I was going to write a response to Popehat’s post from last night that the verdict in the Johannes Mehserle trial was the correct one, but I noticed that Scott Greenfield beat me to it this morning. I get the point that Popehat is trying to make – that if you argue in favor of […]
So, a man is convicted of raping and murdering a teenage girl in El Paso. While in jail and awaiting appeal for his death sentence, he finds religion. As prosecutors argue for the death penalty, his religion is invoked to portray how he’s changed since the crime was committed. Similar stories to this aren’t uncommon, […]
I read a lot of blogs every day. There’s a folder in my RSS reader called “law” with somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 blogs in it. A lot of them are by criminal defense lawyers. Some are by journalists. A couple are by prosecutors, and a few are by public defenders. And a few […]
This post by Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice reminded me of this article that’s on the cover of The Onion this week. Sadly, that’s often the case when reading criminal justice stories. Greenfield details the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision that overturned a death sentence for a man convicted of killing two police […]
High on the list of things I never gave a bit of thought to before I started working in the office at Sumpter & Gonzalez: the way criminal defense attorneys were portrayed in the media. I wasn’t among the camp who thought they were Bad People Who Get Criminals Off (I believe that’s an official […]
There’s a maxim favored by lazy journalists that say three of any incident – even something absurd, like spotting hipsters with potbellies – constitutes a newsworthy trend. And it’s certainly weird, when you see totally unrelated instances of the same thing pop up. I don’t know that I’d be calling the New York Times for […]
Convicted child killer Raul Meza is fired for the second time in as many months. It’s been 28 years since eight-year-old Kendra Page was raped and murdered in Southeast Austin. The man convicted of the crime, Raul Meza, is currently attempting the transition back into society. It’s what Page’s big sister, Tracy, has been dreading, […]
So, we re-launched our website about six weeks ago on a new domain. We were at sg-llp.com, and now we’re at sumptergonzalez.com. The bulk of the content from the old site is up here, though there are some pages that seemed particularly obscure, and perhaps a little too overwhelming to people looking for information on […]
Dal came by my desk this morning, as he does from time to time, to tell me about a news story he’d caught before work this morning. The video’s made the rounds, and become a national news story. I watch so many videos like this one, though, that I was actually surprised it became a […]
The best criminal law blogs – ones like Simple Justice, Gamso For The Defense, Crime & Federalism, even Popehat (which is only occasionally about criminal law) – have something in common: they’re not so much about criminal law as they’re about social justice. (Mark Bennett’s excellent Defending People, meanwhile, is often about the actual practice […]