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Lawbeat 
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Post Frequency: 3.4/day Last Entry: May 10, 2009 at 17:34:15 Recent Entries: 427
By Mark Obbie
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LawBeat on hiatus
Posted on May 10, 2009Why has this blog been so quiet? Two reasons: Until today, I've been in a long, dark tunnel of work, more intense than even past end-of-semester crunches. But on top of that, I've been debating whether to continue producing LawBeat. The debate is over...
Painting oral arguments as mere politics
Posted on April 26, 2009Dana Milbank's April 23 column "The Supremes Sing the Oldies" in the Washington Post is hardly what some would categorize as pure legal journalistic writing. In his column, Milbank pokes fun at the Supreme Court justices hearing the oral arguments of Ricci v...
Fortune hypes an already-good feature
Posted on April 25, 2009The new Bernie Madoff narrative in Fortune by James Bandler and Nicholas Varchaver is a hell of a page-turner. I haven't devoured every Madoff detail -- and who can, judging only from the CNNMoney.com Madoff archive -- so I'm not the best judge of how much new ground this nearly 11,000-word feature actually breaks...
In Lackey story, an opportunity lost
Posted on April 23, 2009It is almost unheard of that an acquittal receives more media attention than the case that predicated it. But this is the case for Dan Lackey, a developmentally disabled man who was wrongly accused and convicted of sexually assaulting a woman in 2003...
In an instant, the Court camera tide turns
Posted on April 23, 2009It's hard not to feel a tingle of excitement when reading Tony Mauro's report of today's appearance at a House hearing by Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer -- an annual budget ritual that unexpectedly became a forum on the Supreme Court's transparency and public accountability...
The Docket: 04/22
Posted on April 22, 2009This week's edition covers an impressive range, from torture to witty banter among Supreme Court justices. As always, send comments and suggestions to rsmascarenhas [at] gmail [dot] com. As we've seen since the release of the Bush Administration torture memos, covering detention policies well requires extensive knowledge of medical and legal issues...
When a child porn charge isn't what it seems
Posted on April 19, 2009This article in today's Washington Post Outlook section should be required reading for every legal reporter and journalism student. Ting-Yi Oei, a Virginia high school administrator, recounts his indictment and the news coverage of his case. Here's how he starts it:The Channel 4 Newsbreak was meant to shock: "High school assistant principal in Loudoun County arrested for child pornography," announced WRC's Jim Vance...
The Docket Returns
Posted on April 16, 2009Near the end of last year, I briefly wrote The Docket, a weekly feature on this blog that highlighted some of the best legal journalism around the web. I ended my modest effort (the ABA Journal's kind review notwithstanding) to concentrate on a new job as the Newark Star-Ledger's night cops reporter...
1st Circuit nixes court cameras
Posted on April 16, 2009That ends that. I guess it was wishful thinking to expect to find a loophole in the federal ban on cameras in the court.
Gerstein gives DOJ its due -- and then some
Posted on April 16, 2009On his blog today, Politico's Josh Gerstein shares the backstory to a report he wrote on Attorney General Eric Holder's speech at West Point last night. Justice Department officials, he writes, were "pretty unhappy" that he emphasized a portion of Holder's speech where the AG cautioned that government transparency has its limits...
Picking through shards after Stevens case collapse
Posted on April 12, 2009Last week, in praising a Legal Times story on the Department of Justice's screwups in the Ted Stevens prosecution, I wondered which reporter would ask the next logical question: To what extent was Stevens truly exonerated (because the allegations against him went unproven)? Neil Lewis of the Times provides the first story I've seen of that sort, and the results are unimpressive...
Lessons from a wrongful conviction
Posted on April 08, 2009Last night, Syracuse University was privileged to play host to a public screening of a documentary on a local wrongful conviction, followed by a Q&A with one of the filmmakers and with freed convict Roy Brown. Blanchard Road: A Murder in the Finger Lakes (watch the trailer here) was made by Newhouse School graduate Alex Dunbar and Andrew Wolf...
