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

Sure, consider the source, that it’s the recently convicted felon Conrad Black sentenced to 78 months for theft and obstruction of justice, but then again, just because a prisoner said it doesn’t make it less true:

I have been persecuted by one arm or more of the US government for over five years and had to post bond of $38 million.

The system is based on the plea bargain, the bare-faced exchange of incriminating testimony for immunity or a reduced sentence.

It is intimidation and suborned or extorted perjury, an outright rape of any plausible definition of justice.

Those last two sentences could have been written by any practicing criminal defense lawyer, although I suppose that would provoke some to still caution, "Consider the source"...

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That’s the name of the latest and greatest show that network TV has in store (or as Balko says “I think reality TV may have finally hit bottom”). So what exactly is this fabulous concoction whipped up for our viewing pleasure?

The show features law officers in Phoenix setting up grandiose sting operations to lure criminals with warrants into their waiting hands, and cameras.

“Ah, I see,” said the blind man. This is pink underwear, tent city, “America’s Toughest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio country. Supposedly the good news is that this latest publicity grab won’t cost “his” taxpayers forty three million dollars in settlement payouts for dead and injured inmates.

“It is a reverse Punk’d,” says Fox President of Alternative Entertainment Mike Darnell.

“Instead of the worst day of your life and then a joke at the end, this is the reverse. This is the best day of your life, and then we arrest you.”

Well I can just hear the announcer’s voice now in the promos: “For those of you who like to mix reality with a little Schadenfreude…” But hey – it’s OK to get a little pleasure out of other people’s misery, right? I mean, if they’re bad people…

“If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law,” Darnell says. “It’s Cops as comedy and no one’s ever tried it before.”

According to Darnell, all of the marks are non-violent criminals.

Non-violent criminals? Does that go all the way down the ladder including folks who have forgotten to, or been unable to pay their traffic tickets? I don’t know the answer to that, but I'm glad to know that this will be done only to non-regular people.

These types of stings are possibly ethically justifiable on some sort of “they had it coming”/ “just saving the taxpayers money” axis. After all, it’s a lot cheaper if you can fool people with outstanding warrants to come to you than it is to round them up.

But it’s the viewer himself sitting at home on the couch actually enjoying someone else’s “worst day” that is so troublesome. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

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Radley Balko asks if any criminal defense lawyers out there have ever heard of such a thing. 

Not knowing anything about the prosecution’s case except what I’ve read on his blog doesn’t stop me from agreeing with his conclusion that based on their request to transfer venue – which was denied - their case is “coming apart at the seams”.

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One of the interesting things about stats packages on blogs is that the best ones allow you to see not only exact queries on search engines by visitors but also the specific pages they reached. (One of the downsides is that when I started this blog I was obsessed with checking the stats package to see exactly how people search the internet for information. It’s endlessly fascinating and not at all what I expected. After two years plus of blogging I’m down to about 10 minutes a day or less of checking, so it’s taking a while to wear off.)

So when someone just now googled “Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer Published by Jamie Spencer, Attorney At Law October 22, 2006” yet didn’t visit the archives to see what was published that day, I thought “Gosh that’s an awfully specific search by someone who didn’t manage to actually navigate their way to the destination they were seeking… They must not know about archives.”

Well that reader has probably come and gone but there’s a link to Archives at the top of every page; if you scroll down to the bottom you can read posts by month and year and find any particular day’s worth of blogging.

And for what it’s worth – not very much - I wrote three posts that day:

• Marijuana vs. Alcohol: Which is Harmful?
• Are the Police Allowed to Lie to You (During a Criminal Investigation)...
• Grits for Breakfast on Inmate Jail Calls

Perhaps the searcher was reminiscing about the good old days when I’d post three times substantively instead of blogging about blogging, stats packages and Google…

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It took me awhile to track down the transcript of oral arguments from Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts and it’s 76 pages, so frankly I’m busy and I’m going to read it later, but sometimes (perhaps frequently?) I come across someone’s commentary on a subject that I completely agree with.

In this case, I even envy the headline “You have the right to confront your accuser, as long as it's not too inconvenient”:

[Monday], the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that I think ought to be a no-brainer. The issue is this: in a criminal prosecution, can the state present a certified lab report as evidence without bringing in the person who prepared that report to testify? I frankly don't understand why this is even a question.

The 6th Amendment protects the right of criminal defendants to confront their accusers. It's obvious that an eyewitness who will testify he saw you commit the crime is an accuser as is the police officer who found the baggie of white powder in your coat pocket. But what about the lab tech who tested that white powder and decided it was cocaine? Well, isn't the person who says the stuff you [possessed was marijuana/cocaine/whatever] just as much of an accuser as the person who says you [possessed] it? Like I said, it seems pretty obvious to me.

