Sorry about that little bit of fluff earlier.  It was just too much for me to bear alone.  Thank you for sharing my grief.

As Hurricane Isabel heads for the east coast, I am making my final arrangements to fly to Memphis on Friday for a death penalty defense conference.  Presuming the weather doesn't interfere, I look forward to the barbecue, the blues, and the Duck March at the Peabody Hotel.  It should add just enough perspective to the sessions on death penalty jury selection and mental retardation mitigation.  Work all day and play all night.  The typical lifestyle of a criminal defense litigator.  Sort of.

Of course, leaving at any point in the work week means more work in fewer days.  Tomorrow is a quick court appearance in the Connecticut Superior Court in New Haven to modify the terms of a client's probation.  Sad situation.  Man was accused and convicted of drug possession and improper touching of some minor girls.  He finished his prison sentence and, now on probation, cannot have unsupervised contact with minors other than his own children.  Now that my client wants to see his own children, someone in a sex offender treatment program doesn't want him to have unsupervised contact with his own kids.  At least not for now.  Maybe later.  My client's wife, who supported him while his case was pending, has now divorced him and has already called me to say that she doesn't want him to have contact with their kids.  Not because of any sexual concerns, but because of her concern about drug use.  Of course, I don't represent the ex-wife, I represent her ex-husband.  She understands.  You just have to go with the flow.  And this is one of the easy cases.

In the afternoon, I finally have the sentencing hearing in the second of the two sentencings that I had to continue when my back failed on me two weeks ago.  (I did the first of the continued hearings on Friday in federal court in Bridgeport.  Client was looking at 15 to 20 years on a drug conspiracy charge.  Due to his efforts to help himself and some diligent legal work on my part, the Court imposed a sentence of 6 1/2 years.  The client was quite happy.)  Tomorrow's sentencing hearing is in the case that started out as a federal death penalty case.  We were able to defeat authorization by the Attorney General to seek death prior to trial.  The case was tried for two months last fall and ended with a hung jury: they couldn't agree on a single count against any defendant in a 30-count indictment.  The case was re-tried this spring and the result was the opposite: guilty verdicts against each defendant on everything -- or almost everything -- charged in the indictment.

My client, a young man of 22 or 23 years of age, was 18 at the time the crime alleged by the government occurred: the daytime shooting death of another young man in a Bridgeport, Connecticut housing project.  The State dropped its prosecution of my client in favor of letting the Feds include my client's case in a federal racketeering (RICO) prosecution.  The Feds were concerned after the first trial ended with the mistrial.  The time had already expired for the State to resurrect its case and the government was getting a bit hinky about whether they could prove guilt on a racketeer-connected murder against my client.  They felt better at the end of the second trial.

My client now faces the remainder of his life in prison.  23 years old and staring at another 50 years in one joint or another.  He seems resigned to the prospect of spending the balance of his days incarcerated.  I can't imagine what that must feel like.  As sacred as I feel and have been trained to believe life is, maybe death would be a more palatable alternative.  I still have two motions pending that the Court needs to resolve before sentencing: a motion for acquittal and a motion for new trial.  The Judge should grant an acquittal based on the proof in the case, but it is unlikely that he will.  At the very least, the Court should give my client a new trial.  Again, given where the Judge is and the pressure that is on him to finish this case now, I have informed my client that his hopes should not be high.  Is hopefully pessimistic a term?  The opposite of cautiously optimistic?

I'm sorry if I fell into rant.  I'll feel better when I get home.  Maybe a workout at the gym followed by a glass of wine to end the day.  It's nice to be back in the blog.  I hope that all is well with the rest of you.    J

12:08:50 PM    comment []