Ken Lammers at CrimLaw will be happy to know that the list of prosecutor blogs just keeps growing and growing.
I should have thrown A Harris County Lawyer into the mix a long time ago. And I’ve recently run across “da blog” written by an anonymous “assistant district attorney in a large, metropolitan city”. My guess? That city is likely Houston, and definitely in Texas.
Any other blogging prosecutors please email me or comment sometime so I’ll be sure to know about you.
Erstwhile defense attorney and current prosecutor/blogger Ken Lammers points to Western Justice, a relatively new prosecutor in the practical blawgosphere:
Cool, we're now up to 3 prosecutors who actually blawg about *GASP* criminal law.
I’m pretty sure Ken is including himself, Western, and of course, Tom McKenna at Seeking Justice. (Since Tom’s URL is ConfoundingTheWicked.blogspot, here’s some too old to still be under copyright Mozart for the classical music lovers out there.)
Let me throw Joel Jacobsen’s erudite Judging Crimes into that mix as well. It’s from a prosecutor’s point of view, and worth an addition to any criminal lawyer’s RSS reader.
Ken points out that both Western Justice and Defending People “share an affinity” for the same painting, Pollice Verso, so how about some prosecutorial props for Dallas Sidebar – and of course his masthead: Raphael’s Judgment of Solomon.
By the way, Mark has revamped his site recently, so the thumbs up/thumbs down painting is less recognizable- but more importantly, jury consultant Anne Reed reminds me to remind my readers that you need to resubscribe to Mark’s blog since he moved to WordPress. If “Blog or Government Propaganda Tool” is the last item in your reader, you are literally 50+ posts behind.
Back to prosecutors… Sarena Straus found a new prosecutor blogger in ‘You… For the People’ – but I fear that ‘You’ may have suffered the typical two posts and out fate that many bloggers suffer. Meanwhile, Sarena mostly tells us about her post prosecutorial upcoming TV appearances – such as this one:
We will be discussing the case of Jennifer Latham. Latham kidnapped an infant from a Florida hospital and was apprehended a short time later.
The judge, believing that Latham had no prior convictions, agreed to release her without bail on the condition that she wear an ankle bracelet with a GPS. It was later discovered that Latham had a criminal record in another state.
We will be discussing whether the judge's decision was appropriate. I'm sure you can guess what my position is....
I’ll cop to not seeing the show, but since I was asked to guess, let me surmise that her position was… “You’ve got to keep people in jail until you absolutely confirm that they have no prior history anywhere.” And then perhaps… “Once you confirm that there is no prior history, keep them in jail anyway, because you can’t ever actaully prove a negative”?
So Ken’s mostly right. There aren’t many prosecutor blogging about criminal law and almost nothing but criminal law. But I think there are more than three.
Anyone else out there subscribe to some that I haven’t mentioned? And any prosecutors out there starting a blog, please feel free to email me, I'll be happy to give your new blog a little link love.
Sarena Straus writes about the dangers of jurors judging the demeanor of a witness and deducing truthfulness:
As a prosecutor I learned that there is no pattern to how people grieve or react to trauma. In fact, the bulk of my voir dire often focused on whether the jury would hold it against the victim if they did not cry. In my experience, most rape victims did not cry on the stand and often they had a very flat affect while testifying.
She also points out that this applies to those who are accused of crime as well:
The other thing I learned is that people do hold it against victims and defendants when they behave in a way that the juror thinks they themselves would not behave. They think, “If I was raped, I would cry,” or “If my husband died, I would not have a party.” The truth is that you never know how you will behave when you have been traumatized or you are grieving.
Good points. And defense lawyers need to be especially aware of covering this sort of “evidence” in jury selection, as Sarena points out.
If you remember the Darlie Routier case, several jurors said the strongest evidence was the videotape of the family having a birthday party and using silly string four days after the murders. They just knew they wouldn’t have done that, so they convicted her…
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Too often the phrase “splitting the baby” is equated with justice. And sometimes the arbiters of justice in our modern world (judges) believe that giving something to both parties involved in a dispute is the wise and fair thing to do, after all, that’s the Wisdom of Solomon, isn’t it? Well, let’s see…
Two women having recently given birth came to King Solomon to settle an important dispute. One of the mothers had accidentally smothered her infant while sleeping, and silently replaced her dead child with the other. The mother of the living baby awoke, and realized the dead child was not hers.
They stood before the King, and argued a fairly typical “he said/she said” type situation that we see in courts today all the time. King Solomon asked for a sword, so he could cut the baby in half, and give part of the baby to each.
The real mother cried out not to cut the child in half, but to give it to the other woman. Solomon gave the baby to her, because he knew that would be the real mother’s reaction.
OK. So why is this used as an example of Solomon’s wisdom? Because he was really going to split the baby? Of course not.
The Wisdom of Solomon was in devising a plan that would reveal the truth.
Now, I’m not suggesting that judges in our modern world have the capacity to always reach the correct decision –or to use such strong arm tactics. What I’m asking of them, however, is that they make the best decision they can, with the facts and the applicable law, and stick to it.
Very often in the criminal law context, when a case is “he said/she said”, the law requires that a judge acquit a defendant because the State’s case has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. (It’s certainly not convicting the defendant, but “only” giving him probation, not jail – which I think some judges believe is splitting the baby.)
Giving something to both sides is not justice, nor is it following the Wisdom of Solomon.
[Post inspired by Dallas Sidebar’s use of Raphael’s famous painting which hangs in the Vatican. Good blog, and I recommend adding him to your RSS reader.]
For almost as long as I have been reading blogs, Judging Crimes, written by New Mexico appellate prosecutor Joel Jacobsen, has been on my RSS subscription list, and I highly recommend adding it to yours. One of the best written criminal law blogs on the internet, Joel’s posts are intentionally lengthier and often more thoughtful than the usual blog pieces, and I’m always amazed at the scope of references in his writing. That’s it, he’s the Dennis Miller of criminal law blogging.
For example, in today’s post “Happy 150th, Justice Brandeis”, he references no less than Herbert Spencer, the Irish potato famine, George Orwell and Gandhi.
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