Juror Googles the DefendantRecently a family member of mine who is a prosecutor finished a jury trial. The jury convicted. He was talking to the jurors after the verdict and learned that one of the jurors had Googled the defendant in violation of the jury instructions. The juror learned information that had not been admitted [...]
A Creed to Guide Professional ConductCivility is not a new subject here – see earlier post. Just attended the first of three sessions at Seattle University Law School on civility. I sat next to and visited with Judge Harry McCarthy who was there as a speaker. Judge McCarthy served on the Professionalism Committee of the [...]
Principles of Civility, Integrity and ProfessionalismLast week I was at the University of Montana Law School teaching at their Advanced Trial Advocacy course and met Don Robinson. Don is a member of the American Board of Trial Advocacy, and during the course he lectured on civility and showed a video produced by ABOTA, which is [...]
The Steven‘s Ethics Trial and the Prosecutors’ EthicsNo topic gets more attention in my Seattle University Law School Pretrial Advocacy class on criminal case discovery than the prosecutor’s responsibility to turn over exculpatory information. Violating the duty can lead to disastrous consequences. A prosecutor can lose the case – do it right or do it [...]
Lesson 1: A Trial Lawyer’s CreedWhen I left the prosecutor’s office for the first time way back, my colleagues gave me the multi-volume set of Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. They knew he was my role model for being a lawyer. He still is.In this bicentennial year of Lincoln’s birth, we can still learn from [...]