'Church and state' just doesn't cut it
Posted on April 08, 2009I derive no pleasure from criticizing the legal coverage in my hometown paper, The Syracuse Post-Standard. But I was dismayed by a story about a new appeal in Peck v. Baldwinsville Central School District, printed on Tuesday, April 7, and first published on the web on Friday, April 3...
Stevens v. DOJ takeout
Posted on April 06, 2009Mike Scarcella and Joe Palazzolo have this standout story on the Ted Stevens prosecution mess in this week's Legal Times. It excels at three things in particular:Explaining the case's meltdown at a level of detail I haven't seen in other reports. But it's also a narrative (and I'm a sucker for those)...
What led up to latest church scandal revelations
Posted on April 03, 2009Tom Roberts has done some valuable and enterprising work in recent weeks to cast a light on historical insights into the Catholic church pedophile scandal. Today's story by Laurie Goodstein in the Times, which graciously credited Roberts' National Catholic Reporter story on Monday, tipped me off to Roberts' work...
Inside the workers comp hellhole
Posted on March 31, 2009God bless The New York Times. This, boys and girls, is what you get when you invest in real reporting by professionals: a wondrous piece of muckraking, with human tragedy, vivid scenes, masses of data and background boiled down to digestible portions, and a passionate howl at the wasteful, cruel bureaucracy that New York calls a workers compensation system...
Morning News turns up heat in Keller showdown
Posted on March 31, 2009Veteran legal and investigative reporter Steve McGonigle of the Dallas Morning News expertly used property records to drop a bomb into the already-volatile case against Texas' chief criminal court judge, Sharon Keller. His story is a gutsy and meticulous (and carefully contained) takedown, showing that Keller -- while complaining that she needs discounted legal fees or a publicly paid lawyer in the ethics case pending against her -- owns nearly $2 million (and maybe more) in real estate holdings that she neglected to disclose as required by law.
What to do with Gitmo: a new chapter
Posted on March 29, 2009The Post's Peter Finn and Joby Warrick provide new glimpses of the mess that U.S. officials find themselves in as they wrestle with what to do with particular Guantanamo detainees. Their focus in today's front-pager is seven-year detainee Abu Zubaida, an early and seemingly valuable intelligence source whose interrogations -- both traditional and tortured -- yielded a mountain of material that set off manhunts and warnings worldwide...
Gillibrand and Big Tobacco: big score with a big flaw
Posted on March 27, 2009The Times' Raymond Hernandez and David Kocieniewski have an ambitious and heavily reported front-pager today proving that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., had a far more influential legal role defending The Philip Morris Company than she is willing to concede now...
Did Greenhouse overstep an imaginary line?
Posted on March 20, 2009Does a retired journalist hurt the reputation of her successors by taking a partisan policy role in the field that she previously covered? That's the question that troubles me when I hear that former New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse has joined the board of the American Constitution Society, the liberal legal think tank...
Google, Twitter and mistrials
Posted on March 19, 2009[Editor's note: This is the first of a series of guest posts by students in the Law, Politics, and Media course.]Imagine you're the plaintiff in a civil suit that's been ongoing for the past six weeks. The judge is about to announce the verdict and you picture yourself walking out of the courtroom wearing a big toothy grin, holding $10,000 in compensatory and special damages in hand...
Why the Casey Anthony case is so heavily exposed
Posted on March 18, 2009Amy Edwards' story last weekend in the Orlando Sentinel about public access to court records in the Casey Anthony case probably will evoke two reactions: the envy of police and courthouse reporters outside Florida, and the enmity of anyone who hates the tabloid frenzy that Anthony's case has become...
Shotgun "wedding" for NLJ and Legal Times
Posted on March 16, 2009No matter how Incisive Media spins it, its announcement today that it is "merging" Legal Times and the National Law Journal under one banner is the shutdown of Legal Times -- a best-case-scenario shutdown, perhaps, but still a shutdown. And that makes me angry, or sad, or maybe just my usual state of angry/sad as I watch what's happening to journalism and the people I've spent my career with (I'm speaking broadly, not just about Incisive Media, but now would be an apt time to link to my conflicts disclosure)...
Torture debate gets injection of new details
Posted on March 15, 2009Author and journalism professor Mark Danner points out in his newly published New York Review of Books article that American journalists have written often of the existence of "black sites" -- secret overseas prisons -- and of associated controversies over "extraordinary rendition" of terror suspects and the use of torture, by U...
