Too funny. Tommy Chong was a featured guest and speaker at NORML's convention in San Francisco this past week, which attracted more than 500 attendees. Among his remarks:

"I know Dick Cheney's Secret Service guys smoke pot," Chong said. "The reason I know that is I sold them bongs."

He also compared Bush to a speed user or "tweaker." (Maybe he meant Adderall for ADD?) You can listen to his speech here (mp3).

by TChris

This isn't the way most of us want to die.

RALEIGH, North Carolina (AP) -- A defense lawyer [Tom Farris] was arguing a drunken driving case when he fell on the courtroom floor and died of an apparent heart attack, officials and friends said.

It's becoming more common for defibrillators to be installed in public buildings, but neither the courthouse nor the rescue workers had one. It may not have made a difference, but it's sad that the county dragged its feet in making the purchase.

The county allocated money last year to buy the paddles but has been studying where they are needed.

San Francisco criminal defense lawyer Tony Serra, a legend and the lawyer the movie "True Believer" was based on, got an extension of his jail surrender date last week so he can finish a murder trial. Tonywill be going to jail to serve a ten month sentence for tax evasion.

For any other lawyer, a jail term would mean financial ruin. For Tony Serra the 10-month sentence he starts this weekend for 20 years of tax evasion will be little more than a much-needed rest. With his long silver hair in a ponytail, his tie-dyed shirts and his admission that he smokes cannabis every day, Serra, 72, isn't like most lawyers, yet in a 40-year career he has built an unrivalled reputation of being able to win cases others dismiss as unwinnable.

What makes him remarkable is that, in a country where lawyers are among society's top earners, he has no credit cards, savings or bank account and owns no property. All his clothes are from charity shops or the Salvation Army. His net worth is whatever he happens to have in his pockets.

by TChris

Apart from facilitating fraud, websites that circumvent caller ID may make it easier to set up an innocent person for a dangerous encounter with the police.

In one case, SWAT teams surrounded a building in New Brunswick, N.J., last year after police received a call from a woman who said she was being held hostage in an apartment. Caller ID was spoofed to appear to come from the apartment.

by TChris

The winner of the 2006 American Judicature Society's Herbert Harley Award is Bryan Stevenson.

John Carroll, dean of the Cumberland School of Law, nominated Stevenson for the award. "His efforts have brought reform in the case law, reforms in the criminal justice system in this state and have saved countless lives," he said in a press release. He said Stevenson and his colleagues have helped get 20 Alabama prisoners off death row.

Alaska criminal defender Bill Bryson died on January 12. This front-page article from the Alaska Daily News does a great job of explaining his strengths and weaknesses.

Bill was my friend and a colleague I saw several times a year over the past decade at meetings of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He will be missed.

An attorney in Waco, Texas has been arrested for kidnapping her client on his wedding day.

What was she thinking? Attorney Paula Allen bonded a client out of jail, he failed to appear and she was held liable for $5,000.

In an attempt to collect, she and some associates allegedly showed up at the client's wedding and kidnapped him. The client was handcuffed, which is against the law in Texas, even for bounty hunters.

They drove to the police station, but didn't turn the client in. Instead, they allegedly drove around for four hours while they had the client call family members on a cell phone trying to raise $20,000 the client owed Allen for the bail bond forfeiture and attorneys' fees.

The client escaped. The lawyer got no money, but a felony charge.

[Via How Appealing.]

A judge in Michigan, Kent County Circuit Court Judge Dennis C. Kolenda, has decided to ignore the Supreme Court and deny poor people the right to appointed counsel for their appeals.

The ACLU has filed a class action against the Judge.

In a move reserved for extraordinary cases, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan today filed a class action in the Michigan Court of Appeals to force a Michigan judge to comply with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling granting poor people the right to attorneys on appeal.

“Thumbing your nose at the U.S. Supreme Court is almost unheard of in the judicial system,” said Kary Moss, ACLU of Michigan Executive Director. “And, in this case, the judge seems to believe he is above the law, or at least above the Supreme Court.”

You won't believe what this guy has to do for his roadside sobriety test. The video is laugh-out loud funny. 21:17:34 is where I just cracked up and laughed for the rest of the way through. [Via Crim Prof Blog.]

The New York Observer has an article today about white collar prosecutors leaving the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York for the other side. The article, while telling and factual, draws the outline of the real picture, but being a news as opposed to an opinion piece, doesn't explain the dots. I will.

U.S. Attorneys and Assistant U.S. Attorneys leave the office and get picked up by the other side for one reason: the money. The white-shoe firms that hire them believe, justifiably so, they will be a huge draw to the increasing number of white collar defendants. But, it's a promise without substance. Once they leave the Department of Justice, they have no more clout than a lawyer who has never earned a dollar working there. Yet, that's not the real problem.

The real problem is most of these former high-level prosecutors can't make the mental shift. They don't have it in them. They thought they were doing G-d's work for the prosecution and feel more than a tad sleezy about working for the other side. You can read my rant about who is really doing G-d's work here and here where I take Law & Order chief Dick Wolf to task.

The truth is, most prosecutors can never be true defense lawyers. They don't have it in them to empathize with their clients. In the Observer article, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, being heralded in the media and the blogosphere for objecting to Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program, gives a quote I couldn't even make up to illustrate the point:

A jury in Alameda, California sent a strong message to Wal-Mart yesterday in returning a verdict against the company for $172 million. The winning plaintiffs were 116,000 Wa-Mart employees who sued in a class action alleging the company denied them lunchbreaks.

TChris wrote about the lawsuit here:

Wal-Mart's lawyers reserved their right to give an opening statement until after the employees rest their case -- a sign, perhaps, that Wal-Mart isn't sure what defense it might have to the allegations. Wal-Mart might be playing for the fumble.

My last post on Wal-Mart and its mis-treatment of undocumented workers is here on Huffington Post.

There are honors, and then there are honors. Lawyers' Weekly has released its list of the year's 11 top lawyers.

It includes Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Chief Justice John Roberts.... and TChris, who blogs here on TalkLeft.

TChris argued the Booker case in the U.S. Supreme Court, which along with the Fan Fan case argued at the same time by Rosemary Scapicchio of Boston, resulted in the Court's decision that the federal sentencing guidelines are advisory only. The decision is widely referred to as one which revolutionized federal sentencing and turned the existing system on its head.

For newer TalkLeft readers, TChris has been blogging on TalkLeft since December, 2003.

Congratulations, TChris. This really rocks.