it as descriptive — the way we are — rather than prescriptive — the way we should be. We should be prepared, shouldn’t we? Yes and no. There are things we can [...]
Category: listening, mindfulness, Terry MacCarthy, voir dire |
5 Comments »
Tags: voir dire
Mark Bennett | April 21, 2008
Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Washington Post article by Rick Weiss on the use of DNA evidence in court for reasons other than identification: . . . [W]hat of the murderers, rapists and other violent criminals who fall outside those narrow bounds? Can some, at least, blame their behavior on their genes? Studies have shown [...]
Category: determinism, DNA, Uncategorized |
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Mark Bennett | April 19, 2008
The criminal bar — defense and prosecution — are a big dysfunctional family. We go at each other hammer-and-tongs in court, but when one of us is wounded or sick, the rest of us usually pitch in to help. This weekend the family lost one of its own: a defense lawyer whose significant other was [...]
Category: Uncategorized |
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Mark Bennett | April 18, 2008
Did they go to the Lykos Flight Attendant Academy?
Category: Lykos, Uncategorized |
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Mark Bennett | April 18, 2008
When Gale Ladehoff, principal of the Clear Horizons Early College High School in the Clear Creek Independent School District (and Official Woman), assigned a student to Saturday school because of excessive absences, she may not have known that the absences were due to a medical condition. She may not have known that this unwarranted discipline [...]
Category: petty tyranny, Uncategorized |
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Mark Bennett | April 17, 2008
I still haven’t gotten to the inevitably brutal Problem of the Working Class post (using the words or phrases “pull yourself up by the bootstraps”; “economic expansion in the service sector”; “a symbolic border wall is the best solution”; “I agree wholeheartedly with Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan”; robber barons; the productivity wedge; debt; Scandanavia; [...]
Category: improv, Uncategorized |
3 Comments »
Tags: improv
Mark Bennett | April 17, 2008
HCCLA is putting on six hours of free ethics CLE — that’s two years’ worth — tomorrow from 9 to 2* in the lawyers’ ready room on the 7th floor of the Harris County criminal courthouse. I’ll be speaking in the coveted “last speaker on Friday afternoon, long after everyone else has gone home” slot [...]
Category: CLE, ethics, HCCLA |
1 Comment »
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