Blog or Government Propaganda Tool?

Is it just me, or should a blawg contain some original content?

I’d added David Finn’s Dallas Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer “blog” to my reader because I defend federal criminal cases in Dallas and because I’ve heard of David (and am acquainted with his partner, George Milner III). It’d been on my list for a few weeks, providing nothing that even looked worth clicking through to. Ho-hum.

Until today, when I saw the headline 4 Indicted In Texas Mortgage Fraud Scheme. I was just retained by a new client who is charged with mortgage fraud in Texas, so I clicked to see what David had to say about mortgage fraud. Imagine my surprise to see that “David’s” “blog” post (signed with his name at the bottom) was about my client. Imagine my greater surprise to find that the post read much like the USDOJ press release about my client’s prosecution. Much like? Nay, verbatim.

Interested for the first time in David’s “writings,” I took a look at the other posts on his “blog.” Compare Mortgage Fraud Prosecution on the Rise by David Finn with State, U.S. Preparing Loan Fraud Crackdown by J. Patrick Coolican of the Las Vegas Sun. In Predatory Lending – is it a Crime?, at least “Judge Finn” gives HUD the byline for the material that he copied from this page. The previous post over David’s name, Federal Reserve Board Aims to Curtail Predatory Lending Practices , seems to have come wholesale from here.

This blog is the intersection of the Super Lawyer discussion, the Former Prosecutor discussion, the Half-an-Hour a Week discussion, and the Ghostblawging discussion, with a little bit of “look-at-me-I’m-a-government-stooge” added in for good measure.

David is a purported “Super Lawyer,” a former prosecutor who is spending half an hour a week — if that — producing his blog thanks to the unwitting help of his ghostblawgers at DOJ, the Las Vegas Sun, and other sources.

But “government stooge”? Them’s fightin’ words in Texas; might be in Dallas too. So I’d better back ‘em up.

Stealing from J. Patrick Coolican is one thing. Patrick and the Las Vegas Sun might object strenuously and litigiously, but at least you’re plagiarizing the work of someone who might himself have some journalistic ethics.

Repeating what the Federal Reserve Board or HUD tells you, if you’re a criminal defense lawyer, is another thing. It’d be better to give the governmental agency credit and a link, but the Federal Reserve Board is not generally your adversary. Sometimes other governmental agencies say things that might be of interest to us and our clients.

But by repeating what the DOJ tells you and giving it the added credibility of publication over your own name, though, you serve the Government that is trying to put your clients — and my clients — in prison.

The DOJ puts out press releases. Why? Because keeping the populace well-informed is good for the government? Please.

The DOJ puts out press releases so that if you are charged with a federal crime that the press might be interested in, your friends will know about it, your neighbors will know about it, your employer will know about it, and your children will know about it. So that, no matter how innocent you are, and even if you ultimately clear your name in court, your reputation is shot forever. So that you are, in other words, hosed.

I had a discussion some years ago with a Houston federal criminal defense lawyer who was reprinting DOJ press releases on his web page to boost his search engine rankings. He, too, had reprinted a press release about a client of mine who was accused of mortgage fraud; he agreed with me that doing so probably wasn’t appropriate.

Lawyers who are ethically representing their clients (as opposed to aggrandizing themselves) will try hard to keep their clients’ names out of the public eye. Once a client’s reputation in the community is damaged, even an acquittal and an expunction will not restore it.

DOJ press releases are a propaganda tool. The government is trying to get free publicity in its struggle to take away people’s freedom. Legitimate information sources don’t reprint press releases (any press releases) word-for-word. Newspapers, for example, receiving one of these press releases, will investigate a bit, make sure it’s true, see if there’s a story of interest to the readers, and give the other side an opportunity to tell its story. Bloggers don’t have the same ethical rules as journalists, but real bloggers will — at a bare minimum — cite to the source of the information so that readers can consider the source. Not David — David takes the DOJ’s press release and signs his name to it. Better bloggers won’t repeat the information without some comment or context — why is this story important to the reader? What does it mean?

By disseminating the government’s propaganda without critique, citation, context or comment, a “blogger” serves as nothing more than a conduit for propaganda. He acts, in other words, as a government stooge.

