Stephen McDaniel cleans up nicely for court.
Stephen M. McDaniel, the Mercer Law School graduate accused of killing classmate Lauren Giddings, made an appearance in court this morning. As you may recall, Giddings’s decapitated torso was found on June 30 in Macon, Georgia, and thus far, police have been unable to recover the rest of her body.
Last month, we mentioned that Bibb County prosecutors intended to seek the death penalty for McDaniel. Today, in court, the alleged murderer received formal notification of his fate if he is found guilty of the charges levied against him.
McDaniel’s arraignment hearing has been set for February 7, but his lawyers raised some interesting issues today. What sort of motions will they be filing on their client’s behalf?
Continue reading “Arraignment Date Set for Stephen McDaniel in Lauren Giddings Murder Case”
SCOTUS has spoken on S&C's screw-up.
We’ve previously written about the mailroom of death at Sullivan & Cromwell. To make a long story short (read our prior posts for the full background), a mailroom mix-up at 125 Broad Street caused an Alabama death-row inmate to miss a deadline for filing an appeal. The Eleventh Circuit rejected the condemned man’s attempt to reopen his case.
Presumably feeling bad for what had happened, S&C appealed to the Supreme Court. The firm hired a leading SCOTUS advocate — former Solicitor General Gregory Garre, now a partner at Latham & Watkins — to argue that prisoner Cory Maples shouldn’t forfeit his life because of S&C’s screw-up.
This morning, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Maples v. Thomas. What did the high court have to say?
Continue reading “Supreme Court Rules on Sullivan & Cromwell’s Mailroom of Death”
* Andrews Kurth had such a good year that they’re not just giving their high performers bonuses, they’re giving raises to 25 associates! [Texas Lawyers]
* Davis Polk is taking a jump across the pond. [The Lawyer]
* When I’m struggling to think creatively, I have a drink. When that doesn’t work, I have another. [What About Clients?]
* How bloodthirsty do you have to be to believe that the death penalty, as applied, is actually working? [SAFE]
* If I had a kid, I’d start a parenting blog. I’d call it: How To Avoid Raising A Lawyer. [WSJ Law Blog]
As we mentioned in Morning Docket on Friday, prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty against Stephen McDaniel if he is convicted of the murder of Lauren Giddings, his former neighbor and classmate at Mercer Law School.
The Bibb County District Attorney calls the crime “outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman in that it involved depravity of mind,” which is one standard the prosecution has to meet to seek the death penalty in Georgia.
The Macon Telegraph conducted a long interview with Lauren Giddings’s boyfriend, David Vandiver. The King & Spalding lawyer wonders if Giddings’s final email to him was entirely hers….
Continue reading “King & Spalding Lawyer Received Key Email As Prosecutors Seek Death Penalty Against Stephen McDaniel”
* DLA Piper is blaming the Occupy Wall Street movement for Biglaw’s sad, 2011 bonus season. It looks like we can expect a Cravath match from that firm. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* We could really use some more law schools — fourth tier law schools, in particular. Say hello to the Savannah Law School, a John Marshall Law School Atlanta production. [National Law Journal]
* University of Texas School of Law Dean Larry Sager has been ousted from his position. Readers have flooded our inbox with the news, so we’ll have more on this later. [Texas Tribune]
* This Senate victory for gay servicemembers came with unintended consequences. It’s now kosher to have sex with men, women, and everything else under military law. [Washington Post]
* Prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty against Stephen McDaniel. If being drawn and quartered were an option, maybe this medieval scholar wouldn’t mind so much. [Macon Telegraph]
* Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Although Ben Stein is the keynote speaker at this year’s ABA Techshow, legal tech nerds will likely be unable to win his money. [ABA Journal]
We live in a country where some states have the death penalty. Capital punishment. The “ultimate justice,” people like Rick Perry say with a smirk, as if justice that ends in death is somehow preferable to justice that respects the dignity of human life.
Do you not know what those sanitized words mean? Do you not know what the death penalty is?
We live in a country that sanctions murder of supposed criminals. That’s what we’re talking about: murder. It’s not “self-defense.” Death row inmates are locked down, strapped down, and would be in jail for the rest of their natural lives but for our societal decision to kill them first.
And the people we kill, we suppose they are criminals. We have a system that spits out a verdict that a person is guilty. It’s a flawed, imperfect system. In any given case, witnesses, counsel, judges, or the jury could be wrong, stupid, or both. We, as a society, take their word for it because it’s the best way for dispensing justice that we’ve come up with so far.
But since we have this flawed system, and we do kill people, then it is inevitable that occasionally we’re going to murder the “wrong” person. To support the death penalty is to support the occasional murder of innocent people. That’s been true since the first barbarian hunter-gatherer thought it’d be a good idea to gather the whole tribe together to watch the death of another defenseless person who claimed innocence.
