People v. State

Probably the craziest thing I do on this blog, and the thing most likely to get me disbarred, is openly criticize judges. A couple friends and family members have wondered at some of the things I’ve written, and wondered if I wasn’t scared that a judge might read them. Despite the modest readership of this blog indicated by sitemeter, a couple local attorneys have randomly mentioned to me that they read the blog, and complimented me on it. I have to assume it’s likely that others in the local legal community, including possibly some judges I appear before, have read it, and aren’t amused. This realization no doubt contributes to the generalized sense of estrangement and alienation I noted in my previous post.

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The above was the original subtitle of this blog, before I changed it sometime back to “Fairly Undermining Public Confidence in the Administration of Justice.”

But you know who really excels at illuminating the philosophy and practice of law and liberty? Matt Brown, relative to whom I’m a piker. I want to highlight here a couple paragraphs from his latest post.

First:

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Tony Serra comes closest to hero-status for me, but I take him at his word when he says that he is a deeply flawed human being and that his primary motivation as a criminal defense attorney is the gratification of his own ego.

I’ve been accused of being a Bugliosi groupie. I challenge anyone to actually read And the Sea Will Tell and then tell me that Vincent Bugliosi was not a badass criminal defense attorney. This doesn’t mean he’s a hero of mine that I aspire to emulate. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a former prosecutor to enter the kingdom of heaven, at least until after he’s smoked a turd in Purgatory for every hour of unjust incarceration for which he is responsible. (Both Serra and Gerry Spence are also former prosecutors, by the way.) But I’ve got to respect a guy, perhaps especially a guy primarily famous for being a prosecutor, who has written things like this, this and this. Read those links, and then tell me whose “side” Bugliosi is on.

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First, Mark Bennett wrote a post reversing his previous condemnation of John Regan, the formerly anonymous author of the Lawyers on Strike blog, as a “coward.”

Then, Scott Greenfield tried to kick John Regan’s ass and “revealed” that John Regan was also commenter “John R.”.

Then, Bennett updated his post to write of John Regan that “it might be better for the criminal-justice system if he stays in Canada.” Bennett’s reversal of his reversal was based on the following comment left by John R. at Greenfield’s blog in 2010, which both Greenfield and Bennett at the time adjudged “scary bad”:

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In a comment on Mark Bennett’s post criticizing a Colorado district attorney’s plan to offer cash bonuses to her deputy prosecutors who participate in at least 5 trials in a year and win a felony conviction in at least 70% of them, I remarked:

I agree with Gerry Spence: If a prosecutor is doing his job right, he should never lose at trial.

[As I noted in this post, Spence wrote of his stint as a prosecutor in The Making of a Country Lawyer:

I finished my second term having tried many more cases, none of which I lost, not that such a record stands for much. With all the power prosecutors possess, they ought not lose cases. The wrong case, the unjust case should be rejected in the prosecutor’s office before he seeks an indictment.]

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