It’s that time of year again! Time to recognize the effort and thoughtfulness of criminal law blawgers with our annual Best Criminal Law Blawg Post, which has been dedicated to the memory of our dear friend Joel Rosenberg.

Unlike the other Beauty Pageants in the blawgosphere, the idea here is to provide a platform to revisit the excellent work done over the past year.  Past winners of the JDog prize are luminaries of the blawgosphere,  Ohio’s Jeff Gamso, Connecticut’s  Gideon Strumpet, Texas’  Mark Bennett and Arizona’s Matt Brown. Continue reading →

The snitch gave the police a tip that might strike a Yankee as odd, but apparently sounded credible enough to the police anti-narcotics squad (as opposed to the pro-narcotics squad in Harris County) in Parker County, Texas.  Via Raw Story:

Officers in Parker County took Michael Fred Wehrenberg and some associates into custody in summer 2010, after watching his home for about a month as part of a drug investigation.

A confidential informant told police that Wehrenberg and others were “fixing to” cook methamphetamine, and investigators searched the house while he and his friends stood outside in handcuffs.

Police said they found pseudoephedrine, stripped lithium batteries and materials used to make meth and then asked a judge to grant them a warrant to search the house.

What does “fixing to” cook meth mean? Continue reading →

Seth Godin has a remarkable ability to deal with the complexity of human behavior in short, astute bursts, and his posts have provided me with a great deal of insight. But as with all bloggers (myself included), not every post is a winner.  This one was a mutt:

Vampires, of course, feed on something that we desperately need but also can’t imagine being a source of food.

You have metaphorical vampires in your life. These are people that feed on negativity, on shooting down ideas and most of all, on extinguishing your desire to make things better.

Are there “vampires,” assuming you’re into the fashion trend Continue reading →

If criminal defense lawyers think they have it hard, it seems as though we’re living large compared to the misery of a prosecutor’s life.  Or so says a commenter named “Paul” to Judge Richard Kopf’s Hercules and the Umpire post on Chief Judge Alex Kozinski’s Olsen dissent.

So it’s clear, Paul gives no last name nor identifying information to pinpoint where, in the spectrum of Justice (with a capital “J”) he lives, but from the content of his comment, it’s clear that he’s telling the tale of woe from behind a rock in the dark corner of a federal courthouse.

“[E]pidemic”?  No.  Just hyperbole from Judge Kozinski.  But that is not surprising. Continue reading →

Despite the original claims by Taser International that its weapon of choice was non-lethal, the trail of dead bodies it left behind really screwed with the advertising budget.  Not even their own special cause of death did the trick.  What else could Taser do?

Via The Verge:

On the day before Thanksgiving this year, international stun gun and cop-cam company Taser International, Inc. announced it had given up its fight in two major legal battles over “suspect injury or death.” In a 275-word , the company’s chief financial officer said it would pay a total of $2.3 million in settlements to plaintiffs who had sued the company in product liability cases. Continue reading →

In her concurring opinion in United States v. Jones, empathetic Latina Justice Sonia Sotomayor pondered the question of the digital age:

More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to accept this “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” and perhaps not. Continue reading →

As a defendant walks before an arraigning judge for the first time on a drug charge, there is one crucial detail that’s simply assumed: the substance at issue is drugs.  Assuming a quick plea doesn’t dispose of the case, the substance will eventually be tested in a laboratory, and assuming the lab tech doesn’t lie, screw it up or cross-contaminate it, there will be a definitive answer as to whether it’s drugs or, say, soap.

In the case of Annadel Cruz and Alexander Bernstein, it turned out to be soap.  They only spent a month in jail awaiting that conclusion.

A state trooper pulled the couple over Nov. 13 on Interstate 78 in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, for driving 5 mph over the speed limit and hugging the side of the lane. Continue reading →

Following Judge Kozinski’s extraordinary dissent to the denial of en banc review in United States v. Olsen, Judge Richard Kopf put the question on the table:

The judge writes: “There is an epidemic of Brady violations abroad in the land. Only judges can put a stop to it.” United States v. Olsen, Nos. 10-36063-36064 (9th Cir., December 10, 2013) (dissent). Is the most interesting man in the world merely trying to be interesting or is HE right?

As interesting as the opinions of others may be, the far more interesting question is what Judge Kopf thought of Judge Kozinski’s opinion and, to push the envelope a bit farther, how would he, as a district court judge, cure the disease, if disease it was. Continue reading →

At PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman asks an interesting question: How precise must a student’s answer on a test be when employing the language of the law:

Law is a language. It involves a particular way of speaking and the use of certain phrases and terms, some often confusing or cumbersome, having arcane meanings and/or drawn from statutes and rules which themselves often are not well drafted. But it is the language we are stuck with and the language that they must use in the practice of law. That is a particular thing in class such as Civil Procedure and Evidence–“failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted,” “proof sufficient to support a finding,” “meet the burden of production on the non-existence of the presumed fact” . . . it goes on. Continue reading →

In a comment to a post that was uncontroversial to experienced criminal defense lawyers, but less so to others, Charles Morrison wrote:

You are about to read something you are (probably) unused to seeing here: you are right. You have convinced me that a regulatory scheme that differentiates between attorneys is a bad idea.  I’m willing to admit that my initial inclination is wrong after having considered arguments.

I don’t know who Charles Morrison is. Continue reading →