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Public Defense

A Public Defender

Criminal law news from Connecticut and around the country.
By Gideon

Post Frequency: 10.1/day

Last Entry: March 31, 2011 at 12:17:35

Blawg Review #247

Posted on January 18, 2010
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Welcome to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day edition of Blawg Review. This is the third Blawg Review hosted by those of us in the public defense field (BR #91 and BR#143 being the others)...

Is the Attorney General statute unconstitutional?

Posted on January 17, 2010
photo credit: sokabs You’ve heard by now, I’m sure, of the ruckus surrounding Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz’s decision to run for Attorney General of CT instead of Governor and specifically the hubbub that followed compadre Ryan McKeen’s post asking if she met the qualifications of CGS 3-124 in order to be eligible for [...

A citizen?s arrest

Posted on January 16, 2010
As is the norm, as I was leaving work on Friday I got caught in a long meandering conversation with co-workers that ended with this question: “Is a citizen’s arrest legal in CT?” As is my wont, I was immediately contrarian and emphatically said “No!” As often happens in such situations, I was not even wrong...

Depends on what ?active? means

Posted on January 13, 2010
Is Susan Byse-Byzie-Bysiewicz legally qualified to be Attorney General? Maybe. It depends on what “active” means. (The other candidate, George Jepsen, seems to be qualified.)

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Monday Morning Jumpstart

Posted on January 11, 2010
photo credit: MercurySpace I think the weather needs a jumpstart. Someone wake me when the thermometer goes north of 50 degrees Fahrenheit. In the meantime, maybe these stories will get those neurons firing and generate some heat in you. A powerful piece in the NYTimes about a different approach to violations of probation and parole and [...

A conjoined criminal enterprise

Posted on January 10, 2010
nocaptionthistime If a conjoined twin commits a crime, does his counterpart get punished too? That’s the question posed to Slate’s Explainer and in classic lawyer fashion, the answer is: who the hell knows. At first blush, it would seem terribly unfair and unconstitutional: you punish the guilty and seek to avoid punishing the innocent...

Sunday stupidity: just watch edition

Posted on January 10, 2010
(The entire video is CGI. Remarkable.)

270 days to go

Posted on January 09, 2010
270...269...268... A dastardly business, this is. We are businessmen of the worst kind; our currency is not money, but the lives and freedom of others. And with experience and time comes a certain desensitization. I’ve written about this before: 5 years, 10 years, 20…the numbers roll into one another, without much thought...

CT: (not) so soft on cop assaults

Posted on January 08, 2010
Man, we live in such a namby-pamby sissy state. All our judges are liberal, defendants regularly walk out the door after committing multiple homicides which involve gouging the eyes out of little children and eating their entrails while singing songs of the devil and Hitler (too soon?)...

The objection?s on the other foot

Posted on January 08, 2010
An interesting and ironic-chuckle-inducing opinion from the Colorado Court of Appeals (via Volokh), where the trial court granted a mistrial in a criminal case. The defendant had been charged with assaulting his estranged wife and one of her friends, with threatening the wife, and with disturbing the peace...

The fruit of the poisonous confession

Posted on January 01, 2010
fruit of the poisono---oh nevermind We at this blog, and as a consequence you as an observant reader, have known for quite some time now that false confessions are an underrated scourge in the world of wrongful convictions. Some 15-20% of all exonerations have seen the original convictions brought about by these false confessions...

The absurd hero

Posted on December 31, 2009
Comparisons have been drawn, in recent days, between our condition and that of Milton’s Satan and Abdiel. Meaning has been sought to explain who we are and what makes us do what we do. It is a curious profession we have chosen; those of us who dedicate our lives to defending the freedom of others...

If you?re black and you smoke pot, get arrested

Posted on December 30, 2009
I'm not as think as you stoned I am (Title sung to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it…” What? It’s 11:00pm. Buzz off.) While much of the news media and indeed the blawgosphere has been preoccupied with the news that NYC isn’t really a big, bad and dangerous place, curious little attention has [...

10 things I learned this decade

Posted on December 30, 2009
Not being one to care about what others think and always wanting moar lists, I’m going to subject y’all to yet another. Here are ten things (in no random order) I learned this past decade. Some are law related, some are not related to anything at all...

Is a battle on sex offender registration brewing?

Posted on December 29, 2009
Silly sex offender registration laws have long been a bone that I’ve been itching to pick. If you asked me to list the ten worst decisions by SCOTUS in the last decade, Smith v. Doe and Dept’ of Public Safety v. Doe would make the top 5 of that list...