So why do it? I suppose someone has told David that he gets better search placement by adding content often. For a busy lawyer like David, original content shouldn’t be hard to come by. More likely, he’s got someone else posting on his blog for him, and they don’t have anything original to say about the narrow field of Dallas federal criminal defense.

So why not do it? Because — aside from the fact that our job is to make the government’s job more difficult, and not less — what comes around goes around, and some day, David, you will have a client who would just as soon his name not be spread far and wide for the sake of some other lawyer’s search-engine rankings.

(Postscript: I got an email from J. Patrick Coolican thanking me for tagging David’s plagiarism. “My editor,” wrote Patrick, “will be in touch with the judge today.” I’ve burned a PDF of David’s blog as it was when I wrote this post so that, after David takes down the offending posts, I can prove that I didn’t imagine it.)

Real Bloggers Get DOSed

English barrister Geeklawyer apparently wrote something not-so-nice about ex-PM Tony Blair (who reportedly seeks to become president of the EU), resulting in the Blairites (Blairians?) attacking his blog with a denial-of-service attack.

Elsewhere

A tour of my “Read First” list in Google Reader:

Stephen Gustitis comments on a post by Dallas lawyer Brian Cuban responding to this post on Tom Kane’s Legal Marketing Blog. I’m not sure whether Brian’s point is really that he doesn’t give a shit (his words) about his clients or that most other lawyers don’t give a shit about their clients. It’s not entirely clear I’m guessing it’s the latter (and that the “I don’t give a shit” of the title is ironic), because he distinguishes between “kick ass” lawyers and “don’t give a shit” lawyers, and writes that the latter aren’t reading legal marketing blogs, which he is plainly doing. Anyway, nice move for Brian, who clearly knows how to “reduce his reputation value”.

Stephen also writes about fee setting. Never compete on price. If I’ve given the lowest bid for a particular job, I’ve screwed up.

APD asks if his home state, Fenwick, will ever get beyond the quick fix for its prison population explosion. All signs point to “no”.

ACDL promises to blog more. You and me both, brother.

Curia Advisari Vult has passed 30 days with no posts, and has been demoted from my “Read First” list. As has Malum in Se. I feel the loss. Criminal Defender is about to be dropped from my “Read First” list for violating the 30-day no-post rule.

Brian Tannebaum shares his view of Ben Kuehne’s money-laundering indictment: “As my friend Milt Hirsch said upon Ben’s indictment: ‘It’s official, it is now a crime to be a criminal defense lawyer.’” To my prosecutorial readers: don’t be getting any bright ideas, now.

Hunter Biederman brings us criminal defense lawyer John May’s statement in support of Ben Kuehne. “To target an adversary like Ben Kuehne, who is held in such high regard by the community and whose integrity is unquestioned, sends a message that any lawyer is at risk, even concerning previously unheard of prosecution strategies like those used here.”

Grits for Breakfast is conducting a “mini-campaign” to get two criminal justice-related resolutions passed at Texas precinct conventions on election night. Vote twice!

Under the category of “what the heck was Young Shawn thinking?”, he asked his insurance company if his car would be covered if it were destroyed in a terrorist attack on the Federal Building next to his building in Fort Worth. (Answer: No, terrorism is an “act of God”!) Shawn, you do know that you’re on all sorts of lists now that a good little Republican shouldn’t be on?

MacLitigator describes how to add a “recent documents” stack to your dock in OS X 10.5 (H/T Criminal Defense Law with a Macintosh for the link to MacLitigator).

Ken Lammers (Blogging Since ‘73) has a paranoid labrador retriever.

Deliberations, the best jury blog ever, has discovered another good jury blog, Thaddeus Hoffemeister’s Juries. Thaddeus (query: real name or pseudonym?) tells us about a California lawyer who might face disbarment for actions he took as a juror.

David Tarrell sounds the alarm about the slow death of the exclusionary rule.

David Feige (whom I somehow conflated recently with David Tarrell; sorry David) is flying cross-country first class and driving around California in a convertible. Didn’t David used to be One of Us?

AHCL, of course, is writing about Harris County District Attorney politics. God bless her for providing all those scared ADAs a place to vent and praise themselves in comments.

