The stronger and more compelling the case against a criminal defendant, the more cohesive the picture of guilt painted by the prosecution in opening statement, the more defense counsel must have something coherent to say in response – an alternate story, a more complete story, or an attack on the veracity and integrity of the
It is rare if ever that a proffered expert will be deemed so unqualified as to be precluded from testifying. Why? The threshold for expertise is decidedly low. To use the Pennsylvania test, “[t]o qualify as an expert witness, a witness need only have a reasonable pretension to specialized knowledge, on a subject for which expert
Do mask-wearing witnesses deprive criminal defendants of their right of Confrontation? Does impairing the ability of jurors and lawyers to fully assess ‘demeanor’ result in less reliable trials? Can jury selection be fair of prospective jurors’ faces are covered? Or is this all a Shakespearean “much ado about nothing” because we – the great majority
Does science support a firearms and toolmark expert from saying anything more than that “the firearm may have fired the recovered casing…? Not ‘it came from this gun and no other,’ or ‘casings from the crime scene and from test fires of the suspect’s gun match,’ but a much more calibrated and restricted conclusion, evidence that is
We live in a time where every action we take, every premise we rely on, warrants scrutiny through the prisms of race and implicit bias. This reckoning, long overdue for too many individuals and institutions, was brought about by the murder by police of George Floyd and the consequent outpouring of grief, rage and commitment.
Judging the immorality of the four police officers charged with the death of George Floyd is easy. Mr. Floyd was handcuffed and on the ground, with four armed officers over him. All the police had to do was listen and stop – he would still be handcuffed, he would still be unable to harm them;
The landmark holding Crawford v. Washington, now sixteen years old, changed the framework for challenging hearsay offered against the accused in a criminal case – if the hearsay was “testimonial” in nature it is admissible only under one of two conditions: The declarant will ultimately appear at trial and thus be subject to cross-examination regarding
Too often, the mindset in negotiating is completely adversarial – we are good, they are bad; we are right, they are wrong; we are just and they are unjust; and, perhaps most perniciously, we are reasonable and they are not and will not be so. Even Ronald Reagan didn’t posture in this way – his
[This article is a chapter in the newly-published Remote Advocacy: A Guide to Survive and Thrive, NITA 2020. The entire book can be found at https://www.nita.org/publications/books-dvds/Remote-Advocacy:-A-Guide-to-Survive-and-Thrive ] Whether in a live or virtual proceeding, at trial or deposition we need exhibits. Sometimes they are the better or best proof. Sometimes they are the only
I suspect that many if not most lawyers are unaware of “narratology,” defined as “the study of structure in narratives” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/narratology, last visited April 5, 2020) or “a humanities discipline dedicated to the study of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation…” (https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/48.html, last visited April 5, 2020). Yet a definition that itself uses