Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | June 30, 2010
(In lieu of the more complete trial journal that I should have been keeping for the last eight weekdays.) 0530: Get up. Prepare for trial. 0620: Breakfast, shower, shave, get dressed, etc. 0725: Leave for courthouse. 0800: Arrive in courtroom. Meditate. 0830: Trial begins. 0930: 1-hour break for court to handle court business. Small snack—half [...]
Mark Bennett | June 22, 2010
Some numbers, perhaps of interest to nobody but me: Panel average -0.15 Struck for cause average 0 Struck by defense average -0.02 Jurors sworn average -0.20 Struck by State average -0.69 Numbers are a measure of authoritarianism/egalitarianism based on scaled answers to eight questions, chosen unscientifically—according to how interesting they were to me. Lower numbers [...]
Mark Bennett | June 22, 2010
If you are a blogging lawyer, and you want to be read by other bloggers, know that being read by other bloggers includes being taken to task publicly when you write something dumb or silly or ill-considered or even just vapid. If you don't want to be read by other bloggers, if you are blogging [...]
Mark Bennett | June 19, 2010
I've been thinking more about University of Texas Medical Branch's practice of renting out mentally ill prison inmates for cops to practice their phlebotomy against, and it seems to me that UTMB, TDCJ's medical services provider, is missing out on several other great opportunities to make money on the backs of "consenting" (consent is easy [...]
Mark Bennett | June 18, 2010
I admit it: I was wrong. For a decade I've been encouraging young lawyers and soon-to-be lawyers to start their criminal defense practices right out of law school. With hard work, intelligence, and humility, I thought, they could do well without hurting anyone; the question, I thought, was not whether they would provide perfect representation, [...]
Mark Bennett | June 18, 2010
"UTMB’s Correctional Managed Care program has an agreement with Lone Star College involving its Law Enforcement Phlebotomy Program. The participating Houston police officers at the units were there as part of the Lone Star College course they were taking. Having blood drawn is part of the standard intake process at TDCJ and mentally ill offenders [...]
Mark Bennett | June 8, 2010
I suspect that there are tens of thousands in the U.S.: disaffected young men and women who like to see themselves as willing to kill for their beliefs, whatever those beliefs. Most of them don't hold beliefs including violent jihad. They believe, instead, that abortion is murder, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim, or [...]
Mark Bennett | June 6, 2010
Today's Houston Chronicle has an interview with Erica Rose, a Houston socialite who is going to law school (she's a 3L at my alma mater, University of Houston) to advance her career in reality TV. (I'll link to it when a link is available.) The last line of the article: Q: What's next for you? [...]
Mark Bennett | June 4, 2010
Apropos of today's earlier post about collaboration (and, ultimately, strategy) in federal drug cases: Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do. —Savielly Tartakover, chess grandmaster That, and many other criminal defense chess quotes here.
Mark Bennett | June 4, 2010
Texas criminal-defense lawyers of old could talk to their jury panels about the Bible, and safely assume that they were talking about a common cultural framework. Modern culture is electronic, and much more ephemeral. It's harder for a lawyer to find a cultural hook that catches most of the jury panel. Once upon a time [...]
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