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Judges seldom grant motions for new trial. I have various theories about why. And they range from being sympathetic to the judge to utter cynicism. Sometimes, there just wasn’t any harmful error. Sometimes, the judge couldn’t fathom that he made a mistake. Sometimes, it’s just too dang expensive to try the thing twice. And some…

A few weeks ago, I met with a respected colleague about a case we are doing together. The lawyer is one of the best criminal defense lawyers in Georgia. As I entered his office, I noticed something conspicuously absent from his desktop — computer monitors. Where a monitor might go, there was a dictaphone with,…

A couple of days ago I posted about using the iPad in my appellate practice. In that post, I mentioned that one solution for reading transcripts on the iPad is the iAnnotate PDF reader as an application. There are several applications out for iPad that allow you to read pdfs, including Goodreader and the iBook…

One more vestige of the Johnnie Caldwell legacy will remain in place, for a little while anyway. Greg Land at the Fulton Daily Report notes that the United States Supreme Court has denied Jamie Ryan Weis’s petition for certiorari. Mr. Weis has been sitting in the Spalding County Jail since 2006 charged with murder. His…

I’ve been working hard ever since I left a firm to go out on my own a few years ago to make my practice as paperless as possible. I really don’t want to spend a bunch of money storing old files in a mini warehouse somewhere. And one of the problems with appellate law is…

Heroes seem few and far between these days, or maybe I’m just being a little cynical. I’m listening to the audiobook version of Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt right now and wondering why more political leaders are not cut out of something resembling a similar mold of intergrity and leadership. Since I’ve been…

If there’s one evidentiary issue that you will encounter in your next jury trial, it’s hearsay. It comes up all the time, and some lawyers and judges don’t have a firm grasp on it or its exceptions. Beyond that, trial lawyers often stop short of fully developing their record because they fail to make an…

I’m off tomorrow morning to speak to the Henry County, Georgia, Bar Association. The topic is a good one after wrapping up a week of trial. That topic is preserving the record for appeal. It seems like every seminar has the preserving the record speaker, the ethics speaker, and the professionalism speaker. You can tell…

On the first day of this week’s foray into criminal trial practice, I wrote about what a felony trial has been teaching me about appellate practice. Then a rejoinder form a commenter made me think that blogging during trial was not the greatest idea. Yesterday, the trial resulted in a mistrial. An hour into deliberations,…

This week, I am trying a criminal case. My practice is predominantly appellate, but I have brief forays into the work of criminal trial practice. And today began such a case. While it’s not appropriate to go deeply into the particulars, I think that jury selection today was particularly instructive. I don’t know whether this…