Preempting peremptories

Posted on December 29, 2009
As I’ve noted before, there are times when I’m staring at a story, thinking about writing a post, when a few days later I come across something else that ties in nicely with the first. I have now concluded this is because of my unusually high midi-chlorian count and the Force is speaking to me...

Shamelessly self-indulgent list

Posted on December 28, 2009
Everyone’s making a list. It’s the year-end list disease. A list for top crime stories, a list for top blog posts, a list for top lists (yes, they’re out there). So, not wanting to buck convention or anything and feeling the immense peer pressure, I am offering my own list...

A vex at your door: revisiting FL?s stand your ground law

Posted on December 28, 2009
Back in 2005, when this blog was in its infancy, I wrote a few posts about a new FL law which removed the duty to retreat before employing deadly force. The law, in essence, expanded the concept of the “castle doctrine” to, well, everywhere: (3)� A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and [...

It?s time to wake up (updated)

Posted on December 27, 2009
It’s a different world today than it was in the ’80s, ’90s and even the early whats. The economy may or may not be recovering, but one thing is for sure: budget deficits are spiraling out of control. Crime may be down, but the workload of the criminal justice system is up...

High-risk sex offenders still have nowhere to go

Posted on December 22, 2009
Two years ago (and how time flies!) I wrote about the lack of any real residential inpatient options for high risk sex offenders in Connecticut. As of today, nothing has changed. The man whose case prompted the prior post is set to be released from custody on Christmas eve and – surprise, surprise! – he’s [...

Junk ?science? and missing evidence

Posted on December 21, 2009
Add a gallon of destroyed evidence to a tubful of junk science and what do you get? Another man set free. Philip Scott Cannon was released from prison Friday after serving 10 years for a triple murder. Note that I have not yet used the term exonerated – and that’s for a reason...

Between a void and a hard place

Posted on December 20, 2009
You are Paul Clarke. You live in a small town in England. You’ve had a run-in or two with the law, but nothing serious. One day, you find a black bag a the end of the garden. You think it’s a bag of rubbish (garbage, for you non-Brits). You open it and inside find a [...

The fear is upon us: convict to be on the safe side

Posted on December 20, 2009
these are not the sex offenders youre look-wait, he kinda is America’s War on Sex (Offenders) is well documented by now. Sexual deviants and offenders are the modern day witches, persecuted by the fearful among us, without any regard to rationality or reason...

Act V

Posted on December 20, 2009
If you haven’t yet, take some time out of your day to listen to Act V, an episode of This American Life from 2002 about Hamlet performed in a Missouri prison, with the assistance of this group. There’s some video here. Poignant, insightful and moving.

The stupidity epidemic: it?s catching

Posted on December 20, 2009
Well, folks, now you’ve gone and done it. The stupid has taken over the world. In addition to the “honey I found a shotgun in the yard” crime in Britain, Virginia has now gone and convicted the coffee guy who was walking around his house naked and was spied by some peeping toms...

The Georgia peach has turned rotten

Posted on December 20, 2009
not cool, GA. You made lolcat swear. I’m going to throw some numbers at you. See if you can recover sufficiently to read the rest of this post. Ready? 475, over a year, $160,000, 187 and finally 2 and a 1/2. Any guesses? If you guessed� active cases, time pending, funding for contract attorneys, clients without counsel as [...

What?s a little money between friends?

Posted on December 17, 2009
I always thought we were brothers (and sisters). You, the criminal defense lawyer in private practice, and I, the public defender. Cousins of a sort. We had one common objective: acquittals defending the Constitutional rights of those unlucky enough to be sucked into the vortex that is the criminal justice system...

Depends on what ?money? means

Posted on December 17, 2009
As expected, my post yesterday on the money wedge between public defender and private attorneys has generated a response from Cousin Greenfield, who calls me on my bullshit of not noticing that there are, indeed, divergent interests to some extent between the private bar and public defenders...

Polluting the jury pool

Posted on December 16, 2009
In today’s hyper connected world of 24 hours news and in-your-face social media that tweets breaking information before you have time to read it, one of the great concerns among legal professionals is keeping the jury pool free from pollution. As information is more widely and easily available, more and more people are becoming intimately [...

This Seattle DUI lawyer is not a douchebag

Posted on December 16, 2009
Remember that stupid post I wrote about some article on some site that suggested that defendants were better off with private lawyers (a particular private lawyer, actually) than public defenders because pd’s are overworked-underpaid-useless-etc? Turns out one of my two readers also writes a blog for the Seattle Weekly and the post was picked up there [...

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