"Crumbled lives and shredded families"
Posted on March 13, 2009The Philadelphia Inquirer's John Sullivan last Sunday had this powerful followup to the Pennsylvania judicial scandal, where two judges were convicted of taking millions in kickbacks from privately run juvenile jails that the judges stocked with undeserving kids...
P-I plays watchdog ... for now
Posted on March 11, 2009I wonder if Tracy Johnson is among the chosen few reporters who will remain with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in its rumored slimmed-down online-only rebirth -- and whether Washington state citizens could hope to stay as well informed of such stories as this one by Johnson on a state Supreme Court justice's questionable conduct...
Club's judicial freebie gets full airing
Posted on March 11, 2009The ABA Journal's Terry Carter broke a juicy judicial-ethics story on the magazine's Web site. It's a two-fer: a questionable price break for judges at an exclusive D.C. club, and dodgy loophole-threading to avoid newly legislated restrictions on gifts to judges...
Grace trial coverage showcases law-press collaboration
Posted on March 09, 2009Thanks to Bob Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch, I learned of the Grace Case Project: a collaboration of the University of Montana's schools of journalism and law to cover a lengthy criminal trial of W.R. Grace & Co. and its top officials. The site offers legal and factual backgrounders alongside daily coverage by blog and Twitter posts...
A child is railroaded, and only barely saved
Posted on March 09, 2009In this month's American Lawyer, Susan Beck documents the heroic and monumental legal struggle required to undo the wrongful conviction of a boy coerced into confessing to the murder of another child. Beck's spare, just-the-facts language makes the details all the more shocking...
Another Weingarten masterpiece
Posted on March 08, 2009Readers of The Washington Post Magazine probably know Gene Weingarten as the humor writer in the back of the book, a wisecracking funny man. People in the business may know him also as the former editor to humorist Dave Barry. I knew all that, but I also knew him as the writer of a memorable, Pulitzer-winning feature that I've recommended often to others...
Making sense of the Wyeth ruling
Posted on March 08, 2009Does the Supreme Court favor businesses, or the people who sue businesses? Rather than rely on lazy, oversimplified, ideological labeling -- the "conservative" and "pro-business" Roberts Court took a surprising detour into pro-plaintiff, liberal territory in last week's decision in Wyeth v...
Wrongful-conviction documentary screening
Posted on March 07, 2009The Carnegie Legal Reporting Program is proud to be a co-sponsor of this April 7 screening of the documentary 'Blanchard Road: A Murder in the Finger Lakes,' on the wrongful murder conviction of Auburn, N.Y.'s Roy Brown. After the 6 p.m. film screening, Brown and filmmaker Alex Dunbar, a Newhouse School graduate, will discuss the case and the film in an audience Q&A.
Another trial-Twitter roundup
Posted on March 06, 2009Roxana Hegeman filed this AP report giving an overview of federal court access issues pegged to Ron Sylvester's trial-tweeting experiment in Wichita. It's a thorough but not groundbreaking story. Because it's AP, it's bound to raise the profile of such advances -- and maybe convince a few more trial judges to take the plunge.
How to add spice to Ginsburg story
Posted on March 06, 2009USA Today's Joan Biskupic gets Justice Ruth Ginsburg's first post-surgery interview, which the paper played out front. The short, one-source story is a feel-good piece -- not that there's anything wrong with that. Ginsburg undoubtedly agreed to talk to signal that she is not near death or about to vacate her seat...
Wichita reporter tweets from federal trial
Posted on February 26, 2009Ron Sylvester, the Wichita Eagle reporter I blogged about last month, continues his push to expand trial coverage via Twitter. He's convinced a Kansas federal judge to allow him to use the social-networking tool from the courtroom in a criminal trial that began this week...
Questions in Kent case need answers
Posted on February 26, 2009After a bizarre back and forth throughout the day, the Florida federal judge called in to hear the prosecution of a Texas federal judge has lifted his gag order on lawyers and witnesses in the case. Judge Robert Vinson had left the gag order in place since Monday's guilty plea by Samuel Kent, who stepped down from his judgeship when pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in a case featuring accusations that he sexually abused women who worked for him...
