Bolstering the troubling trend toward more, and longer, mandatory minimum sentences, the Supreme Court today upheld the federal Armed Career Criminal Act, which allows prosecutors to seek longer mandatory sentences if a defendant has 3 or more prior convictions for crimes that are either violent felonies or serious drug offenses. In James v. United States,…
Randy Barnett, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, has an excellent op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Barnett makes a great case for the critical role that defense lawyers play in protecting the rights of the innocent, and why that means that the rights of the guilty must be protected, too. Barnett’s…
My apologies for not posting today. Sometimes the horror of life intervenes. My prayers are with those killed in the shootings at Virginia Tech today, and their families.
As if bowing to the wave of political correctness and abandoning their students to the public lynch mob last year were not enough, Duke University officialdom remains more or less unrepentant. The day after the charges against the Duke Three were dismissed, I received the following email from the Chairman of Duke’s Board of Trustees…
That is the focus of an article in the April 23rd issue of Newsweek. While largely a rehash of information available from other sources over the past year, the piece does provide some new details and is worth a read. One thing is clear – and was clear before the article – is that there…
Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor, who evidently intends to prosecute the case himself, announced on Thursday that the Commonwealth will not seek the death penalty in the case of Penn professor Rafael Robb, who is accused of brutally bludgeoning his wife to death. Interesting decision. Castor said that its not a death penalty case…
In a post on his blog, ABC’s Terry Moran has posted one of the most insipid, offensive analyses of the dismissal of the charges against the Duke Three that I have seen. Moran’s analysis, in a nutshell, is that the three lacrosse players are not entitled to the sympathy that has been directed toward them…
A New York state trial judge has denied a motion to dismiss fraud and breach of fiduciary duty claims against the New York Stock Exchange’s CEO, John Thain, the New York Law Journal reported this morning. The claims against Thain arise out of the Big Board’s merger with Archipelago Holdings in 2005, and its related…
Philadelphia lawyer Larry Charles, about whom I posted previously when he was found naked with a 14v year old girl in a room in the Criminal Justice Center, faces charges for assaulting 5 other women, the Inquirer reported this morning. Mr. Charles was found in a Bucks County motel, apparently having suffered a drug overdose.
Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong today issued what in his mind passes for an apology to the three Duke University lacrosse players who he had indicted, and planned to prosecute based upon the lies of Crystal Mangum, and whose lives he tried so hard to destroy. Nifong, of course, couches his not so mea…
