People v. State

Noted A. E. Housman, whom Darrow visited in 1927. Housman has long been a personal favorite of mine, ever since I was turned on to him (and Omar, and Reading Gaol) by Robert Service’s poem “Bookshelf.” Here’s a representative sample:

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.

I am, alas, not particularly inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement,  for sentiments suggested by the poem above and reasons expressed by Thomas Knapp, Gerry Spence, and especially Claire Wolfe, who advises: “Occupy Your Ownself.”

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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What follows is an email I sent today to Norm Pattis, with links to pertinent posts on various blogs added:

Norm,

I am completely disgusted by Greenfield’s hit piece on you. The guy’s a raging hypocrite. Look at his very first blog post at Simple Justice. It clearly had in mind as an audience and was directed to potential clients.

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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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