Legal News

Nichols trial coverage weak on insanity defense

Posted on July 10, 2008
Few criminal cases have received as much attention in Atlanta lately -- and deservedly so -- as the Brian Nichols case. Nichols is charged with capital murder in the deaths three years ago of four court and law enforcement officials in a wild courthouse shootout and escape...

Same-sex marriage analysis skips the law

Posted on July 08, 2008
Tom Curry, MSNBC.com's national affairs writer, contributes to a weekly series called "Briefing Book: Issues '08" in the site's politics section with this piece on the courts and same-sex marriage. I'm not a big fan of the briefing-book format -- no named sources, no he-said/she-said debate of the experts -- but it's a pretty straight (pun!) account of where the two major-party presidential candidates stand on the issue, and what role the courts have played at the state and federal level thus far...

Times vows to fill legal slot . . . eventually

Posted on July 08, 2008
Nine Tuesdays ago, Adam Liptak's Sidebar column on legal affairs in the Times ran with this note:Beginning next week, the Sidebar column will be on hiatus for a few months. It will resume after Adam Liptak begins coverage of the Supreme Court later this year...

Can "narrowcasting" change the cameras debate?

Posted on July 08, 2008
Andrew Longstreth reports on The American Lawyer's Litigation Daily blog that longtime cameras-in-the-courts champion Jonathan Sherman is trying to open a federal courtroom to video cameras. The showdown will be decided by tomorrow, when Boston federal district judge Nancy Gertner is scheduled to hear a motion to dismiss the race-discrimination lawsuits against subprime-mortgage provider Countrywide Bank...

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WaPo immigration-law trend story misses mark

Posted on July 07, 2008
Karen Bruillard and her editors at the Washington Post should have taken a closer look at this trend story today, to avoid the trap that they have fallen into. It's a familiar trap for journalists who suspect their story is true and timely, but they either lack the energy or the luck to prove it convincingly...

Sympathetic portrait of an accused plagiarist

Posted on July 04, 2008
Attention, flacks -- er, PR professionals. Any time a client under fire for ethics violations wonders whether to cooperate with a reporter who's digging into the facts and profiling your client, show him this piece today by Adam Liptak. It should help both of you resist the urge to hunker down...

CAAFlogger adds a p.s. to Kennedy story

Posted on July 03, 2008
A followup to my post yesterday on the origins of Linda Greenhouse's much-talked-about story on the gap in legal research in the Supreme Court's Kennedy v. Louisiana decision. I asked the blogger whose post tipped off Greenhouse, Dwight Sullivan, how obscure this information was in his legal world...

Relentless K.C. reporter finally gets results

Posted on July 02, 2008
The Kansas City Star's Mike McGraw (pictured here) has to feel a sense of accomplishment today. His extensive, documents-intensive investigation of a major arson case has finally yielded a decision by federal authorities to call for an investigation of his findings...

Greenhouse and Fidell's last laugh

Posted on July 02, 2008
Linda Greenhouse has taken heat for her husband's legal expertise in military law -- specifically for his advocacy in causes that have come before the Court. But on today's front page, barely two weeks before her retirement, Greenhouse nails a good story thanks to that familial connection...

Greenburg takes politics detour

Posted on July 01, 2008
ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg reveals on her Legalities blog that her bosses have reassigned her this summer, now that the Supremes are on break. She'll spend the next four months covering the candidates for vice president. "It’s not as big a transition as you might think," Greenburg cheerfully argues, as she points out the prominence of legal issues and potential Supreme Court nominations in the presidential campaign...

Good questions reveal fake-cop scam

Posted on July 01, 2008
Linda Trest wins the award for skeptical reporter of the month. The 51-year-old reporter for the weekly Gasconade County Republican in Missouri has given various explanations for what started her reporting that led to revelations that the police in Gerald, Missouri, had been duped by a man posing as a federal agent and leading local cops on warrantless raids...

Locy may be off the hook, but Congress isn't

Posted on June 28, 2008
Assuming now that the Toni Locy contempt case is over -- and let's hope that the judge doesn't try to punish Locy for her principled refusal to betray her sources in the Steven Hatfill privacy case, now that the government has coughed up millions to settle Hatfill's claims -- we can breathe a sigh of relief and move on...

Biskupic scooplet on Scalia's public persona

Posted on June 27, 2008
After yesterday's Second Amendment decision penned by Antonin Scalia, Joan Biskupic rightly decided to focus on the justice. It's a quickie, but it has this original gem:"I have decided to try to do more writing, apart from just writing court opinions," he told USA TODAY...

Bob Barnes, call your agent

Posted on June 26, 2008
If I were the Washington Post's Supreme Court beat reporter, Robert Barnes, I'd be jealous of some of my competitors today. Yesterday's decisions included two highly newsworthy ones, on the death penalty for child rape and the Exxon Valdez punitive damages case...

All hail SCOTUSblog. Now, attack it.

Posted on June 26, 2008
I've been pondering since yesterday what to say about SCOTUSblog and its impact on legal reporting. Comment is called for because of the great service that the site provides on crunch days like the past two days, when multiple newsworthy decisions came down...

A glimpse at covering the FBI

Posted on June 26, 2008
"Talk of the Nation" host Neal Conan and his two guests, FBI assistant director of public affairs John Miller and NPR's FBI reporter Dina Temple-Raston, did a good job in this 30-minute Q&A of educating the general public about reporter-source relationships, specifically on law enforcement stories...