So my question is, why the hell are people so worked up over Troy Davis?
Continue reading “Did America Just Learn That We Have The Death Penalty In Some States?”
* It took SCOTUS more than four hours to write one sentence. But oh, to be a fly on the wall last night when they decided to deny a stay of execution for Troy Davis. [New York Times]
* AT&T wants to take the DOJ’s antitrust case to trial. This must be some sort of a joke, but the only punchline I can think of is the company’s crappy wireless network. [Bloomberg]
* Court-clogger or pocket-stuffer: Andrew Cuomo is debating signing a bill that could put more money into the hands of class action attorneys. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* GW Law ex-adjunct Richard Lieberman was disbarred this week. What is with all of these lawyers who try to seduce minors online? Such a weird casualty of this profession. [National Law Journal]
* Because Chanel No. 399 just doesn’t sound as classy as Chanel No. 5, the company has filed a massive trademark infringement lawsuit against nearly 400 defendants. [ABC News]
* Memo to our readers: You know our exploding car thing was just a caption contest, right? We weren’t anticipating a real life lawyer car bombing. [Forbes]
Stephen McDaniel
In our coverage of Stephen Mark McDaniel, the 25-year-old Mercer Law School graduate who has been charged with the murder of Lauren Giddings, his former classmate and neighbor, we have repeatedly stressed that McDaniel remains innocent until proven guilty. We have pointed to past examples of individuals who were viewed by the public as almost certainly guilty of particular crimes, but who turned out to be innocent — such as Gary Condit and Richard Jewell, to say nothing of the numerous prisoners who have been freed thanks to DNA evidence.
It is therefore appropriate to ask at this time: Has Stephen McDaniel been framed for the murder of Lauren Giddings?
Let’s look at some of the theories — and the evidence — suggesting this might be the case….
Continue reading “Has Stephen McDaniel Been Framed in the Lauren Giddings Murder?”
Chris Christie
* Some bloggers stand up to dubious defamation lawsuits. [Techdirt]
* And some settle: St. Thomas Law (or its insurer) is paying $5,000 to Joseph Rakofsky. [Simple Justice]
* Another day, another lawyer accused of trying to kill someone — but not succeeding. (We might have more to say about this case next week; send us tips about Jason Smiekel.) [Chicago Tribune]
* My former boss, Governor Chris Christie, defends his appointment of Judge Sohail Mohammed, standing up to some of the Sharia-obsessed crazies on the right. Alas, some of these crazies could create problems for him in 2016. (Where are all the nice, moderate, socially liberal Republicans hiding? Establishment types, please take the GOP back from these icky populists.) [Arab American Institute]
* My co-author, Zach Shemtob, takes to the airwaves in defense of our New York Times op-ed, which has been controversial in some quarters. [AM 560 WIND]
Richard Matasar
* Dean Richard Matasar, outgoing dean of New York Law School, denies that law schools are all about the benjamins; rather, NYLS and other independent law schools “exist only for the benefit of their students.” [Bloomberg Law / YouTube]
* A woman is videotaped saying that she will claim sexual assault, when no such assault happened. (Staci’s take: “Pissed off women do strange things.”) [Houston Press]
* Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, accuses its competitors of being evil. [Corporate Counsel]
* Being a tenured professor can be a pretty sweet gig. Being an adjunct prof? Not so much. [Adjunct Law Prof Blog]
* If you’re looking for something to do on Monday night in New York, check out this fundraising event, sponsored by Weil Pays It Forward (and featuring Survivor hottie and former Weil lawyer Charlie Herschel). [Celebration of Survival]
* A federal judge in Kansas has given Planned Parenthood’s Abortionplex a new lease on life. [WSJ Law Blog]
* What? A former Supreme Court clerk who got passed over for a job at a law school? Nicholas Spaeth, who’s also the former state attorney general for North Dakota, is suing the Michigan State University College of Law, for age discrimination. [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times via SBM Blog]
* Interesting thoughts from Scott Greenfield on making executions public. I certainly don’t oppose more-comprehensive coverage of the criminal justice system in general. [Simple Justice]
* Elsewhere in criminal justice news, should prisons be run on a voucher system? Dan Markel offers some thoughts on Sasha Volokh’s interesting proposal. [PrawfsBlawg]
* An interesting profile of Alan Gura, the celebrated Second Amendment litigator, by a fellow small-firm lawyer, Nicole Black. [The Xemplar]
* Hopefully this will all become moot after a deal gets done, but remember the Fourteenth Amendment argument for Obama unilaterally raising the debt ceiling? Jeffrey Rosen thinks a lawsuit against Obama would get kicked for lack of standing — or might even prevail. [New Republic]
* But Orin Kerr believes that a recent SCOTUS case might change the analysis. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Howrey going to pay all the creditors? A lot turns on how some contingency-fee cases turn out, according to Larry Ribstein. [Truth on the Market]
* From in-house to the big house: former general counsel Russell Mackert just got sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for his role in a fraud scheme. [Corporate Counsel]
* Keep It Simple: a commendable theme for Blawg Review #313. [Patent Baristas via Blawg Review]
In a New York Times op-ed, mentioned previously in Morning Docket, Professor Zachary Shemtob and I argue that executions should be made public. More specifically, we argue that executions should be broadcast live or recorded for future release, on the web or on television.
