Scents of Plum and Newspaper Ink

This is completely off topic, but it’s been slow around here, not much criminal news to write about.

Mrs. BadCourtThingy and I were making dinner last night, and the recipe called for red wine.  Since I’ve read that red wine is good for your heart, I figured I better do my body good and have a couple glasses.  I’m sitting there, drinking, thinking to myself this is a pretty good way to be healthy.  If only they made beer with resveratrol.  Note to self, that’s a million dollar idea.

I’ll preface this by saying, I’m not a wine snob.  I’m a beer snob, but not wine.  I don’t “get” wine.  We’ve got a couple wineries by us and I’ve done the tours.  People say they taste everything from apples to lemons to motor oil when they’re drinking a glass.

Personally, I think that’s a crock.  Here’s what your wine tastes like.  Grapes.  Want to know why it tastes like grapes and not lemons?  Because it was made of grapes.  Maybe you’ll get a taste whatever type of wood was used in the barrel, but that’s it.  It doesn’t smell like newspaper ink.  If it does, you either need to wash your hands or take the newspaper out of your wine bottle.

Down The Tubes

It finally happened. No, not a nasty letter from the State Bar. It finally cost me over 50 dollars to fill up my gas tank, $51.00 to be exact. I knew this day was coming, the cost to fill up my tank has been going for in the 30 dollar range, to the low 40’s, then the high 40’s, and now finally it breaks 50.

Scott had two recent posts that got me thinking about this topic more. The first was discussing an New York Times article (I have to stop reading these articles from the Times, I’m going to get kicked out of Texas) by Thomas Friedman.   The second is about our love for trucks and SUVs.

Basically, Friedman states in his column that with the way things are going, he who has the oil is going to make the rules.  While that’s probably an accurate statement of the world today, he states the balance of power is going to keep shifting, and even the mighty United States, with all our advantages, may be reduced to Canada-like status.

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

If this huge transfer of wealth to the petro-authoritarians continues, power will follow. According to Congressional testimony Wednesday by the energy expert Gal Luft, with oil at $200 a barrel, OPEC could “potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just three days.”

Friedman then wonders how the US its going to pull its collective bacon out of the fire this time.

For too long, argues Zakaria, America has taken its many natural assets — its research universities, free markets and diversity of human talent — and assumed that they will always compensate for our low savings rate or absence of a health care system or any strategic plan to improve our competitiveness.

“That was fine in a world when a lot of other countries were not performing,” argues Zakaria, but now the best of the rest are running fast, working hard, saving well and thinking long term. “They have adopted our lessons and are playing our game,” he said. If we don’t fix our political system and start thinking strategically about how to improve our competitiveness, he added, “the U.S. risks having its unique and advantageous position in the world erode as other countries rise.

Scott’s take on the article is that Friedman is confident the U.S. will figure out something, and everything will turn out fine.  He (Scott) goes on to say he’s not as confident, and what’s going to happen if there is no magic bullet.

This is what Friedman talks about when he remains optimistic about encouraging the United States economy to perform its magic yet again.  He believes in miracles.  He believes that our captains of industry, our engineers, our scientists will come up with something, anything, to save the day if only we push them.

What if they don’t?  There is no guarantee that another internet will come along just in the nick of time to save the day.  Maybe we’ve used up our good fortune.  Maybe the ride is over.  You only get so much good luck before your luck runs dry.

Friedman may be right, that we still have some juice in the economy to pull us out of this jam.  Perhaps “Mr. Fusion” is right around the corner, and the rest of the world will come running to us for their needs.  But even so, can we count on another miracle to come along the next time?  And as long as Americans continue to hide our heads in the sand, there will most assuredly be a next time.

I disagree with Scott that Friedman is optimistic.  Maybe I’m reading the article wrong, or perhaps he’s a regular reader of Friedman, but I don’t take from this article that Friedman is especially optimistic.  However, I agree with Scott that keeping our heads in the sand and just hoping that something will come along to save us isn’t a good way to handle the situation.  I don’t know what the answer is, assuming there is one.  I’m just a simple country lawyer.  But I do know that the current path isn’t the answer.

Money for Nothing

I promise I’ll get back to writing about criminal related stuff, I just haven’t had anything good lately. Just run of the mill crimes, nothing worth writing home (or on the interwebs) about.

So right now myself and the soon-to-be Mrs. BadCourtThingy are in the process of buying a house. And since neither of us are independently wealthy, we went to the bank to get a loan. We tell the nice mortgage lady all our information, and she tells us that we’re pre-qualified for almost $300,000. We looked at each other and laughed.

Now, both of us well educated professions who make a decent living, we don’t have any kids, we have good credit, and apart from my law school loans, we really don’t have any debt. But 300 large? That’s just nuts. In theory, we could afford it. We just couldn’t afford put furniture in the house or groceries in the fridge. And I like to eat.

Finally, I ask the lady, “Aren’t loans like this one of the reasons the housing and lending market is so bad right now?”

She tells me it has to do with adjustable rate mortgages and the subprime meltdown and other such things that I know about, but don’t completely understand. I don’t really have a head for numbers, the soon-to-be Mrs. BadCourtThingy is the brains of our operation.

