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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

Thursday Tourette?s

Posted on October 28, 2010
I was initially going to go with “Thursday is ‘I give you links so I don’t have to blog’ day”, but that was too long. So here are some interesting stories that you might have missed or will miss or have already showed up in your feedreader: Anthony Graves, freed after 18 years on death

G-hic G-hic G-hic G-uilty?

Posted on October 26, 2010
[I don't want to hear anything about the title of this post. Deal with it.] Remember hiccup girl? Even if you don’t, you can guess that she’s a girl who hiccups. She made national news two years ago as the girl who couldn’t stop hiccuping (video at the end of the post)...

Politicizing judicial elections

Posted on October 26, 2010
It’s election season, which means we’re all subjected to those horrible bipartisan attack ads, each side proclaiming that the other is a vicious child molester who eats babies for dinner while swimming on corporate money, stolen from the pockets of hard-working, salt of the Earth middle Americans...

Does Martha Dean have a point?

Posted on October 26, 2010
If I’d never heard the words “attorney general” and “lawsuit” and “active practice” in the same sentence again, ever, I’d have been a happy man. Today, I am sad. As Rick Green reports, professional whackjob Attorney General candidate Martha Dean tweeted today that she’s filed suit seeking a declaratory judgment that her opponent, George Jepsen,

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Because restrict does not mean disseminate

Posted on October 21, 2010
Everyone knows that a sex offender registry exists. Almost everyone knows where to find it online. People use it routinely, even if just for fun. You log on and you search for your town and you see all the creepy people living around you. You may know some of them...

Sunday stupidity: Wednesday edition

Posted on October 20, 2010
Because it’s never three days too late to thank Christine O’Donnell for the bounty that is her endless stupidity (you really have to watch the whole thing and not just listen, because her reactions are priceless as well):

Thank goodness she was awake

Posted on October 20, 2010
So, I was watching legal show the other day and in it, a defendant was charged with breaking into the home of a woman and violently assaulting her. An anonymous caller informed police that this was occurring, but when the police arrived, he hid with her in the bathroom and kept her silent...

An incovenient system

Posted on October 19, 2010
I’ve been watching the torturous trial of Steven Hayes from afar, overcome by shame, sadness and disgust. This trial has showcased not only the worst acts that man is capable of, but also the worst emotions that we allow ourselves to succumb to and has shone a spotlight on the primal, base urges for bloodsport

Latest poll: CT still split on death penalty vs. LWPOR

Posted on October 13, 2010
As lawyers know, it’s all about how you ask the question. If you ask “Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”, you get one answer and if you ask “Which punishment do you prefer for people convicted of murder, the death penalty or life in prison with no chance

The sword: fall on it

Posted on October 05, 2010
Pride is a troublesome thing. It makes us lie, it makes us obfuscate and it makes us, ultimately, injure others. Lawyers’ pride is even worse, if that’s possible. We often forget that that our only goal should be to help the client, in whatever way possible, within the ethical boundaries of our profession...

Whose Governor is she anyway?

Posted on October 05, 2010
There is no love lost between this blog and thankfully-not-for-much-longer-Governor-Rell. This blog has expended precious bandwith to excoriate the obvious preferential treatment given by the Governor to her precious white suburban constituents, especially in the criminal justice arena...

The rotten peach? It?s in Washington now

Posted on October 04, 2010
Maybe there’s nothing more than coincidence at work here and maybe I have my understanding of the philosophies of Supreme Court justices all wrong, but I find it noteworthy that on the first day in 35 (!!!) years that SCOTUS opened a term without a justice named Stevens sitting in one of the 9 chairs,

?Watch this! Cuff him up?

Posted on September 30, 2010
Well, let’s take this New Haven police officer at his word and “watch this”: Quinnipiac student arrested after filming another student’s arrest from The Quinnipiac Chronicle on Vimeo. If only someone had the technical know-how to turn that first 16 seconds into a repeating GIF and set it to music, it’d surely become the latest

Deconstructing the arguments for and against the death penalty

Posted on September 30, 2010
A commenter left a very lengthy, insightful and thought-provoking comment to my recent post on the death penalty. The comment, in my opinion, is worthy of its own forum and so I’ve received permission to reproduce it here as a “guest post” of sorts...

