Intoxication is Not a Defense
But it might get you out of jury duty.
(Or should I have made this post something about having “a jury of your peers”?)
Good Law?
Doug Weathers asks criminal defense lawyers, “Would you rather have Good Facts or Good Law?”:
Every time I am preparing for a trial I deal with the question of do I have good facts or good law. Rarely do you have both because those cases are usually dismissed or never go to trial. Sometimes you have neither good facts or good law and those cases usually plead. In most of the trial cases you will have either good facts or good law.
In my experience as a criminal defense attorney in Texas, there is precious little good law for the defendant.
On Law & Order and other TV shows judges are routinely throwing out cases for undotted i’s and uncrossed t’s, but it ain’t exactly so in real courtrooms. The overwhelming government interest (according to appellate courts) in convicting anyone and everyone when it comes to the War on Drugs has darn near killed the Fourth Amendment.
And then there’s that DWI exception to the Constitution:
In sum, the balance of the State's interest in preventing drunken driving, the extent to which this system can reasonably be said to advance that interest, and the degree of intrusion upon individual motorists who are briefly stopped, weighs in favor of the state program. We therefore hold that [stopping drivers without reasonable suspicion or probable cause**] is consistent with the Fourth Amendment.
[**original wording is “it”. Read the case. My substitution for the word “it” is 100% accurate.]
Good law? Only been practicing a little over ten years. I’ve heard rumors that such a thing existed in the 70’s. And I’ve read plenty of caselaw overturning those well reasoned precedents.
I’ll go with Good Facts. Medium Facts. Any Facts.
OK. Enough dreaming. Gotta get back to work on some of those “Not So Good Facts/Not So Good Law” cases…
Public Presumption of Guilt Made Enron Prosecutor's Job More Difficult
In researching an upcoming post about Brady violations in Jeffrey Skilling’s trial, I ran across an interesting tidbit.
An MBA student at Cornell named Kristine De Bacco posted a review of sorts of lead Enron prosecutor John Hueston’s speech to her school, where he brags about what a difficult job he had in obtaining the convictions…not because public sentiment was with the defendants, but because it was against them:
[I]n fact, prior to the commencement of the trial, Lay and Skilling had already been convicted in the court of public opinion. To the average person on the street, their guilt seemed a foregone conclusion.
From Mr. Hueston's perspective, however, this made the job of the Enron prosecutors much more difficult. They were expected to win.
Hogwash. Any federal or state prosecutor loves the presumption of guilt. Simply a case of a guy trying to convince folks out there that his job was harder than it really was.
It’s disappointing that no critical thought is put into analyzing this assertion from the former prosecutor. How is it exactly that going into trial with a jury pool that already believes the Government’s case before they have heard it could be harmful to the prosecution?
There may be more pressure on a prosecutor when he is “expected to win”; but when that expectation arises from a playing field tilted in his favor, it’s not a disadvantage.
For example, it might be embarrassing for a number one seed in the NCAA’s to lose in the first round to a small school overmatched opponent that barely scraped their way into the tourney, but it doesn’t change them from favorite to underdog. (And if it did, wouldn’t the 16th seed suddenly become “expected to win”… rinse and repeat?)
Another excerpt about the speech:
Mr. Hueston and his team had been especially concerned that there were few, if any, documents linking Lay and Skilling directly to the fraud - no perfect "smoking gun" to wave in front of the jury.
So, in order to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Mr. Hueston and his team employed a number of alternate strategies.
Yeah? Looks like one of those alternate strategies may have involved deliberately not turning over impeachment material from the original Fastow interview notes, and either minimizing or deleting them from the 302s turned over to the defense.
More on this coming soon.