And the mortgage lady is probably completely right that a lot of the problem has to do with the subprime market and adjustable rate mortgages; but I have to think that giving people, even people with good credit and good jobs, twice the amount of money they can really afford is a bad idea.

Just Say No

Chemistry was never my strongest subject in school, and today I had to deal with the worst chemistry has to offer. Meth addicts. I have no idea if defense lawyers in places like Harris County have to deal with a lot of meth addicts, but here in rural Texas there’s a ton of them. My experience with the guy wasn’t that unusual for dealing with a tweaker, he was skinny, had very few teeth, and was paranoid. Nothing really worth writing about.

I am going somewhere with this though. He got me thinking. I’m certainly no rocket scientist, but by most objective standards I’m smarter than the average bear. Two degrees, passed the bar, have a reasonably respectable job, can hold my own in most conversational topics; but I couldn’t make a batch of meth to save my life.

So how is it that all these backwoods, slack-jawed yokels can somehow make meth without blowing themselves up (sometimes) while a well educated guy like me would perish in a fire of Sudafed and phosphorus? I have no idea.

What I Didn’t Learn In Law School, Pt 1

I’m pre-emptively labeling this as part one, because things I’ve learned on the job, that I never learned in law school will be revisited again.

Over at The Defense Perspective, Stephen Gustitis had a post about using a polygraph as a method of client control. His reasoning goes, criminal clients often refuse to face the facts, even if the prosecution has a mountain of evidence against them. Since they won’t face reality, the client will insist on a course of action where the only outcome is the client spending time in prison, when they could have taken an offer and received less time or probation. If you give the client a polygraph, there’s two potentially positive outcomes for the attorney. The client passes and you can go to the prosecutor with that tidbit of information. Or, the client fails and will (hopefully) decide to face reality.

Where am I going with this? Client control. Extremely important and a subject that was never covered during my law school education. Even in my “practical law” classes when we’d have to roll-play being a client, no one was even the client who wouldn’t take the great deal you worked out for him. Or the client with mental illness. Or the client that just flat out ignores you. Everyone would behave like an attorney talking to another attorney. That’s not the fault of the students, they don’t know how else to behave.

My first experience with an out of control client came at my first trial. Up until then, pretty much all my clients just wanted me to get them a deal. The ones that were trouble, my boss would handle, since he has a lot more experience than I do. But, this one was a misdemeanor, and should have been a pretty easy case for the defense. The first time meeting the defendant was right after I was appointed to him. I asked him how he wanted to handle the case, if he wanted me to work something out with the County Attorney or if we needed to set it for trial. His response was something along the lines of, “I don’t want to hear nothing about a deal, we’re taking this thing to trial.” He probably also used a fair amount of profanity for that one sentence as well.

Whenever I’d meet with or talk to the defendant, we’ll call him Billy, he tended to have a lot of trouble staying on topic. I’d ask him a question and he’d give me a long rambling answer, and I use the word “answer” in the loosest sense of the word.  It was usually a jumble of semi-coherent thoughts about how the county was out to get him, or how the state of Texas was out to get him, or that I wasn’t doing my job, and so on.  He’d always end his diatribe by saying, “We’ve got to get this information out at trial, so the jury knows the truth.”  I’d repeatedly tell him that we had a very simple, and winnable case, and if we started talking about how the state of Texas is screwing him over, the jury would think we’re trying to bullshit them, and wouldn’t appricate that.  He’d agree with me, and then go right back to ignoring whatever I said.

Quite frankly, I had no idea what to do with this guy.  There was nothing in any of my law school classes that even remotely prepared me for dealing with a guy like this.  Stephen’s above suggestion of giving him a polygraph wouldn’t apply since A) Billy had no means to afford a polygraph; and B) our defense was that he had legal authority to commit the acts, not that he didn’t do it.  I couldn’t remind him that going to trial costs extra, since he was a court appointee.  In short, I was stuck.  All I could do was keep telling him that its very easy to talk your way into jail.

The trial was an unmitigated disaster.  Even though the prosecutor, the judge, and my fiancee said I did a good job, I felt like I had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  Billy took the stand, with my blessing.  I told him to testify for two reasons.  First off, he had been waiting five months to tell his side of the story.  There was no way in hell he wasn’t going to get up there and testify about how the county, the judge, the prosecutor, and the great state of Texas were out to get him.  This was going to be his moment in the sun.  It was like Festivus came early for him, he got to air all his grievances.  After the prosecutor got done with Billy, I just wanted to lay my head on the table and wave the white flag.  The second reason I told him to testify was that we’d get two extra defenses if he took the stand.  If I had to do it again, I’d probably tell him not to take the stand, but I know he wouldn’t listen to me.

Was there anything I could have done to keep Billy under control?   I’m not entirely sure.  But I do know that law school does a poor job of preparing people for difficult clients.  I know the rebuttal.  You’re a criminal defense attorney in a rural county.  You’re not exactly dealing with the best and the brightest who are going to listen.  And that’s true, but a class on client management would be very beneficial to new attorneys.