Liveblogging ?The Defenders? Ep. 2

Posted on September 29, 2010
Well, The Whole Truth was completely unbearable last week, so I caught the first episode of The Defenders on On Demand and it was actually enjoyable and closer to real life practice than The Whole Truth, so I’m making the switch to that show tonight...

The questions you should be asking about the death penalty

Posted on September 27, 2010
The trial of Steven Hayes (more popularly called the Cheshire or Petit trial), currently nearing the end of the guilt phase, has caused a state-wide sensation. Reporters have packed the courtrooms from the beginning of jury selection, with their numbers swelling well into the teens by the this point...

Liveblogging The Whole Truth

Posted on September 22, 2010
As if I wasn’t enough of a masochist. The Whole Truth?

The problem with administrative law

Posted on September 20, 2010
Is that it doesn’t matter what the rest of this sentence is. As someone who knows next to nothing about administrative law, I wouldn’t even hazard a guess, lest someone with intimate knowledge of that field or someone with Googling skills or someone with intellectual honesty and a blog would point out how and why

KISS your jury

Posted on September 16, 2010
Earlier this week, Scott and I engaged in a mini-discussion of sorts about the tweaking of the format of a trial to better help jurors understand the issues and reach their decisions. The most popular analogy for the decision making process is the black box...

An undignified farce

Posted on September 16, 2010
Astute, long time readers will have noticed two things: 1) the death penalty trial of Steven Hayes, defendant in the brutal murders of 3 people in idyllic Cheshire, CT has wrapped up its first week; and 2) that I haven’t blogged about it yet. I’ve resisted adding to the 5-ring circus, but what I’ve seen

Q&A in closing arguments

Posted on September 12, 2010
In a recent string of posts around the ‘sphere, the jury trial system has come under some scrutiny, mostly in the area of unanimous verdicts. I wrote this post, and then a few days later Volokh had these posts, which prompted Scott to write this...

Because every day needs to be Caturday

Posted on September 12, 2010
If you don’t enjoy this, goddammit, you have no heart. Monster. H/T Colin Samuels

Not my town-itis

Posted on September 09, 2010
Connecticut, for some reason I have not yet uncovered, has thus far been immune to the sex offender hysteria that has gripped our nation for well over a decade now. Sure, we have mandatory minimums and calls to classify sex offenders on the same level as murderers, but the legislature, in an exemplary show of

The obscenity of risk of injury

Posted on September 06, 2010
Connecticut General Statute 53-21 states, in relevant part: a) Any person who (1) wilfully or unlawfully causes or permits any child under the age of sixteen years to be placed in such a situation that the life or limb of such child is endangered, the health of such child is likely to be injured or

Good enough for government work

Posted on September 02, 2010
The Blagojevich trial (and subsequent mistrial) has provided plenty of fodder for discussion among the press, the blogosphere and the nation in general. But it seems as though a bit of the madness that allows him to polish his hair using shoe-polish has seeped into the rest of the world as well...

Crime: reality and perception

Posted on August 24, 2010
Ran across this interesting article in Prospect Magazine from the UK, on the shifting policing and perception of crime, violent and otherwise: The consequence has been that violent crime?defined as actions which cause injury or serious threats to do so?has fallen steadily for about the last 15 years...

CT?s top death prosecutor in federal probe

Posted on August 10, 2010
I stumbled across this brief news item today, which could have monumental consequences for the death penalty in Connecticut, among other criminal justice issues. Waterbury’s chief prosecutor and former Commissioner of Public Safety John Connelly is apparently the subject of a Federal grand jury investigation, with allegations of improper consideration of his good friend, defense

Objects in mirror are as pretextual as they appear

Posted on August 09, 2010
turn left and go directly to jail Over 4 years ago, a police officer received an anonymous tip that Gregory Cyrus was driving home drunk. The officer followed Mr. Cyrus, but didn’t observe him driving erratically, which is a feat in of itself given the bullshit usually spewed to justify a stop...

Another state police lab under scrutiny

Posted on August 09, 2010
North Carolina, step right up: This series [by the newspaper Newsobserver], the product of months of reporting, reveals problems far beyond blood analysis. It shows an agency that teaches its agents and laboratory analysts to line up with prosecutors’ case theories...

Fundamental rights cannot be submitted to a vote

Posted on August 04, 2010
Just an hour or so ago, Judge Vaughn Walker of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California issued this 138 page decision ruling that Proposition 8 (or Art 1, Section 7.5 of the California Constitution) is unconstitutional...

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