Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Constructing the plea mill

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Documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle cast new light on the ways Harris County judges systematically refused to grant personal bonds t...
Monday, February 26, 2018

God told me I couldn't bake you a cake

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Suffer (bring) the children to me. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those a...
4 comments:
Thursday, February 22, 2018

UPDATE: Governor commutes death sentence

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Less than an hour before Thomas Whitaker was scheduled to die, Gov. Greg Abbott commuted his sentence from death to life in prison. This fo...

Boobies are worse than school shootings

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On February 21, 2018, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to the state capitol in Tallahassee, Florida demanding act...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Execution Watch 2/22/2018

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Tomorrow the State of Texas intends to murder another person... THOMAS WHITAKER, 38. Mr. Whitaker was sentenced to death for conspiring w...
2 comments:
Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Checking the medicine cabinet

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From the Texas Tribune we have an accounting of the stockpile of drugs Texas has on hand for executions . What we don't have, thanks to ...
Monday, February 19, 2018

The Gun Show

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WNYC began producing a podcast entitled More Perfect  in 2016. It is an exploration into the Supreme Court. Last October they did an episo...
Saturday, February 17, 2018

Losing leverage

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The purpose of bail is to ensure that the accused appears in court to answer the charge against him and to ensure the safety of the communit...
4 comments:
Friday, February 16, 2018

It's a swing and a miss

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And it's strike two against Harris County in their efforts to maintain an unconstitutional and discriminatory bail policy in place. L...
Thursday, February 15, 2018

Robb Fickman is mad as hell...

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For those of you who aren't aware, the Harris County Criminal Courthouse suffered severe damage as a result of Hurricane Harvey. The bu...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 14, 2018

More fun with forensics

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You can change the name of the lab. You can give them fancy new wraps on their SUV's. You can move them to another building in downtown ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Of split-second decisions

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Whenever an unarmed person is shot and killed by police we hear the same old tropes about officers having to make split-second decisions. Gr...
Monday, February 12, 2018

Dumbfounded

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Possibly the dumbest tweet ever... . @TuckerCarlson : "For the first time in generations Americans have reason to believe that our in...
1 comment:
Friday, February 9, 2018

Tennessee sheriff gets off on killing

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Ordinarily, if you tell someone to shoot someone else - and they do - you're going to find yourself in hot water. But Sheriff Oddie Shou...
Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Fighting to keep innocent men behind bars

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Over in Kentucky we have the latest example of a prosecutor forgetting that seeking justice, not obtaining convictions, is his ethical duty....
1 comment:
Monday, February 5, 2018

A little something to listen to

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I stumbled across a new (at least to me) podcast the other day called Small Town Murder . Every episode focuses on a murder case in a small ...
Thursday, February 1, 2018

Execution Watch: 2/1/2018

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Tonight the State of Texas looks to take another life... JOHN BATTAGLIA. Mr. Battaglia has been rescheduled for execution after a jud...
3 comments:
Wednesday, January 31, 2018

More on the language we use

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Had a couple of interesting twitter exchanges this weekend with a couple of acquaintances that got me to thinking a bit. The first had to ...
1 comment:
Monday, January 29, 2018

Doing the right thing

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Well here's an interesting twist in Harris County's fight against bail reform - Michael Fields, the presiding judge in County Crimi...
Friday, January 26, 2018

Calls to lower the legal limit to .05

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In the latest step in the never-ending quest to criminalize everything, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine have cal...
Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Is Harris County deliberately undermining a federal court order?

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This past June an order from US District Judge Lee Rosenthal went into effect that drastically altered the way pretrial bonds are handled in...
1 comment:
Monday, January 22, 2018

The language we use

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I will never forget my English teacher from 7th grade. She drilled into our heads the evil that is the passive voice. If we wrote a sentence...
Friday, January 19, 2018

Can acting in a client's best interest violate the 14th Amendment?

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On Wednesday the US Supreme Court heard a case out of Louisiana that raised the question of whether or not a lawyer can tell a jury his clie...
3 comments:
Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Execution Watch: 1/18/2018

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Tomorrow night the State of Texas looks to kill again... ANTHONY SHORE. Condemned following his conviction in the murders of four fema...
3 comments:
Monday, January 15, 2018

Whitewashing MLK Day

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I got quite the chuckle when I saw a link to a Fox News story in my Twitter feed decrying the "media" for politicizing Martin Luth...