Football season is here again, friends! The stadiums are packed with cheering fans, parking lots are full of tailgaters, and somehow I’ve once again decided the actions of a bunch of young men aged 18-23 will decide my mood on weekends for the rest of the year at minimum.

My beloved Tennessee Volunteers are in a bit of a rebuild again this year. Our quarterback is Faizon Brandon, a true freshman who looks like he’s got the potential to really make some waves this season. In his opening game against Furman, Brandon scored five touchdowns. The last QB to achieve that feat in the SEC was a fellow named Cam Newton. Continue reading →

As long-time readers will know, I’m reluctant to write about 9/11. It affected me greatly, having my office at the time on the 51st Floor of the Woolworth Building with my windows facing the twin towers. I knew people who didn’t survive. From my desk chair, I had a panoramic view of The Site (the rest of the country and the media called it “Ground Zero,” but those of us who were there called it “The Site”). There were body and airplane parts on the roofs of neighboring buildings below for the next year or so. I stopped looking out my office windows after 9/11.

My practice effectively ceased for more than six months following 9/11. The electric and telephones were lost for more than six months. I was allowed to enter the red zone because of my office location, and walked up the 51 floors to reach it. But there wasn’t much reason, as I couldn’t reach my clients, they couldn’t reach me, and without telephones, there would be no new cases. Continue reading →

There is no way Masoumeh Ebtekar, or “Screaming Mary” as she was known, should be allowed to enter or remain in the United States. She was the “spokesperson for the students who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held fifty-two people hostage for over a year.” She deserves our condemnation. She earned it.

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio took his condemnation one step further.

Rubio tweeted:

Masoumeh Ebtekar – also known as “Screaming Mary” – was the spokeswoman for the Islamic terrorists who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days – subjecting them to beatings, starvation, and mock executions. . . . Her family should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country. America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families – and under the Trump Administration, it never will.

Continue reading →

As it turned out, the pre-mistrial perception that the Lindsay Clancy jury was divided 11 to one was correct. With three jurors speaking out, it’s become clear that one juror, despite believing that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, refused to vote for “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Eleven of twelve jurors had agreed not to convict Ms. Clancy. Then the one holdout “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” the jury’s forewoman, Roni Carlson, said in an interview with the television station NBC10 in Boston on Tuesday.

So that was the end of deliberations? Not quite. Continue reading →

My older sister walked me to Washington Elementary School, about a mile from my home, when I was in kindergarten. Then again, she was in fifth grade and attended the same school. When I entered first grade, I was on my own, like pretty much every other student. No one considered this unusual or problematic. The idea that kids shouldn’t be allowed to go places on their own was unthinkable at the time. Then again, the words “stranger” and “danger” had yet to be connected.

Not only has there been a distinct shift in the propriety of parents allowing their young (and not so young) children to be outside on their own, but other people observing children walking without a parent or guardian hovering over them have assumed a duty to call the police on other people for allowing their children to be “free range,” as Lenore Skenazy calls it. That’s what happened to Virginia mother Karyann Parkinson. Continue reading →

Being a criminal defense lawyer has, unsurprisingly, provided me with the opportunity to speak with a great many people who are inclined to commit crimes. It has allowed me to recognize the pathologies, the different worldview of people who put their self-interest above all else. Hard as it is for some to imagine, there are people who, for whatever reason, see the constraints of ethics, morality, virtues and humility as either the tools of fools or gambits to be played for one’s own advantage to win the game. There is, at least in their grasp of reality, nothing that matters except winning the game, and everything else is a mere weapon to be employed as needed to win.

Roy Cohn was such a person. So too is his weak-minded protégé. Continue reading →

When a trial ends with a hung jury, the law allows the case to be retried before a new jury. That’s the law, and it should be clear that any claim to the contrary is not the law. At least not yet.

The discharge of a deadlocked jury follows one of two events. The first is that the defendant moves or consents to the mistrial, which happens most of the time since a hung jury beats a conviction any day.  The second is the court finding of  “manifest necessity,” an urgent and overwhelming need to secure a fair trial. A deadlocked jury fills the bill. A deliberate act by prosecutors that compels a mistrial, such as showing the jury prejudicial inadmissible evidence, on the other hand, does not.

The rationale. as explained by justice Hugo Black in Wade v. Hunter, 1949, for permitting a retrial after a jury is unable to reach a unanimous verdict is, if nothing else, practical. Continue reading →

Friends, when one decides to start up a fight promotion, the general rule of thumb is you don’t want the fighters putting you out of business before you run your first show. Unfortunately for the team at Duel Arena, they decided to fund a bunch of crazy people to fight on Youtube.

And somehow, I found out about this shit.

“Duel Arena 1” was a fight card that happened last weekend. It was a hybrid card featuring exhibition boxing matches, MMA fights, and kickboxing matches all in a cage. Because that’s what we do these days in America. We say “rules be damned,” and we throw influencers, former pro wrestlers, and kickboxers in a cage for fun because crypto bros have too much money.

But let’s actually discuss the craziness that happened here, because it’s a slow day and I’ve got nothing better to make fun of. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This is Part II of a guest post by Madison, Wisconsin, criminal defense lawyer Christopher Van Wagner. Part I can be found here.

Anyone of a certain age recalls the famous closing argument by the late Johnny Cochran: “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” What many may not recall is that it was not Cochran but a prosecutor, Christopher Darden, who risked it all by having Simpson try on the glove despite not taking the stand. Darden lost it all with that blunder.

He tripped on the oldest of trial maxims: Never ask a question if you do not know the answer. Yet in doing so, Darden gave Cochran the line that grabbed the attention of all twelve deliberating jurors and prompted a four-hour acquittal, barely enough time to get the deliberating jury’s sushi delivered and eaten, what with LA traffic. But what that ill-advised demonstration provided was the thing most defense lawyers have long sought: an argument, a point, or a piece of evidence which raised a nagging, persistent doubt in the minds of all twelve jurors, such that they were unanimously compelled to acquit. A criminal defense Rosetta Stone of sorts. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This is a guest post by Madison, Wisconsin, criminal defense lawyer Christopher Van Wagner.

It has been a busy week for Court TV’s Managing Editor Cathy Russon at Law & Crime: she has dabbled in Tupac, Charlie Kirk, and now Lindsay Clancy. But she may be onto something in Clancy.

After the Clancy jury issued its second “deadlock” note to Judge William Sullivan, the judge finally relented and gave the frozen jury the notably soft-serve Massachusetts version of an Allen charge, dubbed Tuey-Rodriguez and commonly called the “dynamite” charge, by any criminal lawyer under 50 anyway. The Twittersphere exploded with cries of “enough punishment already” for this jury. The “coercion” or blasting cap language in that “try harder, please” instruction, you ask? Continue reading →