People v. State

By publicly announcing my support for Matt Brown’s Tempe Criminal Defense blog in my last post I didn’t mean to slight the other worthy contenders for the 2011 ABA Journal Blawg 100 in the Criminal Justice Category.

In a recent comment on Jamison Koehler’s blog I credited him with “prompt[ing] what I regard as some of the better posts on my blog.” (Whereas I typically don’t have anything to add to Matt Brown’s posts, because I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything he writes.) But Jamison appears to be leading the race in the Criminal Justice category by a lot of votes, so he won’t miss mine.

I stopped reading Mirriam Seddiq for a while, by accident, because she apparently switched from Blogger and my RSS reader didn’t catch it. And as another blawger who presumably nominated her for the ABA 100 noted, she “might not be the most frequent updater of her blawg.” Furthermore, she apparently just identified herself as a “liberal,” and I am one of those many people she identifies who “think of liberals as scary monsters who are coming to take their paychecks and make them abort their babies.” Nevertheless, just last week I tried to refer an immigration case to her.

Doug Berman’s Sentencing Law and Policy blawg is in my RSS reader, but he’s a lowly law professor, has been nominated to the ABA’s Blawg 100 5 out of 5 years, and is too “objective” for my tastes.

I read Mark Pryor’s D.A. Confidential blog, and he doesn’t seem like a bad person, but I of course would never have voted for him in the Criminal Justice category, because he’s a prosecutor. Now, in a comment on Jamison’s blog Mark says “it irritates me to see this kind of knee-jerk, anti-prosecutor attitude.” Undoubtedly I’d rather have people like Mark in the prosecutor’s office than some of the scumbags I’ve seen there. But the fact remains that prosecutors, relative to criminal defense attorneys, at best serve Justice only indirectly, and by prosecuting people for things that aren’t crimes but that politicians say are crimes are themselves responsible for ruining the lives of innocent people and are themselves Guilty.

I don’t read the other prosecution-oriented blog on the ABA 100, Crime & Consequences, and have no intention of starting.

I haven’t read Matt Kaiser’s Federal Criminal Appeals Blog or Nathaniel Burney’s The Criminal Lawyer blog, but thanks to the ABA 100 am adding them to my RSS reader.

I removed Mark Bennett’s Defending People blog from my RSS reader a while back for something stupid, but am putting it back in.

Same for Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice blog. John Regan today made an interesting observation about one of Scott’s famous bitch slaps in the comments section of Simple Justice:

I think I understand, though, why Scott Greenfield feels it is necessary to draw such bright lines where none are called for, and forcefully shouts down any contrary view.  There is a concern underlying the general rule that is at the heart of the matter:  the lawyer must maintain objectivity, and the client is always ill served if he doesn’t.  It’s more or less the essence of the attorney’s job to be able to see the client’s legal problems objectively.

Some people have a lot of trouble maintaining their objectivity and I suspect Scott is one of them.  And I don’t really mean this in a derogatory way, because the bottom line is that he gives a shit.  That is an important and good quality.  The captain I most enjoyed serving under in the Navy was very attuned to this quality and wanted to see it in his officers, and I’m in complete agreement that it’s an important virtue.  There are too many people who don’t give a shit.

I responded to John’s observation in a comment here:

I was surprised to realize Greenfield has never won the Criminal Justice category in the ABA’s beauty pageant. I just assumed he’d won a couple times early on and that since then voters have wanted to give other blogs a chance. As much as I disagree with him, and as much as I resent the fact he’s banned me twice, and as often as he gets a wild hair up his ass and tries to dish out ass-whuppins to people who don’t deserve it, I think you’re obviously right that he gives a shit.

Reading this passage towards the end of The Surgeon’s Wife a couple years ago made Scott a lot more human for me:

Bob’s eyes were vacant and he wore the hopeless expression of one recently damned to the criminal pit of prison. Dazed, dressed in a tan “Tombs” jumpsuit and orange sneakers issued by the jail, he greeted Scott and asked his lawyer the same question over and over again:

“What happened? How did this happen?”

Bob could not comprehend how he could be sitting behind bars when the prosecution did not have any evidence.

“We failed you,” Scott said, sullenly. “You believed in the system, you believed in your lawyers and we failed to protect you from the insanity. You trusted me and I failed.”

“But, I’m in jail,” Bob said, as if he were stating an impossibility, something that went against the laws of nature.

“I know,” said Scott.

 

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