Defending People

the tao of criminal-defense trial lawyering

From Frying Pan to Fire?

| February 2, 2012

What I did does not remotely approach the level of what I would consider an investigation. It was a cursory review of information that exists in the public domain. Any 14 year old with a smart-phone could access more information than I did. Ultimately, we learned more from Mark Bennett’s blog post than I discovered [...]

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Sadistic Harris County Jailers. And the Streisand Effect.

| February 1, 2012

It started with a couple of sentences on Houston criminal-defense firm Stradley Chernoff & Alford’s website: The jail personnel, especially in Harris County, seem to take a perverse pleasure in making the jail visit as unpleasant as possible. Their actions sometimes border on the sadistic, and the client who is finally released on bail, fatigued, [...]

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On U.S. v. Fricosu and Word Magic

| January 27, 2012

To begin with, Judge Blackburn did not order Fricosu to decrypt her hard drive. Why not? The obvious answer: because the government didn’t ask him to. What did the government ask him to do? It asked him to order Ms. Fricosu “to produce the unencrypted contents of the computer.” (In fact, the government asked for a [...]

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The Uncashed Check

| January 16, 2012

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Unpublished Comments

| January 14, 2012

“Blake Jamerson” (IP 75.148.128.34) writes in response to Andy Nolen: Total Fraud?: Mr. Nolen is a wonderful attorney. Not only does he know the law but lives by the law. He helped my family and I with some valuable insight on my brother’s case. He returned all my calls and would call me if he was [...]

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Joseph Rakofsky in the Happysphere

| January 13, 2012

In the last couple of weeks we learned that two more of the Rakofsky v. Internet defendants had settled with Rakofsky—not with money, apparently, but by abasing themselves, their codefendants, and the First Amendment. LisaLori Palmieri, who on 6 April 2011 wrote a dreadful piece of blatant marketing dreck (archive.org, via comments here) about Rakofsky's [...]

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Harris County Grand Jury News Parts One and Two

| January 7, 2012

One: Murray Newman reports that Pat Lykos has been subpoenaed to testify before the 185th Grand Jury. My guess is that it’s unprecedented for a Texas grand jury to subpoena a sitting District Attorney. Getting subpoenaed is bad. Taking the Fifth would be political suicide. Others might take the Fifth as an obstruction or delay [...]

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A Brief Political Thought

| January 7, 2012

Once I decide who the best candidate for Harris County District Attorney is, I’m not going to endorse him or her publicly, because I think my endorsement might have a negative effect. By the same token, the best endorsement Mike Anderson has received so far, to me, is Harris County Republican Party Chairman Jared Woodfill’s [...]

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Dave Boyle, 1948-2011

| January 1, 2012

“Fearless, relentless, and righteous.” That’s how the Chicago Sun-Times described my friend Dave Boyle in his obituary. Dave got to Vietnam just in time for the Tet Offensive in 1968. He didn’t talk much about his time in Vietnam, but he always planned to go back some day and tour the country in peacetime by [...]

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So You’ve Been Disappeared

| January 1, 2012

© 2011 Ruben Bollin @rubenbolling

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