Mark Bennett | June 12, 2013
Thomas Friedman is a boob. I worry about [another 9/11] even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to […]
Mark Bennett | June 7, 2013
From MySanAntonio.com: A Bexar County assistant district attorney has been fired following an incident in which she was mentioned in a friend’s driving while intoxicated arrest report for advising him not to submit to a breath test. She’s also accused of badging the arresting officer. And “P then told (him) to take a personal recognizance […]
Mark Bennett | May 29, 2013
Chris Green, chosen to be a juror in a non-death capital murder case in the 338th District Court of Harris County, Texas, googled “capital murder” before opening statements began, and didn’t like what he found. He decided that there was a “very real danger of retribution” if the jury convicted Amezquita of capital murder and […]
Mark Bennett | May 27, 2013
Here’s baby lawyer Andrew DeLuca’s pitch: It is these people that have grown tired of your esoteric legal posts, that we as attorneys represent. How do you represent someone effectively when you can not connect with them? The type of perspective that is only learned by life experience or lifetimes of experience and allows us […]
Mark Bennett | May 25, 2013
(tl;dr version: Texas prosecutors think that only they know justice; they want to take power out of the hands of the community; they intend to pass an unconstitutional law and apply it unconstitutionally ex post facto to do so; and they don’t care what lies must be told to get it done.) Texas’s capital-murder sentencing scheme provides […]
Mark Bennett | May 23, 2013
Alan Dershowitz says that Lois Lerner can be held in contempt for taking the Fifth in response to questions asked by Congress after making prefatory comments about the same subject matter: “You can’t simply make statements about a subject and then plead the Fifth in response to questions about the very same subject,” the renowned […]
Mark Bennett | May 14, 2013
A recent Gallup poll names the Houston, Sugar Land, and Baytown region among the least safe U.S. metro areas, according to resident confidence in the safety of where they live. Only 63 percent of those polled in the Houston area responded that they felt safe walking alone at night in the area they reside. * * * * * Compare […]
Mark Bennett | May 12, 2013
When I got a copy of Mark Geragos and Pat Harris’s Mistrial: An Inside Look at How the Criminal Justice System Works … and Sometimes Doesn’t in the mail, I was primed to be either outraged or bored. I’ve expressed my view of L.A. legal culture and lawyers who rep celebrities qua celebrities before and clients who hire […]
Mark Bennett | May 9, 2013
One of the few great virtues of American criminal justice is that it is committed in the light of day. Courts are open to the public, and generally—not always; anonymous juries are becoming more common, which ironically means that the terrorists have won—the accused gets to know who is judging him. In any case, he […]
Mark Bennett | April 23, 2013
Read Scott Greenfield’s closing keynote address for Lawyernomics this week in Las Vegas. There’s a race to the bottom in lawyer online marketing—“ultra-competitive business landscape,”* as Lawyernomics huckster Avvo would have it—Lawyernomics is there to psych lawyers up for that race—using Yelp! Twitter! Google! Virgin America!**—and Greenfield will*** exhort Lawyernomics attendees to go out there and […]
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