At the oral argument, the tack the state of Massachusetts took was that it would be an undue burden on the state to have to bring these witnesses to court in every case. Huh? It would be too inconvenient for the state to bother with each and every defendant's confrontation clause right? Those who observed the argument don't seem to think that a majority of the court will go for the state's argument, but I'm perturbed that the argument wasn't laughed out of court. The 6th Amendment does not contain a convenience exception.

Read the whole post. It’s excellent. Sarah says she is “confident that the Court will conclude that a decision in favor of the defendant in this case won't unduly burden the 50 states”. I hope so, but I’m not sure I share her optimism.

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Anne Reed of Deliberations writes about the Fully Informed Jury Association and their core belief that:

The highest and best function of the jury is not, as many think, to dispense punishment to fellow citizens guilty of breaking the law, but rather to protect fellow citizens from tyrannical prosecutions and bad laws imposed by a power-hungry government.

Absolutely it is. In 1735 the Governor of New York jailed John Peter Zenger for daring to publicly criticize him. Seditious Libel was a crime, not a civil tort, and truth was not yet an available defense. 

The defendant was slam-dunk guilty. He had printed his complaints against the Governor. And all that had to be proven for a conviction was that he had criticized the government; not even that his argument lacked merit. So the original Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton argued – in essence – jury nullification:

Men who injure and oppress the people under their administration provoke them to cry out and complain, and then make that very complaint the foundation for new oppressions and prosecutions…

The question before the court, and you, gentlemen of the jury, is not of small nor private concern; it is not the cause of a poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may, in its consequence, affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main continent of America.

It is the best cause; it is the cause of liberty; and I make no doubt but your upright conduct, this day, will not only entitle you to the love and esteem of your fellow citizen, but every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honor you as men who have baffled the attempt of tyranny, and, by an impartial and uncorrupt verdict, have laid a noble foundation for securing to ourselves, our posterity, and our neighbors that to which nature and the laws of our country have given us a right … the liberty of both exposing and opposing arbitrary power (in these parts of the world at least) by speaking and writing truth.

Not Guilty.

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Success begets success, and indeed the joyous outcome of California’s Prop 8 a week ago has inspired a “A Petition for a California State Proposition that Prohibits Divorce Between Heterosexual Married Couples”:

Divorce destroys the sanctity of marriage and its powerful influence on the betterment of society. 

This proposition would keep the very meaning of marriage from being transformed into nothing more than a contractual relationship between two adults.  Prohibiting divorce between heterosexual married couples will keep the interests of children and families intact.  We will continue to celebrate marriage as the union of husband and wife, not as a relationship between "Party A" and "Party B." 

The marriage of a man and a woman has been at the heart of society since the beginning of time and it promotes the ideal opportunity for children to be raised by a mother and a father in a family held together by the legal, communal, and spiritual bonds of marriage.  As a society we should put the best interests of children first, and those interests lie in traditional marriage. 

Permitting divorce destroys marriage as we know it and causes a profound harm to society.  We should be restoring marriage, not undermining it.

And for those of you who voted yes on Prop 8 but disagree with this petition...Why?  This petition is copied and pasted from literature from your website, ProtectMarriage.com, but applied to Divorce instead of Gay Marriage.  So how can you argue with your own words?

Brilliant. [Hat Tip: Dax Garvin]

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From Matt Hoffman’s 10 New Rules of Legal Marketing:

1. "My lawyer can beat up your lawyer" isn't a marketing strategy. "My lawyer will call me back before yours will" is.

The number one complaint about lawyers every year is made by a client who can not get in touch with his lawyer. And is justifiably upset.

But how does a potential client know this about the lawyer before they make the hiring decision? (I really don’t know the answer to this. If someone else does, please leave a comment.)

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Face it - most Anti-Marijuana “education” comes down to some sort of variation of this:

Hey kids, if you ever give in to temptation and smoke marijuana, you are immediately doomed to a life of shooting up heroin and prostituting yourself for twenty dollars a pop while living under a bridge.

Take for example the ONDCP’s newest ad campaign: Become a Burrito Taster. Radley Balko, Drug WarRant, and Bruce Merken have already commented on the absurdity of this particular tack by the Drug Czar. Windy Pundit, NorLa, B12 Solipsism, TBTEAB, and others have weighed in on the Agitator’s project of listing successful marijuana users.

But there’s a larger issue here as well. There’s no real need to list successful marijuana smokers. You are seriously deluded if you believe that the act itself of lecturing high schoolers (or whomever) about the disastrous consequences of marijuana will reduce comsumption.

Whether or not they read Radley’s list which disproves the Drug Czar’s assertion, I suspect they already know it’s not true. So when you preach “marijuana = death” you lose all credibility. And it wouldn’t hurt to have some credibility left when you try to educate children about the actual deleterious effects of using cocaine and heroin.

[Author’s Note: Nothing in this post shall be read as an endorsement of the over-criminalization of the “harder drugs”.]

