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Many moons ago, I was incredibly frustrated with a client who kept getting in trouble for the same behaviors.

He never was rearrested, but his drug use got him into problems with school, his family, and his inability to follow through on anything we had agreed to. His family was even more frustrated because he did nothing: He didn’t go to school; he didn’t complete any assignments; he didn’t follow through with his responsibilities at home; he didn’t want to go to treatment, and his drug use was occasional enough that he wasn’t really an addict. The main thing was that he just didn’t really do anything.

A little over a month ago, a blog post by a law student got a lot of attention on some of the criminal defense blogs that I read. Mostly it was because he was describing, with great pride, an interaction with the police where his superior knowledge of the law stymied the officer’s efforts to […]

Back a hundred and fifty years ago, when I was in the midst of a totally different career as a touring performance poet, I had a show in Portland, Oregon at a collectively-run coffee shop called the Red And Black Cafe. It was probably the best night I had on the west coast on that tour, and so I’ve remembered the place (and the vegan carrot cake they served) fondly. So I was surprised, a few days ago, to see a Facebook group pop up called “Boycott the Red And Black Cafe”. Who’s got a problem with a bunch of Portland coffee anarchists?

It turns out that the place had actually been making national news for an incident in which they exercised their right to refuse service to a uniformed police officer who’d stopped by for a cup. The Internet, of course, got all huffy about it. That’s what the Internet is for, after all. And I’ll admit that it looks kind of petty – the cop is probably a pretty nice guy, all things considered (most people are, in my experience), and he probably just thought the place looked interesting and was in the mood for a cup of coffee. It is a neat-looking coffee shop. N0 one’s account of the incident had the officer bothering customers or behaving in any capacity other than as a guy who wanted a cup of coffee. So on the surface, yeah, it’s pretty easy to side with the cop and the Internet. The anarchist coffee shop was rude!

Once again, criminal defense attorneys prove to be the canaries in the coal mine. Many of our colleagues in the civil bar understand why their work has slowed down, but they believe that the economic downturn would help our business.  Not so. For the past year we’ve been explaining that people are keeping their nose to the […]

This evening the 5th grade class of Bryker Woods Elementary School presented their annual installment of a self-written and self-produced opera. The theme involved time travel, and the most clever part of the performance was a collection of kids in refrigerator boxes posing as iPeople who happily ate broccoli, took out the garbage, and finished unpleasant math assignments.

There’ve been a lot of good blog posts this week about the Berghuis v. Thompkins Supreme Court decision that (as Justice Sotomayor succinctly put it in her dissenting opinion) presumes that a person facing police interrogation has waived his or her fifth and sixth amendment rights unless that person explicitly informs the police (in language […]

Every Thursday at noon I attempt to mentor a 5th grader at Sanchez Elementary School. There are a number of different mentorship programs in Austin, but the Seedling Foundation is different: We mentor children whose parents are in prison.

This week the Austin Young Lawyer’s Association bestowed Kristin Etter with the prestigious 2010 President’s Award for her work and community outreach in prison re-entry.

Several years ago, one of our neighbor’s kids got into a significant amount of trouble. We’re not talking about “I got caught with pot at school” trouble. We’re not talking about “I shoplifted something at Target” kind of trouble.

We’re talking about First Degree Aggravated Robbery kind of trouble. Exposure to life in prison kind of trouble. The prosecutor’s first offer was 20 years in prison kind of trouble.

Last week I had the pleasure of spending the day with our forensic psychology doctoral student, Lauren Farwell. (Both of us also had the pleasure of getting up at 4:00 a.m. to drive to Ft. Worth for a hearing, but that’s another matter.)

During our drive, we had a great conversation about why forensic psychologists have a much better quality of life than criminal defense lawyers. Specifically, in our differing roles as advocates.