BWO Partner Caleb Mason has published an essay on how Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh may handle criminal procedure issues: "On Criminal Justice, Kavanaugh Might Be More Centrist than Kennedy."...
If you’re a kid, or have kids (more likely, if you’re reading a law firm blog), you’ve probably heard of Jake Paul. If not, that’s ok—think of him as the Disney Channel version of Anthony Scaramucci. Jake Paul is a teenager who posts videos on...
Last week I offered my first lesson gleaned from defending clients in 2016: investigate faster and more thoroughly than the government. It's time for Lesson Two: File better written work product than the government. You can win or lose a case based on the quality of...
To start off 2017, I thought I’d offer a few reflections from some cases I’ve completed over the past year, on what it takes to be successful as a criminal defense lawyer. Over the next few days, I’ll post on a few of those lessons. ...
Last week the U.S. Department of Justice issued directives to all DOJ agencies regarding accurate analysis and presentation of forensic evidence. The directives can be found here. Directive Number 1 provides that agencies must now “ensure that forensic examiners are not using the expressions ‘reasonable scientific...
When a person is charged with a crime, his or her first worry is conviction. When the government charges a defendant, it throws all its resources and authority into putting that person in prison. And it usually succeeds. Most criminal charges result in guilty pleas,...
So you were thinking that Speaker of the House is a cursed position? Enough to make a grown man cry (and cry and cry, and chain-smoke, and quit)? You can now add Dennis Hastert’s troubles to the list of woes besetting Speakers. Hastert, the longest-serving...
When Kim Davis, clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, got out of jail and went back to work, her first order of business was to announce publicly that while she’s not ordering her deputy clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, she “want[s] the...
This month the CEO of United Airlines resigned amid allegations that United had attempted to curry favor with the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey by running a regular flight from Newark to South Carolina so that the official, David Samson,...
The California Department of Corrections, in a settlement of a long-running lawsuit brought by prisoners, has agreed to reduce dramatically the number of inmates held in solitary confinement. This is a reform that prisoners, academics, mental health professionals and religious activists have been seeking for decades, and it...