Cool Tools reviews boots. I generally want to try one of everything reviewed on that site, but I’m not so sure about the zip-up combat boots.

Lifehacker has more lifehacking ideas than I can keep up with. That one requires frequent “mark all as read” operations.

Lemon Gloria, a classmate of mine from high school on the other side of the world, is engaged and shopping for cakes. Congratulations, LG!

In other non-law news, 43 Folders brings an introductory post on the best of GTD. If you’re a lawyer and unfamiliar with GTD, read about it.

Back to the law, Missouri Criminal Defense Lawyer Randy England writes that Missouri’s proposed new death-to-cop-killers law, which essentially creates a (probably unconstitutional) presumption of deathworthiness for murderers of criminal justice officials, would probably make things easier on cop killers. Question: why aren’t criminal defense lawyers — at least PDs — included in the list of criminal justice officials whom it is especially wrong to kill?

Philadelphia Criminal Defense Lawyer Mark Jakubik praises the federal government’s hounding of Roger Clemens. In related news, please see Houston media whore, sports fan, and, oh yeah, writ lawyer Brian Wice’s awards for participants in the Clemens hearing.

Simple Justice has posted 64 times since I began writing this post. He riffs on one of Young Shawn’s posts with extremely funny results; he also posts a cite to this Reasonable Doubts post about a judge wearing, beneath the robe, a cocktail dress, fishnet hose, and high heels . . . which might be a somewhat more appealing image had the judge not been a he. Boston, of course. (Denny Crane.)

Reasonable Doubts joins my “Read First” list this week, as do Juries and Ron’s Insanity, by anonymous Houston lawyer (but not criminal defense lawyer) Ron.

Proper Accreditation

My apologies to a journalist, whose yesterday’s column I shamelessly ripped off without attribution in a blog post four days ago.

When this journalist quotes from my blog, she has the good manners to cite it as “an attorney blog”; I should have the same courtesy when I write something that she will write three days later.

Happy Anniversary Friends

Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice blog just celebrated its one-year anniversary. Anne Reed’s Deliberations celebrated its anniversary on Saturday.

I had a blog back in 2004-2005, when the blawgosphere was young. I posted 17 times between August 2004 and June 2005. Then I quit, figuring that this “blogging” thing would never catch on.

When I resumed blogging in March of 2007, Anne and Scott both seemed like old-timers. I never would have thought that they had been at it for less than six weeks. (Of course, they’re both still blawgosphere virgins, compared to CrimLaw’s Ken Lammers, who’s been blogging since 1973.)

Simple Justice (an ironic title — we’re generally scrambling to avoid someone else’s idea of justice) and Deliberations, along with Jamie Spencer’s Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer blog, gave Defending People some of its first link love. This wasn’t because I asked for it but because I linked to their interesting posts.

I could make a full-time job of riffing off of Scott’s posts. In the last week he’s had two posts about important stories that I might not have heard about elsewhere.

First, The Hidden Risks, about the money-laundering indictment of a Miami criminal defense lawyer who was paid some $200,000 by Miami criminal defense lawyer Roy Black to investigate the source of the $5 million fee in a federal criminal case, and to make sure that it was clean money — not proceeds of illegal activity. The lawyer gave the money a clean bill of health, and was then indicted for laundering it.

This is a cautionary tale for lawyers (the Southern District of Florida is the most common source of such tales); here, Roy Black (the lawyer taking the Really Big Fee) did everything right, which kept the feds (who, in that district, tend to aggressively attack competent defense counsel) from charging him with money laundering, but led them to charge his lawyer with that crime.

The other Simple Justice story that caught my attention this week was today’s When the Lawyer Fails, about Alexandria, Louisiana lawyer Glenn G. Cortello, who dropped the ball in his client’s federal sentencing. He failed to point out to the judge that his client was eligible for the safety valve, which would have allowed the judge to disregard the statutory minimum sentence. So the judge sentenced the client to five years. Until Matthew Sinor, a law student and army buddy of the defendant’s, pointed out to the judge that the defendant could benefit from the safety valve. The judge went back and resentenced the defendant to time served (11 days).

Cortello’s response to his client’s sentence being gutted: Glee? No. Relief? No. Acceptance? No.

