At HuffPo, Ryan Reilly writes about the devastation sequestration is wreaking on the federal defenders:

The public defender system hasn’t just been stripped bare by sequestration, its bones have been chiseled away as well. There has been a 9 percent reduction in the roughly $1 billion budget for federal public defender’s offices, while federal defenders in more than 20 states are planning to close offices. Careers have been ended and cases have been delayed. All of it has occurred in the name of deficit reduction — and yet, for all the belt-tightening being demanded of the nation’s public defenders, money is not actually being saved.

That it’s not actually saving money Continue reading →

Northern District of Ohio Senior Judge James Carr sat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, FISC, for 6 years, which means his hand must have gotten pretty darned tired and cramped from stamping approved on all those ex parte government applications.  In an op-ed in the New York Times, Judge Carr offers a salve:

Critics note that the court has approved almost all of the government’s surveillance requests. Some say the court is virtually creating Continue reading →

While I occasionally gripe about the content of blog comments, this one, fished out of my spam folder, was special.

Thanks for one’s marvelous posting! I truly enjoyed reading it, you can be a great author.I will always bookmark your blog and will eventually come back from now on. I want to encourage that you continue your great writing, have a nice morning! We absolutely love your blog and find the majority of your post’s to be just what I’m looking for. can you offer guest writers to write content available for you? I wouldn’t mind creating Continue reading →

Not that there is a lack of ironies when it comes to police interactions with the public, but few are more inane than the handling of a call for a potentially suicidal person. By definition, this is a person who courts death, and the reason for the call to police is to stop him from doing so.

Does this elude the officers, or does the First Rule of Policing trump reason? From the IndyStar:

Noblesville police shot and injured a 27-year old man Continue reading →

When Kevin O’Keefe twitted the link to me, he explained the story as being about a “blogging lawyer.”  The lawyer was Eric Dixon out of New Mexico, and if he was a “blogging lawyer,” it was news to me. So I responded to Kevin, “another blogging lawyer nobody ever heard of?”

But while Dixon and his blog may not be a household name around the blawgosphere, that doesn’t make his story any less disturbing.  From the Alamogordo Daily News:

Now Dixon’s freedom and career are at stake Continue reading →

As I’ve written before, I urge everyone to get involved in sound, well-managed and legitimate charities.  It’s not just about the cool name or facially good cause behind the charity, but about where your contributions will actually serve the cause, and serve it well.

There are no shortage of scam charities, and no shortage of fools with money, but even seemingly legitimate charities are often horrendous abusers with good press. Continue reading →

Going postal used to mean spraying one’s co-workers from a semi-automatic. While that hasn’t happened in a while, it appears that some postal workers are still just as totally nuts as ever. And they’ve figured out that the police are more useful as their cohorts than the guys putting an end to their shooting spree with a well-placed bullet.

From Mission, Kansas, where tolerance, respect and love of family are cherished values, comes the handling of a less than satisfied Continue reading →

When I read my buddy Tamar Birckhead’s post at PrawfsBlawg, I cringed. While Tamar is a clinical lawprof now at UNC, she used to be a federal defender, whose days were spent getting her butt kicked in the trenches.  This distinguished her from the others, who only knew the trenches from photographs, but also saddled her with a burden she needed to realize. She didn’t.

Her post, that Zimmerman prosecutor Angela Corey may have violated ethics by charging him with a crime she couldn’t prove, had a personal subtext. Continue reading →

Most of the time, there is a tragedy that overshadows the two fundamentally different views of what happened, so that it’s impossible to divorce the consequences from the mechanics. Not so when it comes to the story of 59-year-old Louise Goldsberry in the Herald-Tribune, where it’s about as clean and clear as it gets.

It’s basically a he said, she said story when the operating room scrub nurse arrived home from a day at work, only to find as she washed some dishes at her kitchen sink Continue reading →

It’s been quite a while since there was any life at Eric Davis’ blog, Sustained, which, if I recall correctly, went dormant right about the time Eric and his former associate, Jackie Carpenter, left private practice to join the staff of Alex Bunin’s newly created Harris County Public Defenders office.

He’s back, and brought with him his anecdotal takeaway from his undergrad teaching gig in criminal law at University of Houston.

During one of our class discussions Continue reading →