Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer : Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer & Attorney : Jamie Spencer Law Firm : DWI, DUI, Drug Possession : Serving Georgetown, Round Rock, San Marcos, Travis, Williamson, and Hays County, Texas

 From the internet guru girl blog:

Personal note from CEO of IGG:

While there are many ways to project your business on line, you have to make sure you feel comfortable with the company or person you are intrusting[sic] your site and online marketing to.

Make sure you understand what it does, what you expect from it, and know that IGG is telling you that the web works better than any other medium but you have to allow the features you’ve chose to work together.

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I just read Anders v California for the first time (ever, or in a long time) in preparation for writing this post. You always hear about Anders briefs, and I have some vague notion that it’s what an appellate lawyer files when they want to tell the court that there is nothing worth appealing in their client’s case. Heck, I didn’t even know (or remember) that Anders won, by reverse and remand – which makes me fairly certain I’ve never carefully analyzed the opinion.

The gist of it is that sending a letter to the court saying,

“I will not file a brief on appeal, as I am of the opinion that there is no merit to the appeal. I have visited and communicated with Mr. Anders, and have explained my views and opinions to him. . . . [H]e wishes to file a brief in this matter on his own behalf,"

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Overheard a bench conference about a motion to revoke a felony probation while standing in line waiting to talk to the judge this week. Putting the pieces together, the story went something like this:

The defendant was on a possession of controlled substance probation, and had mucked it up in several different ways. Probably at least one dirty U/A along the way, had absconded (fancy legal talk for “disappeared/not reported” for a few months), and was generally speaking not winning any awards for probationer of the year. As far as I could tell, no arrests for new offenses, but… what are you going to do?

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There are two kinds of reactions to the following statement, made by Andrea Mitchell on Morning Joe, about Elena Kagan’s qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice:

If you can run Harvard, and the Harvard Law factory, then you can run almost anything.

Reaction number one… nodding head in silent (and unthinking) approval, and reaction number two… “What’s that again?”

Seriously? Anything? As Dean of the law school, she proved adept at fundraising, no doubt. But this qualifies her for almost anything? What about vetting mergers and acquisitions, negotiating a contract, representing someone in a divorce, not to mention running a bakery or a bank…

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Heard Jeffrey Toobin explaining Miranda to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last night on the tube, and my head exploded. Sometimes a quick press of the record button, followed by several rewinds and I end up with an informal transcript of something an expert TV commentator said which ends up on my blog, but not this time. Wasn’t quick enough with the TiVo remote.

But no matter, CNN, being justifiably proud of its expert, has posted it online. Blitzer asked Toobin to “explain to our viewers about the Miranda rights” to which the expert replied:

The Miranda rule says nothing you say can be used against you in court unless you first have been read your Miranda rights.

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First, Presiding Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Sharon Keller didn’t know she was stinking rich, and then, she simply forgot to report it as required by law. And even though she didn’t know about it, she apologized. Even though she had done nothing wrong.

From the Austin American Statesman’s Focal Point blog, Chuck Lindell:

Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the state’s highest criminal court, has been fined $100,000 by the Texas Ethics Commission for failing to fully report her income and property holdings on annual personal financial statements.

It was the largest civil penalty imposed by the commission, according to Tim Sorrells, deputy general counsel for the agency.

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I could have used the search box on this blog to locate the URL for an old post about Sharon Keller. Instead I went to Google, and typed in “I was wearing someone else’s pants”. I remembered those words in the title, and for something that odd, my post would be the first result, right?

Uh, no. Numero tres. Beaten out, at number two, by WikiAnswers - Can you get STDs by wearing someone else's pants? (Related link on the answer page… “Am I wearing pants?”)

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From Illegal Utah Marijuana Gardens Dot Com:

Did you know that marijuana is being illegally grown in Utah?

It is? Gee Wally, if I stumble across some marijuana when I’m out and about, what ever should I do?

If you think you have found an illegal marijuana garden, note the location either on a map or GPS unit. We will be able to find it either by latitude and longitude, or a place name.

Avoid any contact with the suspects who may be present and leave the area, undisturbed, as soon as possible. Contact us through this website or your local law enforcement, the sooner the better.

[Hat Tip: Robert Latham through the NORML listserv]

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I thought the doctors would be able to tell us whether my wife was carrying fraternal or identical twins. When she was pregnant with them. Wasn’t that something they could just know? Well, the answer was “not always”.

There are several ways of immediately identifying twins as dizygotic – that is, as coming from two separate eggs, aka fraternal – the most obvious being boy/girl. In our case, boy/boy, so that didn’t help. By the time of their birth, all other factors which could have marked them as fraternal were eliminated: placenta, inner amniotic and outer chorionic membranes, and same blood type. But what about separate sacs, don’t identicals share the same sac? Not for the super majority of monozygotes, and in fact it’s the rare same sac scenario that leads to such difficulties as conjoined twins. Thank goodness then, no confirmation there.

