It’s been decades since I underlined or wrote in the margins of books, really dating back to some point when I was in college and began instead writing notes on bits of paper and stuffing them into the binding. These
For the Defense
For the Defense, published by Jeff Gamso, focuses on criminal defense issues with particular attention to capital punishment, including lethal injection protocols and their legal challenges. The blog also addresses broader legal topics such as bar admission standards, law school accreditation, and the role of professional organizations like state bars and the ABA. It discusses First Amendment issues, including libel law and free speech protections, often reflecting on historical and contemporary legal controversies. The content combines legal analysis with personal insights and commentary on the justice system and legal profession.
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Latest from For the Defense
Well, He Kinda Pardoned Her
FIRST ANECDOTESeveral decades ago, I was invited to a meeting to help figure out how to prioritize and then advance the goals of an anti-death penalty organization. Should we, the group’s conveners asked, be focusing on the risk and evil of…
Bernie Goetz Is Not the Subject of This Post (though when I've finished the book I might review it here)
So this retired criminal defense lawyer is sitting in his recliner one summer evening in Phoenix, Arizona (10 pm temperature a nippy 92 after a high today 106) reading Fear and Fury, which if you’re old enough to remember…
Until They Are Dead
Back in the day, when I was writing this blawg on a regular basis, I wrote often about lethal injection. (You can click the link on the “Labels” section at the top right if you want to bury yourself in…
Uncle Fred and the Texas Bar
Decades ago, back probably when I was a baby lawyer, the Texas Bar Journal (the, er, literary arm of THE STATE BAR OF TEXAS to which every Lone Star State lawyer must belong) announced that it was looking for contributions…
The Past. It's Always the Past.
“The past,” Faulkner famously said, is never dead. It’s not even past.”
So when this blawg returned two days ago from what certainly seemed the dead, it was a Faulknerian return hearkening to and including (resurrecting, if you will –
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11/11: 11 a.m.
Eleventh of November. Eleven in the morning. 1918. That’s when the armistice ending the fighting in the War to End All Wars went into effect. Not the end of the war. That wouldn’t come until the Treaty of Versailles, more than…
Executioners
No person shall purposely, and with prior calculation and design, cause the death of another or the unlawful termination of another’s pregnancyThat’s Section 2903.01(A) of the Ohio Revised Code setting forth the elements of one form of the crime…
A Moment of Remembrance
Tree of . . . Life (?)
Article after article, op-ed after op-ed tells us that the Jewish community is torn, that the Torah and the Jewish tradition and the rabbis can’t all agree. Which is a problem if you’re looking for a authority. Me, I’m just…