defense lawyers

Lance Stott and Dax Garvin (disclosure: my professional roommates/suitemates, and personal friends) started two separate jury trials a few months ago on a Monday.

Let me digress a bit, and for the sake of clarity, define separate.

Each individual lawyer represented one and only one client. They were not co-defendants. Their charges were not related in any way.

They had never met each other.

The U.S. criminal justice system typically pits the defense against the prosecution. But defense lawyers for poor clients will get a hand from their usual adversaries when the Justice Department launches the Access to Justice initiative.

A top constitutional lawyer is taking a leave of absence from Harvard to spearhead the project.

At some point in any trial the prosecutor is going to ask a witness to identify the defendant as the person who is accused in the complaint or indictment. A fair amount of the time this witness doesn’t know the defendant personally – may never have met him – especially if it’s a police officer making an on the spot arrest for a crime alleged to have been committed within his presence or view.

Juries probably suspect the rule I’m about to annunciate. Judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers certainly know it:

I see that my buddy and noted Texas defense lawyer Mark Bennett is speaking at Center for American and International Law CLE called “The Mind and Criminal Defense”. It’s a one day course on Capital Mitigation and it sure looks interesting, but unfortunately it conflicts with my schedule.

Per year. $1,000,000.00 into Google’s coffers.

That’s my guestimate as to how much local defense lawyers are spending in these parts to advertise various phrases through Google’s AdWords program.

 I’m going to attempt to make this a substantive post, not just something that Google – or the other search engines – scans and reads for various keywords and phrases, so I’m not going to list what the most popular keywords are… but you can imagine that they focus on a combination of geography and the profession itself.

Robbie Cooper of UrbanGrounds has weighed in at the comments section of my post ‘A Staunch Pro Death Penalty Advocate Responds’.