Legal

Remember Lori Drew? She's the woman who used MySpace to play a very unkind trick on a teenage girl named Megan Meier, who killed herself. Prosecutors in Missouri, where Drew and Meier both lived, didn't prosecute her for this, probably because saying mean things to little girls isn't a criminal act. That didn't stop grandstanding U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien from stepping … [Read more...] about TOS OMG

I'm not sure, but I think I may have just taken a huge step toward solving one of the toughest problems in criminal law: The meaning of reasonable doubt. It is famously difficult to define this standard for members of the jury, which is a problem, because they're supposed to use it to decide if someone is guilty. Scott Greenfield brought this up again a couple of months ago in … [Read more...] about Towards a Definition of Reasonable Doubt: A Modest Proposal

Jamison Koehler takes on the topic of accepting responsibility. I read about it all the time in crime stories and legal blogs: The defendant is convicted, and the severity of his sentence depends on a number of factors, one of which is "accepting responsibility" for his crime. Jamison saw a case where it went like this: During sentencing, the judge told Bruckheim that he was … [Read more...] about Stalin In the Courtroom

There's a lovely case over at Simple Justice today. According to the news story, it went something like this: A guy was murdered, and a man named Douglas Warney came forward to police saying he knew something about the victim. Police interrogated him, and he apparently confessed, providing eleven details about the murder that only the killer could have known. He was found … [Read more...] about Good Guys Don’t Suborn False Confessions

Back in July of 2009, I declared myself the Greatest Criminal Defense Blogger in Chicago. This was not a boast, it was a lament. I am not a lawyer, and most of my posts have nothing to do with criminal defense. Yet I seemed to be blogging more about criminal defense than any actual Chicago lawyer. Rob Deters was gone, Steven Molo's blog was fake, and James Dimeas mostly just … [Read more...] about Oh My God, Chicago Has a Criminal Defense Blogger!