Levy media pack reassembles
Posted on February 25, 2009McClatchy's Michael Doyle has documented media coverage of this latest phase of the Chandra Levy murder case, adding to what he's already done on his blog in multiple posts about the Levy investigation. As usual, I'm left dumfounded over what might spark a particular news frenzy...
Prop 8 preview takes brainy detour
Posted on February 24, 2009Greg Moran is a brave reporter -- and, evidently, one who has his editors' trust. It's not often that a courthouse reporter can sell his editors on a story about a new legal standard that's applied to certain cases. But that's what this San Diego Union-Tribune courts reporter did to preview next week's oral arguments in the California same-sex-marriage battle...
Rochester judges: masters of their domain
Posted on February 23, 2009Here's a wonderful example of a local newspaper's commitment to public access to court records. David Andreatta of Rochester's Democrat & Chronicle demonstrates convincingly that local civil courts -- through carelessness or worse -- have routinely kept crucial documents out of publicly accessible files...
Gag order persists despite guilty plea
Posted on February 23, 2009Speaking of judges who forget they're public servants, the visiting judge hearing the unprecedented criminal prosecution of U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent persists in limiting legitimate public scrutiny of the case -- and continues to catch subtle hell from the Houston Chronicle's Mary Flood...
Note to Gary Condit: Our bad!
Posted on February 21, 2009If today's news about the Chandra Levy case proves true, and D.C. police charge the suspect identified in last summer's Washington Post series that I praised here, then a few legal-reporting reminders are in order:1. Former Rep. Gary Condit's experience at the hands of police and journalists should join the Hall of False-Accusation Shame...
WSJ cuts lead Law Blog reporter
Posted on February 21, 2009The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog lost its primary writer to newspaper-wide staff cuts. Dan Slater posted a brief goodbye yesterday, and I confirmed that he was the one staff sacrifice that the Journal's law group was told to make earlier this month...
Indecent? Obscene? Whatever.
Posted on February 20, 2009Call me Mr. Picky. But I wonder if this dumb mistake would have been made if Fox News covered the Supreme Court regularly, or had legally smart producers reading copy before it's published or aired. In this Web report, Lee Ross confuses obscenity with indecency in a report on whether the Supreme Court will hear the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" case...
Corporate crime reference misses mark
Posted on February 19, 2009Lynnley Browning's front-pager in the Times on the $780 million settlement between the federal government and UBS -- a deal casting a harsh light on Swiss banking practices -- contains a curious graf near the end:The move by UBS to settle the case, on the eve of a Senate subcommittee hearing next Tuesday on the matter, signals how close the bank came to being indicted for not cooperating with prosecutors...
Creative storytelling about the new AG
Posted on February 18, 2009When I heard Steve Inskeep's intro of this Ari Shapiro piece on NPR's Morning Edition, I had my skeptic's hat on (it's a rather handsome piece of headwear, but I'll save details on that for another post). Shapiro's relatively lengthy report (nearly eight minutes) focused on Eric Holder's innovation as U...
Florida foreclosures, from the inside of a courtroom
Posted on February 18, 2009The Journal's Michael Corkery turns the foreclosure crisis into a vivid vignette in this piece today focusing on how Florida courts are dealing with a glut of cases. The story's brisk pace and human touches -- ending with a woman silently crying as a busy court system churns through its backlog -- belie its mastery of the relevant facts about the housing market, the law, and court-administration realities...
Legal journos reap awards
Posted on February 17, 2009Two recent journalism awards, including the top-shelf Polk Awards, included legal reporters among their honorees. The Polk for justice reporting went to Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin for "Reasonable Doubt," a five-part series in The East Valley Tribune on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's campaign against illegal immigrants in and around Phoenix...
Riling the viewers with a pointless story
Posted on February 16, 2009In her 90-second broadcast report, and an accompanying text story on the Web, reporter and weekend anchor Jen Hale at Birmingham, Alabama's NBC affiliate, WVTM Channel 13, treats seriously a state legislator's proposal that flies directly in the face of last year's Supreme Court ruling barring capital punishment for raping but not killing a child...
