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Parallel Construction: the government lies

[Update: Oh, look. There's more. "NSA handing over non-terror intelligence.] Reuters reports this morning that a government agency is using secret tactics to arrest Americans and then fabricating just...

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Billy Slagle and the tragedy of death

Billy Slagle, when all is said and done, will cut the most tragic figure. His story is ripe for a Shakespearean tragedy 1 or at the very least a documentary with a most somber soundtrack. Consider the...

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CT: New rule for jurors and media

New Rule for Jurors: Don’t listen to media coverage about the case you’re serving on and if you do, let a judge know. Oh? That’s not so new, you say? Well, welcome to CT, where yesterday is 1950 and...

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An exercise in minimalism

This post is meant for my entertainment purposes only. You can safely ignore it. I ran across this piece in something called ‘In These Times’. It’s about the “illusion of juror sophistication”. So...

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The problem with the justice system (in a nutshell)

While doing an updated analysis of this post, I came across this “concurrence” [PDF] by the Chief Justice of the CT Supreme Court that perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong with our “justice”...

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It’s criminal!: An (updated) analysis of CT Supreme Ct opinions

not an actual judge1The last time I did this superficial analysis2 was three years ago. Let’s see what the Court has been up to since then, shall we? First, some ground rules: I may have missed one or...

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Discombobulation roundup

You must’ve heard by now about the Stop and Frisk decision and about President Obama’s press conference about something to do with reading your uncle’s spam emails to you. As you can see, there’s a...

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Off-Topic: A bleg

A fellow public defender wrote to me, asking if I could post his bleg. He, in memory and honor of all that is good, is doing a “century”: a 100 mile bike ride to raise money for cancer research and...

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Freed and fired: how one woman put justice over her job

Albeit a few weeks old, this story out of Jackson County is a truly bizarre tale of modern day American Justice and the confluence of a strong desire to adhere to rigid bureaucratic rules and the...

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Things that are also good at stopping crime/terrorism

Stopping crime and/or terrorism is a noble, if unattainable goal. So it is with that in mind that the governments of various countries (most pertinently to this snarky post, the U.S. and now the U.K.)...

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Clarifying the problems with mandatory-minimums: why it’s okay to let them go

Over the weekend, Susan Bigelow at CT News Junkie had a fantastic op-ed piece arguing that Connecticut should follow AG Holder’s lead1 and revisit its use of mandatory minimum sentences. Susan writes:...

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Playing games

The internet is a series of tubes, about….this big1.Isn’t it just so darling that these befuddled old justices get to pretend that its still the Bronze Age? It’s so adorable that they decide cases...

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Sex offender social media ban unconstitutional

In yet another part of the country, an appellate court has ruled that a law banning sex offenders from accessing and using social networking sites violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees....

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Content

A series of must read posts today, first by Greenfield and then by Gamso on the agony of defeat and what makes us get up every morning, to do it all over again. I echoed these feelings a few years ago...

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You know it’s true

Reprinted with permission from the inimitable SMBC:

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Blech-er: confronting the venomous

Odious people tend to up the ante the most when they’re schilling something: like NY Law Professor Robert Blecker1, who’s got a book out about the death penalty. So naturally he takes to the beatified...

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Disentitling your rights

In doing the math for this post on the rate of success in the CT Supreme Court, I ran across this opinion, again by the Chief Justice, in the matter of State v. William Brabham [PDF]. It’s one of those...

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The playing field is uneven

As written before, one of the greatest lies sold to the American public was Brady v. Maryland: that the prosecution has an affirmative burden to turn over exculpatory material. The problem, of course,...

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City wants defense lawyer to pay for wrongful imprisonment

You’re almost 18 right? No? 16? Well, let’s just pretend you said 17. Now smile for the camera while we destroy your rights1.The lawyer for the city of Worcester acknowledges up front that his legal...

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Judging evil: what if pedophilia is an “orientation”?

Almost 4 years ago, I wrote this post pondering whether pedophiles have free will. In that post I said: there is a very interesting question here. If the science does prove at some point down the road...

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