Love of justice

This post is some­thing I have been think­ing on for a while, but Laura McWilliams prompted me to post it with her Love of the Law, part 2 post.

I went into law school with a gut feel­ing that I could never defend crim­i­nals, and that if I went into Crim­i­nal Law it would be as a prosecutor.

Then I was intro­duced, through the eyes of cases skimmed dur­ing class and through the per­spec­tive of the Crim­i­nal Defense attor­neys I “met” through twit­ter, to the Crim­i­nal Injus­tice sys­tem of our country.

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Published on 07/02/2010 7:30 am.
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Hank Skinner

I sub­mit­ted my request at http://www.governor.state.tx. us/contact/

I am weigh­ing in on the impend­ing Hank Skin­ner exe­cu­tion. I believe it would be a shame to allow this to go for­ward for two main rea­sons.
The first rea­son is one of jus­tice. If there remains untested evi­dence that may excul­pate Mr. Skin­ner, not allow­ing it to be tested prior to his exe­cu­tion would cast a pall over all aspects of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.
The sec­ond rea­son is one sim­ply of pub­lic rela­tions. Allow­ing a 30 day reprieve, solely for the pur­pose of test­ing the DNA, seems like such a minute ges­ture to com­bat the seri­ous pub­lic­ity issue that this has generated.

Please make the right choice, and help guide any oth­ers nec­es­sary in mak­ing that choice.

Moshe Glick­man

Published on 03/24/2010 9:46 am.
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Realities of Criminal Defense — Updated

UPDATE
Please take a moment and read Scott’s and Rick’s posts. I severely abridged their posts to the point of ruin­ing their mean­ings, and I apol­o­gize about that.
This post has been mod­i­fied in response to Rick’s com­ment below.

Yes­ter­day brought another inter­est­ing post from Scott Greenfield’s Sim­ple Jus­tice. He had been made aware of a blog by a new law school grad­u­ate with hopes of enter­ing the world of crim­i­nal defense. The author mono­logued about the moral dilemma a defense attor­ney has when rep­re­sent­ing a “guilty-as-charged” client. Her ulti­mate answer to it was that a defense attor­ney has a duty to tell her client’s story in order to achieve a fair outcome.

Scott, lodged in a les­son about the dan­gers of blog­ging (Loose blog posts Sink egos, or some­thing of the sort), explained that there is no moral dilemma. A defense attor­ney is there to beat the pros­e­cu­tion and win free­dom for his client. It is, after all, an adver­sar­ial sys­tem. (Dis­claimer: This is my sum­mary. Read his com­ment.)

That was yes­ter­day.
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Published on 11/23/2009 9:16 am.
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Just what Maryland needs.

This arti­cle in the Washig­ton Post (h/t @marylandmoment) describes how the Mary­land House of Del­e­gates have passed a bill to allow Mary­lan­ders to cre­ate trusts for their pets.

This is truly a ground­break­ing piece of leg­is­la­tion; pre­cisely what Mary­land needs. Crime? Hous­ing slump? Unem­ploy­ment? Reces­sion? Death penalty? No, let’s focus our efforts on an impor­tant topic — pet trusts. I had dogs grow­ing up, and they were part of the fam­ily; I shed tears when they died. There was no bur­ial or memo­r­ial ser­vice for them.

Do peo­ple need trust accounts for their pets? Maybe — accord­ing to the arti­cle, 39 other states already allow their cit­i­zens to cre­ate trusts for their pets. How­ever, when our state Sen­ate decides to put the issue of repeal­ing the death penalty to rest for this ses­sion by not repeal­ing the death penalty, why is our leg­is­la­tion spend­ing the time on pet trust funds?

Published on 03/04/2009 10:47 am.
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Beyond a reasonable doubt…

I meant to write this post about a week or two ago.

Mary­land just heard from its com­mit­tee to inves­ti­gate the abo­li­tion of the death penalty and the committee’s con­clu­sion is that the argu­ments are stacked against keep­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment around.  (I first dis­cov­ered this via Gideon’s blog)

The thing I find fas­ci­nat­ing and inex­plic­a­ble is that the pro­po­nents of the death penalty con­tinue to uti­lize the same argu­ments in their efforts to evan­ge­lize. The Anti-Capitalists… wait, let’s make that the Anti-Capital-Punishmentists (doesn’t sound as snazzy, but it won’t get me an FBI dossier) argue that there remains race bias in cap­i­tal cases, that cap­i­tal cases are arbi­trar­ily decided, that the human ele­ment defeats the pos­si­bil­ity of a truly fair trial, and that the death penalty fails to deter future criminals.

The Capital-Punishmentists (for uniformity’s sake) argue “nuh-uh!”. Scan­ning the com­ments in Gideon’s arti­cle show sim­i­lar argu­ments that I’ve heard all to often — the sta­tis­tics aren’t accu­rate. The stud­ies don’t defin­i­tively show that. The issues don’t “sub­stan­tially” affect the deter­mi­na­tion. I would under­stand if the argu­ments were reversed; if the pro­po­nents argued sta­tis­tics and stud­ies and the oppo­nents claimed that the stud­ies aren’t con­clu­sive. After all, this is a ques­tion of whether we put some­one to death — you’d want to be sure that the stud­ies are reli­able and determinative.

But to attempt to make a case for the death penalty by say­ing that the case against it isn’t strong enough makes no sense to me.

Published on 12/30/2008 12:18 pm.
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