Probable Cause

The other day, I was sitting in a courtroom waiting for a case to be called.  I was stuck.  Having received a call from another attorney, a very good friend who could not make it to the courtroom, I agreed to make a courtesy appearance for her to ask for a continuance.

When I arrived, another case was in progress: an extradition hearing.  I’d never observed or been involved in an extradition hearing.  The person they were trying to extradite, through his lawyer, was making numerous objections to the evidence being admitted.  And, in particular, he was repeatedly objecting that the California Evidence Code — which he believed the court was ignoring — should apply in this extradition hearing.

That’s how it happened that I got myself into a little pickle.

(more…)

Albert Einstein once said:

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

Experiments help us find the answers to problems.  Experiments help us find the Truth, or the closest thing to it.  Without experiments, the world so many of us take for granted today would not exist.

But what does this mean?  What is an experiment?  And why am I, an attorney, writing about it on a legal blog?

(more…)

Miami criminal defense attorney Brian Tannebaum writes about people who fear that hiring an attorney will make them look guilty.  I see this, too, although by the time people call me, they’ve usually gotten past that point.

More often what I see is people who become uncomfortable after I tell them to stop talking to others.  In particular, I want them to stop talking to the police.  That’s when I tend to hear, “But won’t I look guilty?”

And my response to them is the same as Brian’s response to people who think they’ll look guilty just by hiring an attorney: “No.  You already look guilty.”

And that’s just one of the reasons innocent people need lawyers.

(more…)

Maybe that title is a little too cute.  (I picked it after Kerry Prindiville, a librarian at the Fresno Public Law Library, sent me the link to an article on the use of social networking sites by jury consultants.)  And maybe it’s time for me to move on from writing about MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites.  It’s something of a hot topic, however, and I have some pretty strong feelings about it.

My other articles about this may be found here and here. Those articles have started to attract some attention of their own….

(more…)

In my last post, I talked about prosecutors and police using MySpace and Facebook against defendants in criminal cases. A few days after posting that, I received a call from a reporter from LawyersUSA in Boston. He was writing an article on the same subject and wanted to ask me some questions about how lawyers could handle the situation in court.

What I told him was…

(more…)

If MySpace and Facebook mean anything, looking like a clown is the new cool.¹ However, if you’ve been charged with a crime, you might want to consider at least temporarily re-vamping the camp: a MySpace makeover could keep you from suffering a stiffer sentence if you are convicted. A Facebook face-lift can make it easier for your lawyer to convince the District Attorney you deserve a break.

(more…)

1. In the interest of staying alive, I’ve decided not to post any examples. [↩]