Public execution has some unsavory connotations, perhaps dating back to the days when hangings took place before rowdy crowds in the public square. But when you stop and think about it, the idea really isn’t all that crazy….
Continue reading “Should Executions Be Televised?”
* This whole debt crisis has been a little like Deal or No Deal, except that show had a much better host. Howie Mandel can get people to make a deal with the banker in under 60 minutes. Obama? Not so much. [POLITICO]
* Real life intellectual property matters be damned, because even virtual horses need to eat. If a PETA group doesn’t exist yet in Second Life, I have a feeling that one soon will. [Wall Street Journal]
* Reality shows rule, but I’m not sure if an execution can compete with Jersey Shore. The only thing I want to see die on TV is dignity, but our own David Lat has some other interesting ideas. [New York Times]
* New Mercer Law students are moving into the apartment complex where pieces of Lauren Giddings were found. Why would you sign a lease with a place that’s so stabby? [Macon Telegraph]
* B*tch has balls if she’s willing to go to war with Oprah over an acronym. Before you can OYP (Own Your Power), you might want to OYT (Own Your Trademark). [Daily Intel / New York Magazine]
* Lindsay Lohan is headed back to court today. She’s expected to be arraigned on charges of being the best actress ever. [Hollywood Life]
* Another future Nobelist, Kim Kardashian, has filed a lawsuit against the Gap for using what this article calls “a faux-dashian model in a commercial for its Old Navy brand.” May you live in frighteningly vapid times. [CNNMoney]
* Texas executed a man last night who went on a random brown person killing spree after 9/11. [Fox News]
* Two 14-year-old boys in New Jersey will be forced to register as sex offenders after dropping trou and throwing their stinkholes on two other kids’ faces. Motorboating: taint what it used to be. [WSJ Law Blog]
* The Dodgers squared off against Major League Baseball in a Delaware bankruptcy court yesterday. For more on this story, here’s a dog wearing a toupee. [CBSSports.com]
* Former Congressman and current law firm partner Martin Frost took to the cyberpages of Politico to brag about stealing unflattering file photos of a female judge he clerked for from the Dallas Morning News back in the 1970s. If that sentence doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because I don’t really understand what’s going on here. Also, I don’t write good. [Politico via ABA Journal]
Gov. Pat Quinn
* The opening of the RaJabba Rajaratnam trial will be gripping, apparently. [Reuters]
* The S.E.C. is being attacked again about its ethical standards. It’s not like these problems started with Cam Newton. I mean, the S.E… what’s that? The Securities and Exchange Commission? What? No, I don’t even know what that is. What does that have to do with football? [New York Times]
* Horrifying syphilis experiments keep coming back to haunt the United States government. That’s so syphilis. [Charlotte Observer]
* Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is expected to sign legislation today ending capital punishment. I couldn’t think of a joke here, but this cat thinks it’s a frog. [Chicago Tribune]
* In Buffalo, a fight over attorney pay. I blame Norwood. [Buffalo News]
* A judge helped cut an attorney out of his father’s will and claimed he was still able to act impartially on a case the attorney was handling. That sh*t-eating grin on the judge’s face every time the attorney spoke? Oh, that was just a joke he remembered. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Former U.S. attorney (S.D.N.Y.) and Davis Polk litigator S. Hazard Gillespie, R.I.P. [New York Times]
Here’s an interesting issue for the pro-death penalty crowd: If killing violent offenders passes as justice, are they happy when a violent offender kills himself? That’s the question being bandied about the blogosphere in the wake of Philip Markoff’s apparent suicide.
Markoff was in jail awaiting trial as the “Craigslist Killer.” He allegedly murdered Julissa Brisman after meeting her on Craigslist.
Over on Sentencing Law and Policy (gavel bang: WSJ Law Blog), Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman makes an interesting point:
[A]ssuming he was guilty, my first reaction here is to be pleased. By killing himself, Markoff saved a lot of time, money and energy for those who would be tasked with prosecuting and defending him. And the family of his victim would, I hope, get some measure of closure from Markoff’s death.