Tyler "swingers" case reveals reporter-DA relationship

Posted on June 25, 2008
Ah, life in a small-town courthouse. This Tyler Telegraph story by Kenneth Dean attempts to prove one thing, but actually proves the opposite. The story -- reporting that the judge hearing a child sex-abuse case has allowed reporters back in to cover the proceedings, even though they are subpoenaed to testify in a change-of-venue hearing -- quotes the paper's executive editor, Jim Giametta, in a First Amendment-flag-waving statement...

Explaining a new twist on community standards

Posted on June 24, 2008
After growing frustrated yesterday by confusion in some news stories over the distinction between obscenity and broadcast indecency (George Carlin, RIP), it was a pleasure to read Matt Richtel's front-pager in the Times today about an inventive defense in a Florida obscenity prosecution...

Detainee post mortem: all politics, no law

Posted on June 21, 2008
Michael Abramowitz's front pager today in the Post provides useful historical perspective on last week's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush. It has the requisite back and forth between opposing experts (with some excellent, pithy quotes). And it seems to do an adequate job of explaining the politics of the Bush administration's strategies concerning Congress and the courts...

FISA bill a victory for watchdog journalism

Posted on June 20, 2008
In his story today on the deal struck in Congress to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Times' Eric Lichtblau calls it "the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years" and "a major victory for the White House after months of dispute...

How "Beyond the Law" series overreaches

Posted on June 18, 2008
I've been waiting for the McClatchy series "Guantanamo: Beyond the Law" to conclude before commenting on it. But tomorrow I won't be able to blog, so here's my critique after four of the five parts have run. McClatchy explains the genesis of the series:Early in 2007, as the Bush administration indicated that it intended to release most of the detainees at the prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, McClatchy set out to track down as many of the freed prisoners as possible to help determine who they were, what had happened to them in the prisons the Bush administration set up in Afghanistan and Cuba and what had become of them...

Salon scoop finally gets some bounce

Posted on June 18, 2008
Freelance criminal justice journalist Alan Berlow (pictured here) and Salon magazine deserve a victory lap for exposing an injustice that spared, at least temporarily, a Texas convict from execution last night. The bizarre twist is that Berlow's article exposing the issue was published three years ago -- prior to an the convict's previously set execution date...

Holes in story on grand jury by petition

Posted on June 17, 2008
Monica Davey provides an interesting look, on the front of today's New York Times, at the use of citizen-petitioned grand juries, particularly those instigated by anti-abortion activists in Kansas. The case has received periodic national attention, but this story goes beyond earlier ones I've seen on the history and politics of the state laws that allow citizens to launch a grand jury investigation by petition...

Correction: Giving Totenberg her due for tenure

Posted on June 16, 2008
In keeping with today's mea culpa theme, I now believe I erred when I assumed (and at least confessed that I was winging it) that Linda Greenhouse's departure puts Tony Mauro in second place for SCOTUS beat seniority, behind only Lyle Denniston. That skips Mauro over NPR's Nina Totenberg, whose tenure at NPR predates Mauro's on the Supreme Court beat (originally for Gannett News Service, then USA Today) by four years (1975 vs...

Second thoughts on Kozinski

Posted on June 16, 2008
Patterico's Pontifications runs a letter from Alex Kozinski's wife, lawyer Marcy Tiffany, that puts the LA Times' revelations in a very different light. I still think that it's fair to question Kozinski's judgment, and his ethics in hearing an obscenity case (and I wonder when critics will ever stop accusing journalists of merely trying to "sell newspapers," considering that hardly anyone buys newspapers any more)...

Greenhouse (almost) has left the building

Posted on June 12, 2008
Linda Greenhouse got a classy, if premature, sendoff today at the beat she's covered with distinction for three decades. Here's a report by Tony Mauro (now No. 2 in seniority on the beat, if memory serves me) quoting, among others, the longest-serving SCOTUS reporter, Lyle Denniston...

News judgments about Kozinski's porn

Posted on June 12, 2008
Did the LA Times practice good journalism by outing 9th Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski's porn stash in this blockbuster story by Scott Glover? That's a question asked in a number of ways by various bloggers, most extensively so far by How Appealing's Howard Bashman...

Law held hostage in essay on presidential politics

Posted on June 11, 2008
The CJR series "Turning Point" on press coverage of the presidential election turns to coverage -- or lack of it -- of likely Supreme Court appointments. Writer Zachary Roth, former media editor at the New York Observer and writer at Washington Monthly, has the politics and media smarts to weigh in on this...

Pro Publica's legal chops? The jury's out

Posted on June 10, 2008
Now that Pro Publica has gone live, what kind of legal-reporting leg is it showing so far? Some, not a lot. But it's a good sign that one of its six main news categories is "justice and law," and that there are at least a couple of experienced legal-reporting types -- not to mention a number of hard-core investigative reporters, all of whom presumably know their way around a docket sheet...

"Locked in Limbo" series keeps readers in limbo

Posted on June 10, 2008
Larry Oakes takes a skeptical look at a newsworthy topic: the Minnesota Sex Offender Program, an unusually extensive and long-running system of civil commitments of sex offenders to prison-like treatment centers. The three-part Star-Tribune series ends today after casting light on the problem but with more he said/she said than clear insight into the problems and potential solutions...

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