Defending People

the tao of criminal-defense trial lawyering

What’s an Onlya?

| June 13, 2012

A cou­ple of peo­ple have asked me, “what’s an onlya”? An onlya is any per­son whom a group has a rea­son to mar­gin­al­ize: “he’s only a drug user,” “he’s only a kid,” “she’s only a judge.” Mem­bers of the group can treat the onlya worse than they would treat other group mem­bers. We’re all onlyas to […]

Share

Indiana Steps Away from the Brink

| June 12, 2012

About a year ago I wrote about the Indi­ana Supreme Court’s sua sponte rewrit­ing of Indiana’s self-defense statute to deprive peo­ple of the right to use force to defend them­selves against police offi­cers com­mit­ting crimes. Yes­ter­day Indi­ana Gov­er­nor Mitch Daniels signed into law Sen­ate Enrolled Act 1, which restored by statute that which the Indiana […]

Share

AND Porn, Please">Hate Speech AND Porn, Please

| June 12, 2012

This—a blog post on Legal Schnau­zer laud­ing Brett Kim­ber­lin for his law­fare against Aaron Worthing—is sim­ply stu­pid. Cheer­ing peo­ple for tak­ing advan­tage of an igno­rant (and pos­si­bly senile) judge to shut down the free expres­sion of peo­ple whose pol­i­tics you dis­agree with is nar­row­minded and short­sighted. Even if you think your adver­saries are more likely […]

Share

9 June 1954

| June 9, 2012

Joseph Welch lam­bastes Sen­a­tor Joseph McCarthy: “Lit­tle did I dream you could be so reck­less and so cruel…. your for­give­ness will have to come from some­one other than me.”

Share

Emmette Flynn, and Methodist Medical Center of Oak Ridge

| June 7, 2012

In Feb­ru­ary I wrote two posts about Dr. Emmette Flynn, the San Angelo, Texas sur­geon who per­formed a non­con­sen­sual (and med­ically unnec­es­sary, though med­ical neces­sity wouldn’t jus­tify a pro­ce­dure against the com­pe­tent client’s wishes) proc­toscopy on an arrestee at the behest of the police who brought the arrestee to the hos­pi­tal along with a search […]

Share

Why Do Criminal-Defense Lawyers Cuss?

| June 7, 2012

Because it makes it hurt less.

Share

Erratum

| June 6, 2012

I am informed by a usu­ally reli­able source that, con­trary to pop­u­lar per­cep­tion (and my impli­ca­tion here), count­ing scalps was not a big thing in the Holmes / Rosen­thal / Siegler DA’s Office. Wins and losses were not a big fac­tor. By con­trast, he says, pros­e­cu­tors in the Lykos DA’s Office are afraid to dismiss […]

Share

DHS">Screw the DHS

| June 5, 2012

(Thanks to the Elec­tronic Pri­vacy Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter; PDF from Wash­ing­ton State Uni­ver­sity, see the source PDF, h/t Hit & Run. We didn’t start the fire.) Assas­si­na­tion Attack Domes­tic secu­rity Drill Exer­cise Cops Law enforce­ment Author­i­ties Dis­as­ter assis­tance Dis­as­ter man­age­ment DNDO (Domes­tic Nuclear Detec­tion Office) National pre­pared­ness Mit­i­ga­tion Pre­ven­tion Response Recov­ery Dirty bomb Domes­tic nuclear detec­tion HAZMAT & Nuclear Haz­mat Nuclear Chem­i­cal spill Sus­pi­cious package/device Toxic National laboratory […]

Share

Ethics Redefined

| June 4, 2012

In clos­ing, do not con­fuse decep­tion with lying dur­ing court pro­ceed­ings, fal­si­fy­ing offi­cial doc­u­ments and evi­dence or lying dur­ing inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tions. No police admin­is­tra­tor would tol­er­ate this behav­ior which destroys an officer’s abil­ity to per­form their offi­cial duties in a moral, eth­i­cal and just man­ner. That’s what Day­tona Beach Police Chief Michael Chit­wood told the […]

Share