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According to a post by Alyson Palmer at ATLAW Blog, the Secretary of State’s Office is picking up where Atlanta Lawyer Justin Chaney left off. A month ago, Mr. Chaney challenged Adrienne Hunter-Strothers’s candidacy arguing that she had not been a member of the State Bar of Georgia long enough to be a candidate for…

Picking up on yesterday’s theme, I have been thinking more about why lawyers don’t make good records on appeal. So, I’m going to take a stab at it, and this stab is applicable to criminal trials only. As far as I know, civil practitioners have their own reasons for not preserving a good record for…

The average trial transcript handled by the average criminal trial attorney is a sad sight to behold. All of my client’s hopes turn on what is said in this document and often, I am sad to say, on what is not said in this document. There is one word that makes the difference between dead…

Music is replete with songs about people who had some bad stuff happen to them at their trial and who need an appellate lawyer. So, I am kicking off a weekly series featuring songs about people who need a good criminal appeals or habeas lawyer. To kick things off, let’s listen to Steve Earle from…

Another lawyer contacted me about a case she is working on. She wasn’t the trial counsel. She wasn’t the lawyer on the motion for new trial. In fact, one lawyer handled the trial. A second lawyer handled the motion for new trial. She was hired after the motion for new trial was denied but just…

I don’t want to bury the lead. So, here it is. There must be enough error out there in Georgia to win a slew of appeals. Georgia judges must be messing up on hearsay, the Fourth Amendment, and jury charges. All those things are hard. Many of them, so far this year, are messing up…

, Professor at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University reports at his blog, Sentencing Law and Policy, that the Seventh Circuit has suggested that a non-violent felon might prevail on a Second Amendment challenge if he brings an as-applied challenge to the Federal Felon in Possession statute (18 U.S.C. Section 922(g)(1))). In U.S.…

Who doesn’t like a good story? We start liking them before we know how to read. Trial lawyers generally know that juries like them. But what about appellate writing? Is there a place for story in the appellate brief or at oral argument?There is, and if you start weaving elements of story into your appellate…

I’ve been talking about the Democratic side of the Attorney General election for too long. But what about the Republic side? Georgia is such a red state, that the Democratic ticket is largely irrelevant anyway. Meanwhile, the Republicans are in a run-off. And, as Republicans are apt to do when they square off, the candidates…

I love Kendall Gray’s piece on Brevity and the use of conjunctions to start sentences. I, too, learned never to begin a sentence with But or And. It seemed like good advice at the time. But now I have learned that it is not a law of physics. He quotes Professor Wayne Scheiss, who presented…