Today's articles

Today's Boston Globe:
*It All Comes Back to Danny Keeler: An article about a homicide detective whose credibility has been questioned
*City Gives Him A Break: Mayor Menino helps a man who served 13 yrs for a rape he didn't commit.
*If someone had been kind enough to give me this kind of career advice I wouldn't be in my current frenzy.

The New York Times' Neediest Cases. Did you know that under the current federal system, women do not qualify for welfare if they are in school full time? The 'workfare' system requires job-related activity, and only a few months every two years, I think, can be counted towards welfare eligibility. So then - if she works at McD's, she might be able to get benefits. If she wants to get a bachelor's degree to get a stable, better paying job with benefits, then the kids don't get fed and the bills don't get paid.

The Baltimore Sun has an article about a defendant convicted for carjacking in which the accomplice and purported triggerman was set free. There's one sentence in the article that I thought was a stupid reporter's attempt to interpret law: "Under Maryland state law, if prosecutors lose a pretrial appeal, they forfeit the entire case." I couldn't get over that one little sentence. Just a minute or two of Westlaw research affirmed that this is, in fact, true.
If the State appeals on the basis of this paragraph, and if on final appeal the decision of the trial court is affirmed, the charges against the defendant shall be dismissed in the case from which the appeal was taken. In that case, the State may not prosecute the defendant on those specific charges or on any other related charges arising out of the same incident.
HOT DAMN.

And there is an awesome article on Slate about Kowalski v. Tesmer, a Sixth Amendment case the Court decided recently. I must admit that I am absolutely ASHAMED that I had not read this opinion until today. The Sixth Amendment is my thing - I am all UP AND IN da biznass of ineffective assistance of counsel claims. (I waded through every, single, solitary Fourth and Fifth Circuit case on it last year for my note, and it just stuck. The Sixth Amendment is my favorite.) The article does a great job of demonstrating what a horrid, horrid decision this is.