When Don met Adam, and the things he said
Posted on February 15, 2009What's most remarkable about Adam Liptak's front-pager today on the pending Supreme Court case on judicial ethics and independence, Caperton v. Massey, is not simply that Liptak reported from the field rather than just from the briefs and from talking-head experts...
Caperton resource page: pluses and minuses
Posted on February 13, 2009Justice at Stake, the Soros-funded goo-goos campaigning to rein in or abolish judicial elections (that's what it means in its slogan about "working for fair and impartial courts"), has built this impressive resource site on the pending Caperton v. Massey case...
Autism battle still awaits a full takeout
Posted on February 13, 2009Nearly 11 months ago, I prodded the Times to dig more deeply into the autism-and-vaccines controversy -- a health story, but with a major legal angle, as parents seek compensation on claims that common vaccines can cause autism. Back then, it shocked me that the clearest perspective on developments at that time came in an op-ed, rather than through enterprising reporting...
Court records access battle bursts into view
Posted on February 13, 2009John Schwartz tells a fascinating story today about a controversy over the federal courts' PACER records system. This has been going on awhile, but under my radar (I guess my ballooning blog-reading list still isn't large enough). The heart of the story -- about Public...
Local paper revealed kickback probe months ago
Posted on February 13, 2009Like many readers of The New York Times, I was shocked to read today of the judicial scandal in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where two judges stand convicted of taking millions in kickbacks for sending juveniles to a privately owned lockup. But local residents have had quite a while to get used to the shock, thanks to long-running, hard-hitting coverage of the federal investigation by Dave Janoski and his colleagues at the Citizens Voice...
Behind NY's "merit" selection of chief judge
Posted on February 13, 2009The legendary Wayne Barrett accomplished two feats in this story about the political levers pulled to put Jonathan Lippman in the chief judge seat of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals: he showed how uninspired the Times and other newspapers in the state have been in covering such a crucial judicial appointment; and he provided a stark reminder that so-called merit selection is not the squeaky-clean alternative to elections that it's cracked up to be -- especially in the Empire State, home of shameless machine politics and backroom deals masquerading as democracy...
Revealing the story behind juvenile-suicide report
Posted on February 12, 2009I love it when a small trade publication breaks a good story. Kudos to John Kelly of Youth Today, a newspaper for youth-services professionals, for revealing the backstory behind a newly released report on states' failures to prevent suicides in juvenile lockups...
Con-law 101: legal standing made interesting
Posted on February 12, 2009Jess Bravin provides a primer on legal standing in today's Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) -- not a sure-fire crowd pleaser, but his conversational, example-filled story does a marvelous job of explain an abstract theory to lay readers. The hook for the story is a lawsuit challenging Hillary Clinton's legal right to hold the office of Secretary of State...
CQ's new reported blog on the courts
Posted on February 10, 2009Congressional Quarterly has launched an important addition to legal reporting (and I emphasize reporting) with the new blog Legal Beat, by legal affairs writers Keith Perine and Seth Stern. The site describes itself thusly:Legal Beat chronicles the relationship and tensions between Congress and the courts...
Newsflash: Obama hates freedom!
Posted on February 10, 2009Shame on Evan Perez and the headline writers at The Wall Street Journal. To report on appellate arguments yesterday in San Francisco, they spun the news as political backpedaling by the administration -- but backpedaling on the wrong thing. Here's the hed and two lede grafs:Rendition Case Under Bush Gets Obama BackingThe Obama administration backed the Bush administration's arguments in a lawsuit involving the practice of seizing terror suspects abroad and sending them to third countries for questioning...
Ginsburg coverage insensitive? Phooey!
Posted on February 07, 2009I didn't write until now about this week's news coverage of Justice Ruth Ginsburg's cancer surgery because I didn't see anything remarkable among reports by SCOTUS beat reporters or other major news organizations. But Tony Mauro's story in the upcoming issue of Legal Times suggests -- and not for the first time -- that what journalists consider routine scrutiny of the justices' lives, the Court may see as intrusive and gauche...
