Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | August 29, 2010
Before I euthanized my account there, I had hundreds of “friends” on Facebook. Most of them I knew only slightly; some of them I didn’t even really like. Precious few of them were genuine friends. Someone (I wish I could find a link to give proper credit) coined the term “frends” to represent those online [...]
Mark Bennett | August 25, 2010
I’ve been on a tear about Hartley, R.D., et. al.’s Do you get what you pay for? Aside from their sloppy writing and questionable conclusions, the collaborators wrote a couple of things that really ticked me off. First, they consistently wrote about what happens to human beings in a criminal courthouse as “case processing,” as [...]
Mark Bennett | August 25, 2010
Those who are released on bail [I think Hartley and his colleagues mean "released on recognizance"] and represented by a private attorney are twice as [they got it right this time] likely to be incarcerated as those released on bail [again, "recognizance"] but being represented by the public defender. This is an interesting fact. Recall [...]
Mark Bennett | August 25, 2010
The data for this study are from Cook County (Chicago), Illinois, and are a random sample of 2850 offenders convicted of felonies in Cook County Circuit Court. Hartley, R.D., et. al., Do you get what you pay for? Type of counsel and its effect on criminal court outcomes, Journal of Criminal Justice (2010). I asked [...]
Mark Bennett | August 25, 2010
Here are some conclusions that can be drawn from Hartley’s data: In Cook County, Illinois, in 1993, convicted defendants were: 1.81 times as likely to have been released on their own recognizance if they were charged with a class 1 felony as if they were charged with a class X felony. 2.10 times as likely [...]
Mark Bennett | August 25, 2010
Various readers generously sent me copies of the Hartley article I mentioned here (Hartley, R.D., et. al., Do you get what you pay for? Type of counsel and its effect on criminal court outcomes, Journal of Criminal Justice (2010)), and I’m puzzling my way through it, giving myself a crash course in statistics on the [...]
Mark Bennett | August 25, 2010
Black defendants who retain a private attorney are almost two times more likely to have the primary charge reduced than black defendants who are represented by a public defender. That’s a quote, according to Miller-McCune, from a research paper by Richard D. Hartley. (Hartley wrote his doctoral dissertation at University of Nebraska on the same [...]
Mark Bennett | August 21, 2010
It took a little over a month. The Houston Police Department Chief’s Command issued a memo of questionable legality forbidding cops from talking to defense lawyers without permission. Some 60 HCCLA members, incited and led by former president Robb Fickman, descended upon Houston City Council to protest (video). And the Chief rescinded the suspect order. [...]
Mark Bennett | August 21, 2010
Divorce lawyer John Clinton, running for criminal court judge, seems to be saying that when he was a Houston police officer he “amassed years of trial experience.” (Full video here.) This could be true only in the sense in which a career criminal has amassed years of policing experience. Maybe Clinton spoke awkwardly, and meant [...]
Mark Bennett | August 18, 2010
Houston DUI lawyer Paul Kennedy, in Going for the Gut, calls to our attention this Boston Globe article by Drake Bennett about how disgust may shape our moral judgments. A few thoughts: First, one of the experiments discussed: In one study, [psychologist Jonathan Haidt] had some of his unfortunate test subjects respond to four vignettes [...]
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