Or do I? This quiz makes you decide if stills are from art or porn.

Somewhere around 2/3 or 3/4 of the criminal cases I handle are "dunkers" for the prosecution.  The evidence is so strong that a grade-schooler could get a conviction without breaking a sweat.  Others are triable because, while there is enough evidence for a conviction, there is room for reasonable doubt.  I've had at least one juror tell me after trial, "I think your client did it, but we aquitted because we did not think it was proved beyond a reasonable doubt."

However in a lot of the reasonable doubt cases there is often one single fact, that while it doesn't directly bear on guilt, will make my client look so bad that I feel in my gut that the jury will convict.  It is the unofficial tipping point that will turn the jurors against your client.  A common one is insulting the police officer who is just doing his job.  If the client showed his ass, the jury is less likely to give him the benefit of reasonable doubt.

I imagine a "tipping point" moment happened for to the lawyer for bribe-taking Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham when he learned that he lived on a yacht (bad fact, not many jurors live on yachts) and that he named the yacht "Dukester" (a very bad, probably fatal fact).

If I were a politician I'd stay off the boats, I still remember how bad it looked for Gary Hart after the Monkey Business fiasco.

An N.C. judge is facing her third hearing before the Judicial Standards Commission.  She has already been censured twice for improper comments during trials.

Strip club owners are the most resilient and creative beings on the planet.  No matter how many ways governments come up with to shut them down, they reinvent themselves.  It would not suprise me, if when man finally lands on Mars, we discover that the only life there is a little old guy with an airtight trailer, several dancers, a 2-Tang minimum and 2-for-1 table dances.

 

 

 

A driver has accused Ric Flair of assault in a road rage case in Charlotte, N.C.  I guess to pass The Man, you've got to beat The Man.

 

(More from WRAL.com)

 

UPDATE: Flair has turned himself in and posted bond according to The Smoking Gun.

 

Once again a law and order type who spent much of his career in the drug wars is musing that it is unwinnable.  Burley Mitchell, a former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, suggested in a speech that decriminalizing drugs might be a solution to prison overcrowding. (Story here).  I sometimes joke that the war on drugs provides job security for defense attorneys and prosecutors.  There will always be work as long as two things are true:

1. The voting public has a large appetite for tough on crime/drugs politicians.

2. The public has a large appetite for drugs.

I don't see either changing anytime soon.

Two things have undermined anti-drug efforts.  Many people see a lot of hypocrisy in the the ban on marijuana.  There is no compelling reason to treat pot differently than alcohol or cigarettes, both of which cause societal harm yet they are legal.  I've represented plenty of people who work but want to smoke a joint after work or on the weekends.  If they get caught and convicted they get sent to treatment for their addiction.  I have never seen anyone addicted to marijuana.  Some like it just like a beer drinker likes beer, and nearly 70 percent of Americans have tried it.  It is hard to respect the law when it is that hypocritical.

The other thing that is a problem is lack of treatment.  I have represented lots of cocaine and some meth users.  Most of them really seem addicted and many would like to stop.  Unlike pot users, regular crack or meth users don't seem to remain functional very long.  But there are few treatment options for cocaine or meth users outside the criminal justice system.

We spend too much time chasing down a drug that is not really that harmful and we don't have treatment available to those who really are addicted who want to quit.  If we could deal with those two things, the war on drugs might make more sense at least.

 

 

This story about a fake euthanasia for a dog sounds like a story a friend told me a few months ago.

His wife adopted a cat that he did not care for very much.  One day a radiator fan mangled the cat who had gone under the hood of a car.  The cat limped home badly injured.  They took the cat to the vet, who said the cat might survive but would require expensive surgery.  The couple (both students at the time) could not afford the surgery so they asked the vet to have the cat euthanized.  Several months later my friend got a call from the vet who apologized profusely and admitted that he had not put the euthanized the cat, but treated it to recovery.  He wanted permission to place the cat in an adoptive home.  My friend agreed.

I'll bet the faked euthanasia scenario may not be that rare.

Only a government official could call for openness and transparency and then decline to answer questions:

[N.C. Secretary of State Elaine] Marshall said that they have already threatened the reputations of the lottery and the General Assembly.

"Confidence in government or governmental institutions is based upon openness, transparency, knowing that people are of high ethics and integrity," she said. "You can see how or why things are being influenced by following the money."

Asked whether the parties were cooperating in the investigation, Marshall declined to comment.

(From a Winston-Salem Journal article about the lottery)

As a hard-drinking guy in a hard drinking profession, I know quite a bit about bars.  In law school I was semi-known for being able to recommend a decent bar in any city I had spent more than a few hours in.  Since I have spent much time in many bars, I have also spent time in many bar bathrooms.  And of all the bar bathrooms in all the world I have never seen one that was fit for a sexual encounter.

So I'm befuddled about hearing rumors of lust over the porcelain involving Carolina Panthers cheerleaders.  Was it the quarter-inch of urine on the floor, the cigarette butts floating in the bowl, the stopped up sink, or the hint of vomit that motivated you to turn a stall into a love nest?

 

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