» Entries tagged with "defending people"
Who’s The Fairest of Them All?
What makes a blog worth reading? What makes a blog worthy of an award? The ABA apparently knows, and last year I was fortunate to find myself in great company after being selected for the ABA Journal Blawg 100. From what I recall, I got the least votes in my category. Darn. This year, I was not surprised when I failed to make the cut. Oh well. Regardless, I was pleased to see some great criminal justice blogs in the line-up. Mark Bennett’s Defending People has had a serious impact on my approach to the practice of law. His writing, his approach to issues, and his posts about jury selection in particular have made me a better lawyer for having stumbled upon his … Read entire article »
Filed under: Marketing
The Bigger Problem
There’s something called a “BAT Van” in Texas. “BAT” stands for “Breath Alcohol Testing,” and the purpose of these vans, as you might guess, is to measure whether a driver is impaired try to detect a subject’s mouth alcohol using a potentially unreliable machine made by a largely unregulated and highly secretive company and then roughly correlate that result to a subject’s blood alcohol while largely ignoring the subject’s unique and highly variable metabolism in order to convict him or her not of necessarily being impaired, but of having too much of that thing the state has so imprecisely measured in his or her blood. Those vans are pretty prevalent here in Arizona too, though we’re switching to violent, forcible blood draws in many jurisdictions and don’t have nearly as … Read entire article »
Filed under: DUI
The Makings of a Great Tragedy
I once received very wise advice to take caution when writing about things close to home. I took it to heart. Years of being told “don’t shit where you eat” didn’t sink in, I guess, but that more subtle, specific advice did. Things far away aren’t so clear, however, so they may be a different story. Circumspection be damned? If I lived in Texas, I would have had a little more background when I read this post by Murray Newman. I was skeptical about what he perceived as a double standard even reading it without context, but that by itself didn’t seem worth a post on my part. When a prosecutor gets charged and defense lawyers don’t just rant about the presumption of innocence, I … Read entire article »
Filed under: DUI, Practice in General, Prosecutors
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