Sergeant Lett’s defense lawyer, who had been paid $10,000, did not appreciate Mr. Sinor’s intercession, which he called “insulting.”

“If you think five years was a bad job on my part, then you wanted a magician and not a lawyer,” the lawyer, Glenn G. Cortello, wrote to Mr. Sinor in an e-mail message. “When you get out of law school and have practiced criminal law for over 20 years, I’ll discuss it with you.”

This is the kind of crap that gives lawyers a bad name. Clearly, the law student had something to teach the guy who had been practicing criminal law for over 20 years. Nobody likes to be shown up, but, dammit, if we screw up and our clients suffer because of us, we should be ecstatic to have someone else correct our errors.

(This might also be a lesson in the internet’s power over reputation: for time immemorial, potential clients seeking Glenn Cortello in Google are going to find references to this story.)

Another Popularity Contest

The anonymous AHCL is seeking nominations for the Hector Heathcoat Award:

The Hector Heathcoat Award is dedicated to the “Unsung Heroes” of the CJC. We are starting out with two categories – the unsung defense attorney and the unsung prosecutor. Sure, Rusty Hardin and Dick DeGuerin and Kelly Siegler all get a lot of attention as being great attorneys, but who are the ones the we know are also great attorneys that don’t get near the recognition in the media that they deserve.

The idea of an award for the unsung heroes of the Harris County Criminal “Justice” Center is a great one. In fact, the Harris County Criminal Lawyers’ Association already gives an annual Unsung Heroes Award to a defense lawyer because, unlike the DA’s office, the HCCLA actually cares about its members (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Last year’s HCCLA award went to Vivian King.

Here are my three nominations for the Hector Heathcoat Award for unsung defense lawyer:

• Tyrone Moncriffe
• Cheryl Irvin
• Danny Easterling

HCCLA gives its award to a defense lawyer chosen by consensus of the board of directors. AHCL is taking a different approach: He’ll start a poll on Sunday, and have voting through the next week (and then repeat the process for unsung prosecutorial heroes). AHCL, a relative newcomer to blawging hasn’t seen the practical blawgosphere’s reaction to a popularity contest: ballot-box stuffing and relentless politicking by people who want votes for their friends on the one hand, and griping about how a poll is no way to actually honor people for their good work on the other.

Of course, none of the HHA nominees are likely to be bloggers themselves, and the pool of people who really give a damn about the great lawyering at the Criminal “Justice” Center is minuscule (fewer than a thousand people, I would estimate). But still, AHCL, don’t leave the decision up to the fickleness of internet democracy. Have some backbone. Accept nominations and then make the decision yourself.

New Harris County Criminal Justice Blawg

Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, by an anonymous criminal lawyer who started blogging on January 8th, 2008, “genuinely concerned with the way the media displays our local criminal justice system”.

Practical Blawgosphere Wiki

Don’t forget to check out the Blawg Council Wiki and add to the catalog of blawgs. Someone had the right idea with CrimLaw — he added it to the catalog page for prosecutors’ blawgs and created a page describing it (though, now that I look at it, the creation of a page describing it may have been a happy accident — the PHPWiki software interprets a word with a capital letter within it as a link to a new wiki page).

Another Beauty Contest

The American Bar Association (that’s not the real link — the ABA is merely worthless rather than sinister — but it’s entertaining nonetheless) is hosting another blawgers’ beauty contest. Kevin O’Keefe writes about it here. The heart of Kevin’s excellent post (hat tip to Anne Reed):

Law blogs represent disintermediation of publishers and gatekeepers. No more are those in supposed power and control going to screen and serve up what they think is important. A lawyer in a town with a water tower, an old grain elevator and 3 four way stops is on equal footing with a lawyer who clerked for a Supreme Court Judge. The democratization of publishing and dialogue we get through law blogs is at the very heart of what we stand for in America.

Kevin sees the ABA’s poll, and its publicization of the poll, as “shallow, at best”.

Indeed. If other things were judged by such polls, Toyota would be recognized as the best carmaker, ground beef as the best cut, Gallo as the best wine, and Thomas Kinkade as the best painter. China would be accepted as the best country, Christianity as the best religion, Windows as the best operating system, and ignorance as the best mental state (coincidentally, George W. Bush would be president).