Big play for leaked forensic science report
Posted on February 05, 2009The Times' Solomon Moore previews the upcoming release of a National Academy of Sciences report on flawed scientific practices that law enforcement have used to convict "thousands of defendants for nearly a century." His writing rings with authority, providing useful legal, scientific, and historical context intelligently and clearly...
Scalia fan club decreases by (at least) one
Posted on February 04, 2009Interesting Antonin Scalia outburst in Florida, according to these accounts by Tony Mauro and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Let's see if I have this straight: While defending an improper (but all too common) content-based decision to limit public access to Court proceedings, Scalia attacks a student for asking a thoroughly reasonable question about the Court's public accountability...
Time beats anti-death-penalty drum
Posted on February 04, 2009Reacting to Richard Lacayo's story in Time -- a story declaring that "The Tide Shifts Against the Death Penalty" -- Sentencing Law and Policy blogger Doug Berman calls the timing "interesting." And he doesn't mean that as a compliment. Berman, an oft-quoted expert, wrote:As regular readers know, I have been documenting death penalty's decline for quite sometime...
Olson on me on Olson on CPSIA press
Posted on February 03, 2009Walter Olson adds to his comments on anemic press coverage of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, claiming to echo my earlier thoughts but actually advancing the ball because he has put much more work and thought into it. The logrolling continues.
Check out TheCrimeReport.org
Posted on February 02, 2009A big part of my daily legal-news diet just moved to a new and fancier home. Here's the announcement about Crime & Justice News:After nearly six years, Crime & Justice News is expanding and moving to a new web site. As of today, CJN is based at TheCrimeReport...
Consumer controversy still off some radars
Posted on February 01, 2009Two weeks ago, I marveled at the virtual news blackout that major news organizations had given a controversy that has been roiling small businesses and consumer groups for months. (I'll lazily rely on that previous post to provide background on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, or CPSIA...
Drug-war anecdote: great narrative, thin meaning
Posted on February 01, 2009Today's Washington Post Magazine cover story reminds me of a put-down that my newspaper buddies and I had for a certain type of magazine story: "pretty writing." We meant that magazine artistes were infamous for reading the product of our original news reporting, and then swooping into town to write a feature that had lots of words but not much new insight or information...
More special treatment for judge-defendant?
Posted on January 31, 2009There he goes again. Nearly five months after he imposed a strict gag order in the criminal prosecution of U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent -- a gag order that neither party asked for, and in the absence of any sort of media circus -- the visiting judge from Florida hearing the case in Houston has ordered that certain routine filings in the case be filed under seal...
Schwartz sets smart benchmark for new beat
Posted on January 30, 2009Now this is encouraging: One of John Schwartz's first significant pieces as the new legal-affairs national reporter at the Times -- and his first in that role with a "news analysis" bug -- tackles an unlikely topic in a clear, engaging way. Is there a new federalism blooming, he asks? Through examples and experts, Schwartz explores a story that's more regulatory than courts-driven; more evolutionary than events-driven; and more about ideas and government theory than about conflict and crisis...
Taylor: Ledbetter law news coverage stank
Posted on January 30, 2009Journalists covering Congress' passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act have "thoroughly distorted the facts" in that policy debate, continuing a pattern that began with "an explosion of ill-informed media outrage" after Ledbetter's Supreme Court loss in 2007...
Epic tale of Eli Lilly's Zyprexa battles
Posted on January 30, 2009Ben Wallace-Wells' masterful feature in the current Rolling Stone -- "Bitter Pill," a lengthy narrative on the history of the controversial antipsychotic drug Zyprexa -- puts into perspective the spot-news stories I've read over the years about litigation over the drug...
Wrongful-conviction anecdotes add up to trend
Posted on January 29, 2009Kevin Johnson put a fresh twist on coverage of wrongful convictions in this enterprising story yesterday in USA Today. Citing Innocence Project stats on inmates exonerated by DNA evidence -- showing that 90 percent were convicted of sex crimes -- Johnson explores how the sex-crime stigma follows these men long afterward...
Barnes in the live-chat hot seat
Posted on January 28, 2009The Washington Post's Robert Barnes took questions yesterday at the paper's Web site, juggling a mix of politics and Supreme Court questions -- much as he does in his work for the paper (Barnes took leave from the Court beat last year to cover the campaign)...