Actually, the family of the victim does not seem at all pleased by Markoff’s apparent suicide…
Continue reading “Craigslist Killer’s Self-Imposed Death Sentence Leaves Some Unsatisfied”
Last year, we covered a mistake made in a death penalty case by the white-shoe firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. It was a noteworthy development because of the rarity of the occurrence — S&C doesn’t often make mistakes, at least not ones as elementary as missing a deadline — and because of the stakes involved.
Well, the stakes are getting higher: S&C is now seeking SC review. The firm wants the Supreme Court to step in and essentially forgive the firm’s error in missing the deadline to file an appeal. Adam Liptak tells the tale, in the New York Times:
Sullivan & Cromwell is a law firm with glittering offices in a dozen cities around the world, and some of its partners charge more than $1,000 an hour. The firm’s paying clients, at least, demand impeccable work.
Cory R. Maples, a death row inmate in Alabama, must have been grateful when lawyers from the firm agreed to represent him without charge. But the assistance he got may turn out to be lethal.
Please note: that last sentence originally appeared in the august pages of the Times. Despite its tabloid tone — we can imagine an announcer for Inside Edition intoning darkly, “the assistance he got may turn out to be lethal” — it did not appear first in Above the Law. [FN1]
So how did S&C put a man’s life in jeopardy? Let’s descend into the mailroom at 125 Broad Street….
Continue reading “Sullivan & Cromwell’s Mailroom of Death: A Law Firm’s Error Could Cost a Man His Life”
More than a decade ago, Cory Maples of Alabama murdered two people. After an evening of heavy drinking, playing pool, and riding around in a friend’s car, Maples killed two friends, shooting them execution-style.
According to court documents, he signed a confession, “stating that he: (1) shot both victims around midnight; (2) had drunk six or seven beers by about 8 p.m., but ‘didn’t feel very drunk’; and (3) did not know why he decided to kill the two men. Faced with this confession, Maples’s trial attorneys argued that Maples was guilty of murder, but not capital murder.”
A jury found Maples guilty and sentenced him to death.
Maples appealed his capital murder conviction with the help of attorneys at Sullivan & Cromwell:
Maples subsequently filed a petition for post-conviction relief pursuant to Alabama Rule of Criminal Procedure 32, claiming, inter alia, that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to investigate or present evidence of: (1) Maples’s mental health history; (2) his intoxication at the time of the crime; and (3) his alcohol and drug history.
The trial court dismissed Maples’ Rule 32 petition, and sent notice of the decision to the attorneys at Sullivan & Cromwell and to local Alabama counsel. There was a 42-day period for filing a notice of appeal, but all the lawyers involved dropped the ball on the case, PepsiCo-style.
So what’s the explanation for S&C’s missing the deadline for filing an appeal?
Continue reading “Sullivan & Cromwell’s Life-or-Death Mistake?
Leading law firm blows deadline in death penalty case.“
On Monday, the Supreme Court ordered a federal trial judge to take a closer look at the murder case against Troy Anthony Davis, a Georgia death row inmate. The SCOTUS directed the district judge to “receive testimony and make findings of fact as to whether evidence that could have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis'] innocence.”
Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented. Justice Scalia questioned the viability of Davis’s claim of actual innocence, then went one step further. Even if Davis might be “actually” innocent, he’s SOL:
This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.
This bold pronouncement caught the attention of Professor Alan Dershowitz, back at Justice Scalia’s alma mater, Harvard Law School. From “Scalia’s Catholic Betrayal,” over at The Daily Beast:
Let us be clear precisely what [Scalia's dissent] means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: “Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she’s dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you’re dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you’re innocent.”
It would be shocking enough for any justice of the Supreme Court to issue such a truly outrageous opinion, but it is particularly indefensible for Justices Scalia and Thomas, both of whom claim to be practicing Catholics, bound by the teaching of their church, to do moral justice. Justice Scalia has famously written, in the May 2002 issue of the conservative journal First Things, that if the Constitution compelled him to do something that was absolutely prohibited by mandatory Catholic rules, he would have no choice but to resign from the Supreme Court.
So should Justice Scalia resign? The Dersh isn’t saying that — yet.
But he does have a challenge for Nino.
Continue reading “Professor Dershowitz’s Challenge to Justice Scalia”
* A dramatic closer look at Wolf Block’s collapse. [Philadelphia Magazine]
* The media buzz this week on Sotomayor: Her decision in the New Haven firefighters case could be a key issue during her confirmation hearings. [USA Today]
* Minnesota’s Supreme Court will hear arguments today in the Coleman–Franken election race. Yes, it is still going on. [Wall Street Journal]
* GM files for bankruptcy today. Wasn’t it always just a matter of time? [Associated Press]
* U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez has approved Chrysler’s sale of most of its business to Fiat. [Bloomberg]
* A Georgia man is facing execution for murdering an off-duty cop in 1989, even though seven out of the nine witnesses have recanted their testimony. Should SCOTUS intervene? [New York Times]
