The unfortunate fact about the criminal law system is that human errors are oftentimes unavoidable and leave huge flaws within the system. Unclear testimonies, poor eye witness accounts, and a less-than-great attorney are all things that could land an innocent person behind bars. Last week’s story about Dallas local, Michael Phillips, is a great example of these flaws and really shows the importance of criminal defense. When the front page of the newspaper reads “Man Arrested on Murder Charges”, most people automatically jump to the conclusion that the man was in fact the murderer. As a defense attorney, it is my job and passion to look at it differently. The sensitive and lengthy nature of criminal cases makes it possible
Read more →In 2013, Annie Dookhan, a chemist in one of Boston’s crime labs, made headlines when she pleaded guilty to 27 accounts of misleading investigators, filing false reports and tampering with evidence. Investigations revealed that Dookhan forged the initials of evidence officers, tested numerous samples without properly signing them out, dry labbed samples (visually identified drugs as opposed to forensic testing), and logged five times the average number of tests per month. The Dookhan scandal forced her lab to close and freed hundreds of defendants who suffered a violation of their right to a fair trial. Now sentenced to 3-5 years, Dookhan is facing the consequences for her betrayal of public trust. Now it seems as though Bexar County may have
Read more →Darrow’s The Story of My Life I must admit, if I am not reading for work, I read for escape. I do not often read legal themed fiction, and I have only read a few biographies of jurists. I stumbled across Clarence Darrow’s The Story of My Life and something about the old man’s piercing stare on the cover persuaded me to pick it up. At the time he wrote this book, Darrow had been practicing law more than ten times as long as I have. He was almost 50 years older than I am now. I think as an author he was a realist, to an extent, in that he knew the reader was mostly interested in his career
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