Joy Behar and the decline of civilization
Posted on January 27, 2009When the Rod Blagojevich publicity circus pitched its tent on ABC's The View yesterday, only a fool would have expected real journalism to occur. Still, by the account of the Chicago Tribune's Rick Pearson and Frank James, the venerable interviewer Barbara Walters -- appearing remotely from the West Coast -- did her best to lend some facts and professionalism to the affair...
WaPo hypes Gitmo story to give it news peg
Posted on January 25, 2009This story in today's Washington Post by Karen DeYoung and Peter Finn has a superficial, he-said/she-said balance that at first makes the story seem like real news. Officials from the Obama administration say that they are just now realizing what a mess the government's records on Guantanamo detainees are...
Updates on live-blogging of trials
Posted on January 23, 2009I wanted to make note of a flurry of reports and comments on live-blogging of trials:The ABA Journal's Debra Cassens Weiss wrote this informative, link-filled story focusing on an Iowa fraud prosecution that Trish Mehaffey of the Cedar Rapids Gazette covered from the courtroom on this blog...
Detroit dustup: where's the folo?
Posted on January 22, 2009It's been nearly a week since Detroit's top municipal lawyer was forced out of her job in a dispute with a judge. The city's corporation counsel, Kathleen Leavey, denies she was making a racist comment when she called one of the city's courts a "ghetto court...
Prescription for medical-legal story: more sources
Posted on January 21, 2009Dirk Johnson has this interesting and informative story today in the Times about a criminal case in Wisconsin that examines where the line is between religious freedom and criminal mistreatment of ill children. He clearly explains the issues and provides useful context about controversies over parents' religiously motivated refusals to get the necessary care for their children...
A civil rights history reading list for 1/20/09
Posted on January 20, 2009To mark today's historic inauguration, LawBeat recommends the books that taught him the civil rights history of America -- and the central importance of both the rule of law and public knowledge of its government's behavior. Today, we give thanks to the journalists and historians whose inquiries and writings make today's milestone that much more powerful:Taylor Branch's three-part history of "America In the King Years": Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, At Canaan's EdgeRichard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v...
Localize this: crack sentence reductions stats
Posted on January 19, 2009Why isn't every local federal courts reporter doing what The Birmingham News' Robert Gordon did in this Sunday story? Using stats provided by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Gordon compared Alabama to the other states in the 11th Circuit to show how common it is for its inmates to see their sentences reduced when they challenge their crack-cocaine prison terms...
Glaberson pens another Gitmo pattern piece
Posted on January 19, 2009William Glaberson continues his impressive beat coverage of Guantanamo detainees, this time in a front-pager that's a synthesis of the many snapshots that he and other members of the press have taken in recent weeks. The bigger picture that emerges from Glaberson's notebooks shows how extensively the remaining ranks of detainees are riddled with cases that don't hold up to scrutiny, now that courts and military commissions are reviewing the cases...
Did Plain Dealer betray its reporter?
Posted on January 19, 2009An unhappy ending to a series I praised last fall: As reported by Columbia Journalism Review in its January/February issue (no link yet available), the Cleveland Plain Dealer earned a CJR dart for "failure to aggressively back its reporter," Bob Paynter...
Retailers panic while consumer reporters snooze
Posted on January 18, 2009Major newspapers have largely dropped the ball -- at least twice -- on an important piece of consumer and health news. Barely three weeks before a new law takes effect imposing strict safety and testing standards on products for children, handicraft makers and second-hand retailers are panicking over the law's broad -- and possibly unintended -- swipes at their businesses...
Closing Gitmo ain't easy? Who knew!
Posted on January 15, 2009Now NPR has made a substantial contribution to a rapidly growing body of work that we might call "The Gitmo Puzzle: Harder Than We Thought!" It joins Newsweek, the Times, and practically everyone else, it seems, in reporting on the messy details of what it means to shut down the Guantanamo detention operation...
Boston federal court hearing to be webcast
Posted on January 15, 2009Last summer, I blogged about a camera-friendly Boston federal judge, Nancy Gertner, who was considering a courtroom-camera experiment in her trial court -- dodging the federal camera ban, based on creative arguments made by Courtroom View Network and its Washington lawyer, cameras-in-the-courts veteran Jonathan Sherman...