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Ran across Tamar Weinberg’s Techipedia via Simple Justice’s deconstruction of a comment on her post “The 7 Truths About Social Media Marketing”. SJ unfairly insists she is vapid, apparently missing out on gems like tip #4, “Social Media Is Social”. Perhaps she left out “Social Media Is Media” because everyone knows lists have to be in groups of seven or ten.

Personally, I was struck by these passages from tip number three, “Numbers Aren’t Everything”:

It’s more important to look at the holistic view of the individual or entity on Twitter and across other social channels. If someone has over 20,000 Twitter followers, how many people are they following?

Excellent. We’re going to get a holistic approach to figuring out whether someone is worthy of out Twitter attention. She then dissects folks into three categories of twitterers I should be wary of, based on their ratio of friends/followers. Group number one:

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My assistant just said, in a rather loud voice, "Hey, it's 4:20 on 4/20 guys!"  And I'm 99% sure she could pass a drug test.  Hmmmmmm.

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Tonight!  8 p.m.  Free.  At the Mohawk:  If you haven't caught it the first four times, you'll definitely want to go see Charlie Roadman's Marijuana Law for Musicians.

My excuse for the late posting is not that I'm forgetful.  Not at all.  I figured you wouldn't remember if it were mentioned too soon, therefore, a last minute reminder.  Review of the 2007 edition here, and it just keeps getting better every year.

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Tax day chatter from the NACDL listserv brought this item, from Page 1 of “Instructions for Form 1099-Misc,” to my attention:

Fees Paid to Informers. A payment made to an informer as an award, fee, or reward for information about criminal activity is not required to be reported if the payment is made by a federal, state or local government agency, or by a non-profit organization exempt from tax under 501(c)(3) that makes the payment to further the charitable purpose of lessening the burdens of government.

Wow. We are now paying so many confidential informants (wooops, I mean… “cooperating individuals”) that the issue of whether they must be 1099’d is addressed on the first page of the instructions.

[Update: since initial posting, Greenfield elaborates, "A Nation Of Rats"]

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From D.A. Confidential: at least we aren’t civil lawyers.

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Those who are interested in the history of law could do much worse than to read the letters of Pliny the Younger*. The second century Roman lawyer and magistrate’s letters are still preserved in near perfect form; the most famous of these is Epistle #10 to the Emperor Trajan.

Written in 112 C.E. – aka A.D. - its primary interest to most historians is that it’s the first written mention of Christians outside of the Bible (and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the non-canonized Gospels, etc. – in other words, the first “pagan” reference). Pliny asks Trajan what he should do: should he execute these pesky Christians whose crimes don’t include any sort of rabble rousing or trouble making but simply refusing to worship correctly?

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Amazon has an annoying (and highly profitable) habit of suggesting books I might like, based on my past searches and purchase history. Occasionally their software for figuring out what else they can sucker me into impulse buying goes horribly wrong, often with amusing results. Here’s a recent example:

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From The Tao Of Criminal Defense Trial Lawyering, No Balm In Gilead:

Up through law school, we’re taught that the American criminal justice system is a wonderful thing. The organized bar—the ABA, local and state bar associations—pushes the same propaganda. It’s a lie.

The truth is that, while it may be better than any other system yet created, the U.S. criminal justice system objectively sucks. Factually-innocent people get punished every day. Pleas are coerced. Insane people get punished for doing insane things. Crappy lawyers take people’s lives in their hands. Children get treated as adults. Adults with the minds of children get treated as adults. Wealthy defendants get more justice than poor defendants. [emphasis added]

That’s a Tiger Woods crazy-long list of serious problems for a system that might be the best in the world. Worse still, it’s non-exhaustive, easily modifiable by the phrase “including, but not limited to”. So are we the best?

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I’ve always said that they’re either identicals with a few physical differences, or fraternals that look an awful lot alike. I’ll explain, perhaps, in a later post how it is that after more than three years we still weren’t sure, but for now, the results:

Dear Mr. Spencer:

Our laboratory has successfully completed your zygosity test and your test results have been mailed. Thank you for your interest in our zygosity testing services. As requested when you placed your order, we have included a copy of your test results in this email.

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What will they do to Ken Lay? Give him life plus cancer?

That’s from Jeralyn Merritt, on July 13, 2005, the first known use of the phrase “life plus cancer”*. Her question was not as macabre as it sounds now, since we know that Lay met an untimely death, some guess by suicide, in between his own conviction and sentencing date. No, she was commenting on the 25 year sentence that had just been handed out to Bernie Ebbers, and asking how much Lay would get, since the amount of his fraud dwarfed Bernie’s.

Jeralyn is credited with coming up with the question, what are they gonna do… give him life plus cancer? Greenfield often uses the life plus cancer conceit in discussing proportionality of and disparity between sentences, especially white collar or other non violent crimes. How much is enough? If Mr. X gets 10 years, and Mr. Y’s crime is 4 times as bad mathematically, shouldn’t Mr. Y get 40?

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Here’s an open records request I just emailed and faxed. (Microsoft Word format, if you want to use it as a template.)

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