Blog Feed: The Criminal Lawyer

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Published on 2012-05-17 06:29:18

The call came, as they always do, at the last minute. “I’ve been charged with a crime, and I have to be in court in two days, and my lawyer isn’t doing anything, and I’m scared.” The caller came in to meet with me in person, as they always do when they’re legitimately scared and [...] > read more

More Reason to Increase Legal Profession’s Barriers to Entry

Published on 2012-04-19 10:33:41

When people complain that “there are too many lawyers,” what they really mean is that there are too many bad ones. There is always demand for good lawyers to deal with the intricacies of modern life. If anything, people need more good lawyers than ever before — smart, wise, honorable people to help navigate the [...] > read more

More on Brain Scans – Can They Tell Whether You’ll Get Off Lightly?

Published on 2012-04-03 12:31:23

With a hat tip to our Uncle Ralph, here’s a link to yet another fMRI study bearing on criminal law. Makiko Yamada and colleagues have published in Nature Communications their study “Neural Circuits in the Brain that are Activated when Mitigating Criminal Sentences.” The researchers asked people to review the facts underlying 32 hypothetical murder [...] > read more

Better Criminal Lawyering through Smart Risk-Taking

Published on 2012-03-28 15:28:27

Judgment is the criminal lawyer’s stock-in-trade. The ability to assess the risks of a situation, and choose the better course of action, is the value that lawyers bring to the criminal justice system. It doesn’t matter if they’re defense attorneys negotiating a deal or fighting it out at trial, or if they’re prosecutors deciding whether [...] > read more

Not Ready for Prime Time: Brain-Scan Reliability in Question

Published on 2012-03-13 11:35:40

Almost from our first post, we’ve written here about developments in brain-scan technology and its applicability to criminal law (see here, here, here and here, for example). So needless to say, the past nine days have been of great interest, as the research behind neuroimaging’s claims has come into hot dispute. Now, just because our [...] > read more

Making Drug Enforcement Work

Published on 2012-03-02 07:50:03

Tomorrow’s issue of the Economist has a brief piece on some new drug policing in Virginia: “Cleaning Up the Hood: Focusing on drug markets rather than users means less crime.” The article is on DMI, or Drug-Market Intervention, a law-enforcement strategy that has been spreading around the country since it was first introduced in North [...] > read more

Is Open File Discovery a Cure for Brady Violations?

Published on 2012-02-28 07:45:26

Prompted by a tweet from Scott Greenfield this morning, we read a short editorial the New York Times did a couple of days ago, arguing that federal and state prosecutors should adopt open-file discovery policies, in order to limit Brady violations and promote justice. We’d missed it the first time around, because … well, because [...] > read more

Plugging Away

Published on 2012-02-07 18:22:14

In lieu of a regular blog post, I figured I’d leave a sample of the illustrated guide to crimlaw I’m doing on Tumblr (a link to the full series is over there on the right). Regular writing will resume shortly. Enjoy.     > read more

When Incarceration Shot Up and Crime Plummeted

Published on 2012-01-24 21:13:44

The January 30 issue of the New Yorker has an intriguing article by Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?” Perhaps we’ve grown a bit cynical, but we expected yet another inane media whine about increasing rates of imprisonment “despite” fewer crimes being committed. We were surprised to [...] > read more

Statistics and the Serial Killer

Published on 2012-01-16 13:42:50

Andrei Chikatilo was serial killer who murdered at least 56 young women and children starting in 1978 until his capture in 1990. The details are as bad as one might expect, and apparently the murders and mutilations were how he achieved sexual release. His killings seemed unpredictable to investigators at the time, and even in [...] > read more

Correct, but Wrong: SCOTUS on Unreliable Eyewitness Identification

Published on 2012-01-12 16:22:24

In this Information Age, it is hard to grasp sometimes that everybody does not know everything. And yet it is so. It is common knowledge, for example, that dinosaur fossils are the bones of creatures that lived scores of millions of years ago, that terrorist hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the [...] > read more

Still here

Published on 2012-01-11 17:01:18

We haven’t gone anywhere. Well, actually we did. We spent a couple of weeks visiting family for Christmas and New Year’s. And then took a week getting back on top of work. In the meantime, a dozen great post topics have come to mind only to be forgotten (or, if we happened to have a [...] > read more

Be Right Back

Published on 2011-12-21 08:02:02

Any SEO guru worth his fee will tell you that, once your blog gets some mention or award or whatnot, you need to pump out a lot of content right away. Otherwise, people who come to visit out of curiosity will stop coming back when they don’t see updates. And I have no reason to [...] > read more

Exceeding Their Authority: When Bureaucrats Create New Crimes, Justice Suffers

Published on 2011-12-14 19:58:05

One of our bugbears here at The Criminal Lawyer is the excessive number of federal crimes — particularly those that are created by regulators rather than by elected legislators. We’re not alone in this concern, and over the past several months we’ve noticed what can only be called a growing movement for reform. A particular [...] > read more

Worth Watching

Published on 2011-12-09 08:28:27

Harry Morgan died this week. When we were in grade school, we knew him as Col. Potter on M*A*S*H and as the Sheriff in “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” two characters that seemed to our young eyes to be the most “real” on either show. But of course he did a lot more than that. Plenty [...] > read more

So apparently we’ve got a Tumblr

Published on 2011-12-02 19:16:38

  So now we have a Tumblr. It was bound to happen, really. There are plenty of questions, issues and misconceptions about criminal law; we like explaining things; we like drawing things (poorly); people like learning stuff with pictures… So doing a webcomic sort of guide to criminal law just seemed natural. And making a [...] > read more

Thanks!

Published on 2011-12-01 15:48:04

The Criminal Lawyer made the ABA Journal Blawg 100 today, much to our surprise. We are quietly proud. Be sure to check out the list, there are a lot of excellent blogs there that might be new to you. And weren’t you just saying to yourself how you need some fresh stuff in your RSS [...] > read more