Wednesday Evening Staff Meeting 2

Last week’s meeting was such a success (19 people attended) that we’re doing it again this Wednesday at 4:30pm.

If you are a defense lawyer, and would like to attend, please respond.

Wednesday Evening Staff Meeting

Attention Houston-area criminal defense lawyers:

Back in The Day, before blogs (when I was a much younger lawyer) six or seven of us would gather at Jim Skelton’s office on Richmond Avenue every Wednesday evening to discuss our cases with each other and with Jim.

My recollections of those sessions are fuzzy; there may have been beverages and/or food involved; sometimes other experienced lawyers would join us. It was a good informal way for us young lawyers to learn how little we had actually learned in law school.

I don’t know why it stopped, or when (maybe when we moved out to the suburbs; maybe when Jim got disbarred the first . . . or was it the second? . . . time). The HCCLA listserv, which started on Topica.com back before Google was a verb (in fact, before Google was Google), probably had a lot to do with the end of the Wednesday evening sessions at Jim’s.

I know Jim Skelton; Jim Skelton is a friend of mine; and, senator, I’m no Jim Skelton. But young lawyers nowadays lament the dearth of mentoring. So I aim to do my small part by reinstating the Wednesday evening brainstorming sessions.

Defense lawyers young and old are welcome next Wednesday evening, March 5, 2008 beginning at 4:30ish and going till 6:30ish chez Bennett. Bring your worries, your questions and your cases.

Please respond so that we know how many to expect.

One of the Toughest Jobs in the World

A reader sent me this link: Japanese Justice. In Japan, you can be detained by the police for up to 23 days without habeas corpus. “Forced signed confessions, still considered the “king of evidence” by Japanese courts, are often the result.” No kidding — if you have a guy in custody for 23 days and can’t get him to confess to whatever you want, you’ve got no business interrogating people, especially when “resisting police demands for a confession, and denying the charges, results in detention for extended periods; confession can bring a speedy release.”

You think that would make it tough to be a defense lawyer in Japan? It does — 99% of people accused are convicted, mostly by their own confessions. But wait, there’s more:

Most worryingly of all, say critics, lawyers — the last line of defense in this potholed legal landscape — are not immune from harassment.

Tokyo lawyer Yoshihiro Yasuda was arrested in 1998 and held for 300 days while he was tried on charges of unlawfully concealing the assets of a client. Yasuda was no friend of the police: he had defended Shoko Asahara, leader of the murderous religious cult Aum Shinrikyo, and is Japan’s most outspoken critic of the death penalty.

During the Aum trial, the lawyer accused the police of failing to properly investigate the Aum-sanctioned murder of lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto and his family, because he sided against them in the alleged wiretapping of Communist Party members.

In 2003, the Tokyo District Court found him not guilty, criticizing the prosecutors as “unfair.” But Yasuda remains furious about his detention and interrogation.

“How can we achieve the principle of presumption of innocence in Japan under such circumstances?” he asked The Japan Times after his release.

Says Lawrence Repeta, a constitutional specialist at Tokyo’s Omiya Law School: “The point of what they did to him is to threaten every lawyer in Japan. The authorities are saying to lawyers, ‘Back off, don’t aggressively represent your client or we are going to destroy your life.’ Yasuda’s extended pretrial detention amounts to punishment, even before the court issued a decision.”

Defense lawyer and professor Takashi Takano “calls being a defense lawyer in Japan one of the toughest jobs in the world: after 25 years practicing law, just five of his clients have been completely exonerated.”

“Some lawyers go their whole lives without winning a case,” he explains. “I was very shocked when I first went to court and saw arrogant judges ignore hearsay rules, accept confessions — and lawyers who didn’t challenge them. I feel very strong anger toward the Japanese justice system. It is my motivation to change things.”

Reform is coming: starting in spring 2008 lay juries will hear serious criminal cases in Japan for the first time since 1943.

The Six-Figure Negative Fee

Here’s an interesting one: The Conroe Courier reports a half-million dollar civil verdict against a criminal lawyer in Montgomery County, Texas (the county to the north of Harris County) whose client accused him of extortion. Apparently the lawyer charged the client $1000 for a motion to revoke probation on a felony DWI case and then, after the hearing, demanded another $5,000. Details are sketchy, but there was an allegation that the lawyer passed a message along to Hernandez “mentioning prison as a consequence”.

The jury took exception, found the lawyer liable, and awarded $500,000 in actual damages. They were scheduled to begin deliberating punitive damages when the lawyer agreed to pay $100,000 in settlement.

Give Me Cover

“I’m in trial in federal court, and I need someone to cover for me in Harris and Galveston Counties on Friday.”

If you are a criminal defense lawyer, at some point you will ask for cover. A lawyer other than the one on the case covers for the one who is by making a court appearance.

Cover doesn’t generally involve substantial lawyering, but rather just showing the flag, letting the judge and the client know that the case is not forgotten, and getting a new court date. In other words, it’s not complicated. In the grand scheme of things that we do as criminal defense lawyers, cover is one of the hardest to screw up. I’m not going to send a Horrible Criminal Defense Lawyer into court to cover for me, but anyone with a modicum of diligence and competence should be able to provide cover without making the situation any worse.

By getting cover instead of just calling the court, the lawyer whose case it is can make the client’s life easier and less stressful. You might pay a young lawyer for her time to cover for you (because young lawyers have to eat or they’ll never grow up to be dinosaurs), but you probably wouldn’t pay an experienced lawyer for cover. Experienced lawyers cover for each other as a favor, because they know: if you are a criminal defense lawyer, at some point you will ask for cover.

When I cover for another lawyer, that person’s cases are my first priority. I’ll show up at court extra early and introduce myself to the clients so that they knows they haven’t been forgotten; then I’ll get them on their way out of court as quickly as I can. Otherwise, the clients might start calling their lawyer’s office to find out what is going on. I don’t want that because I know that their lawyer is busy doing something else and doesn’t need progressively more irate calls from his clients.

So I was disappointed yesterday when I learned that the lawyer who agreed to cover a couple of cases for me in Harris County (I’m in trial in federal court) had moseyed into court sometime after 10:30 a.m. — an hour after the 9:30 docket call. My client had been a no-show, and his bond had been forfeited. If the lawyer had made cover a priority and arrived early he might have been able to get a second chance for the client. It turned out okay — young criminal defense lawyer extraordinaire Sarah Wood, one of my former students from criminal trial advocacy class at the University of Houston Law Center, was able to salvage the situation this morning, but that shouldn’t have been necessary.

So give me cover please, but — please — do it well.