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 executing the factually innocent? It seemed a simple question. On the one hand, the answer
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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 and even if you aren’t is a book about Bernie Goetz and the shootings and
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 those posts.). I thought I knew quite a lot about it:
- how the drugs were
Today in History
Today is Juneteenth, the newest, most recently enacted federal holiday. That’s the date in 1865 when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, with the news that slavery was over. But dates are tricky things. And as we rightly celebrate liberty and freedom today, so, if you know me, you know there’s also a dark side to
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 from members who might take positions that, you know, THE [stodgy] STATE BAR OF TEXAS
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 – and I will even if you won’t) it’s own past as well as . .
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 seven months later, on June 28, 1919. So not the end of the war, but
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 of aggravated murder. Anyone who is found guilty of doing that faces a minimum of
A Moment of Remembrance
September 15, 1963. Sixty years ago today.Birmingham, Alabama, USAThese girls
This church
You know, this one
Here they are again
Sixty years ago today.
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 a capital defense lawyer with a blawg who hasn’t written much in recent years.* *