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Proving the obvious - that not everyone with access to the internet has a brain - comes this gem:

I "don't agree" with taxpayer money used for inmates to receive[sic] their "GED" in prison

I’m tempted to repeat a little rhyme about “I before E” but instead I’ll just…

** Sigh **

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 From Scott Henson: Is Babysitting While White Reasonable Suspicion For Police Questioning? 

Scott’s not a lawyer, but I doubt there will be many other posts written in the next two months that can overcome his slice-of-life post that is the clear frontrunner in my mind.

Another Scott, this time Greenfield, riffs on the fascinating comments section of Henson’s original post. As O’Keefe frequently reminds us, the best blogging turns into conversation, and Henson has hit it out of the park with his thought provoking piece.

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Sure, my wife and 2 children have been out of town since Friday afternoon, and I have spent the weekend alone, so how could this have happened you ask?

It’s simple. Yesterday was Saturday, and tens of thousands of straight people got married all over the nation. Probably hundreds of thousands all over the world. You see this makes my marriage stronger.

But Jamie – you gasp – this always happens on Saturdays, doesn’t your marriage get better every week?

Yes of course it does, but yesterday was extra special because Proposition 8 passed in California, and therefore the natural strengthening of my marital bond by the unions of men and women I will never meet was not placed in mortal danger by the harmful effects of two men or two women marrying each other.

Others have addressed this important issue better than I could in the past. Take for example Chad Fifer’s reexamination a few years ago of his critique of the Bush administration’s War in Iraq. He came to realize that there were more important issues at hand:

For once, I'm in complete agreement with the Bush administration — marriage between a man and a woman must be protected at all costs. I know, I know — those of you who've read my previous critiques of George W. Bush are probably surprised by my stance on this issue.

You were probably expecting me to go on and on about the hundreds of young men and women who continue to get killed in Iraq because of Bush's shady dealings and shitty diplomacy. But I'm sorry — when Rosie O'Donnell gets married TO ANOTHER WOMAN, all of those dead kids have to take a back seat.

Well said. I wish all of you – well, most of you, and I know you “others” know who I’m talking about – the best in celebrating this Family Values moment.

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COMES NOW Wayne Schiess’ suggestion that to improve legal writing we should, inter alia, and subsequent to turning in our final edits, remove all archaic vocabulary from the aforementioned writing.

IN the instant case – that is the hereinabove first sentence of this post – all efforts have been appropriately made to follow said rules.

Witnesseth this day by legal bloggers and bloggacutrixes everywhere.

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I doubt it, but here’s my transcript from the 7:40 mark of an interview of New Jersey mayor Cory Booker by Rachel Maddow. When asked by Maddow if Obama would be best served by fighting for liberal issues early in his first term, Booker replied:

Look I was told that about one of the biggest problems in America right now, that is we are wasting blood and treasure in the prison industrial complex.

Love the use of “blood and treasure”. First, decriminalization and/or massive reductions in penalties for drug offenders will come when politicians explain how much it’s costing their constituents to lock up non violent addicts for decades.

Second, the War on Drug Users is indeed a War that costs not only tons of money, but costs us in blood. That’s true both in terms of ridiculous SWAT type raids where innocent civilians and police officers are killed by each other, and frankly in terms of sentencing non violent defendants to years or decades or lifetimes in prison.

Third, it’s just a nice use of the phrase that we hear bandied about in discussions about the Iraq War. But to continue with Mayor Booker’s point:

And people told me this was a ‘left’ issue. You can’t talk about reducing the amount of prisons or helping guys when they come back.

I’m now a mayor in a majority African-American city that has the Manhattan Institute partnering with me on ex offender re-entry because I didn’t sell it as an ideological issue – I sold it as an American issue: that we are wasting billions of dollars in the State of New Jersey warehousing people, where if we do simple basic things to empower their lives, not only do we lessen our prison population, the cost of that, but we create taxpayers…

Warehousing people indeed. And, to mesh his points together, it’s awfully expensive – never mind possibly immoral – to “warehouse” people who haven’t done any harm except sometimes unto themselves.

I don’t really have much actual hope that our president-elect will choose to spend much of his newly acquired political capital on these issues, but it’s nice to hear the possibility of it at least raised in sensible conversations.

Here’s the video clip:

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Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
and I say it's all right

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"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

Click Chris Plante Interviews Sarah Palin Part 2 to hear the quote – and to confirm that Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin is indeed explaining her fears that the media may chill future government candidate’s speech.

This story is all over the blogosphere – with all the responses you would expect from such a silly statement. “Silly” is being kind – but I don’t care to regurgitate on the same topic as others; instead I thought I’d figure out just exactly what First Amendment Palin had been reading.

Perhaps this is it:

The Press shall make no comment criticizing a Republican Candidate, or ask any substantive questions of said Candidate; or endorsing the Candidate’s opponent; or print letters to the Editor in support of the opposition; or aid the people in their right to understand the issues.

I welcome any improvements in the comments section…

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Tomorrow. It’s important. 

The polls are open 7 am to 7 p.m. Here’s a link to find your polling place in Travis County.

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