Bush-Cheney legal legacy, in broad strokes
Posted on January 14, 2009Warren Richey provides the second of three parts of a Christian Science Monitor series on "The Bush Legacy," this time focusing on the president's war-on-terror legal policies, particularly his -- or, rather, Vice President Cheney's -- efforts to enhance presidential power (the series' first part, yesterday, was a more general look at history's likely judgment, while tomorrow's looks at foreign policy)...
An overinflated cover story
Posted on January 12, 2009Newsweek got my attention with a law-of-war cover story by two heavyweights -- Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas -- not to mention an unusual (for Newsweek) editorial illustration on the cover, by the talented Victor Juhasz. But the story is kind of a nothing-burger...
Liptak has to wonder: WWLD?
Posted on January 10, 2009Tell me Adam Liptak didn't feel Linda Greenhouse staring down at his fingers as he typed this one. The day after Greenhouse published an op-ed calling a pending Voting Rights Act appeal a big honkin' deal (the case, she wrote, "promises to tell us more than almost any other about John G...
Prognostications on Wall Street prosecutions
Posted on January 08, 2009Roger Parloff's cover story in the Jan. 19 issue of Fortune is the perfect antidote to the conventional wisdom that "someone" should go to jail for the financial messes we're in. Perhaps many someones should, and will. But, as Parloff documents in his meticulous but readable way, the complicated realities make payback a fairly elusive prospect...
Resource for would-be legal reporters
Posted on January 07, 2009Just-discovered resource: Mark Grabowski, a Marist College journalism prof and law grad, has an extensive journalism-careers site, Cubreporters.org, where he includes a list of opportunities at the intersection of law and journalism -- in legal reporting, and in media law...
We're Number 14!
Posted on January 07, 2009The ABA Journal's "Blawg 100" readers' choice votes are in, and LawBeat placed second to last in the News category. Which isn't bad, considering this site isn't a source of legal news, nor does it fit the Journal's chief criteria: by lawyers (nope), for lawyers (nope again)...
"Creature Comforts" puts human (and animal) faces on policy debate
Posted on January 06, 2009Joe Nocera's cover story in the Times Magazine, on "what led to the financial meltdown," was so compelling that I almost overlooked this remarkably good legal story by Rebecca Skloot. Her deeply reported and engaging story examines a topic prone to snap judgments...
Bloggy updates to a magazine story
Posted on January 06, 2009Lest the last post makes you think I've gone all luddite, check this out: The writer whose NYT Magazine story so impressed me, Rebecca Skloot, has gone much further on her blog, Culture Dish. This is only the latest of several posts that expand on, and update, her magazine story...
Twittering trials: More access than we need?
Posted on January 06, 2009Bob Ambrogi (crediting Social Media Law Student) posted a newsy, link-filled report on a Wichita Eagle courts reporter, Ron Sylvester, who's admirably pushing the envelope of public access to the courts. With links to stories from the Boulder Daily Camera and Colorado Independent, Ambrogi tipped me off that Sylvester had won the right to "tweet" from a locally newsworthy trial scheduled to start Monday...
Shane makes another run at Ivins case
Posted on January 04, 2009It did not take long for The New York Times' Scott Shane to turn a skeptical eye on last summer's early onslaught of coverage of anthrax-attack suspect Bruce Ivins. To his credit, and his paper's credit, he explored those early warning signs in depth, yielding this front-pager five months later that stakes out a bold premise in the nut graf:With the F...
WaPo oversells (or under-proves) corporate crime story
Posted on January 02, 2009The Washington Post's Carrie Johnson reports today on an end-of-year rush on settlements between the Justice Department and corporations charged with wrongdoing. It's a timely scoop, with ample examples to justify its claim that this is happening. A shakier aspect of the story is why the settlements are occurring...
Voice mistreats a legal-reporting treasure
Posted on December 31, 2008When I first became interested in legal reporting, as a grad student at Missouri in 1980, Nat Hentoff's was one of the bylines I gravitated to. I came to admire his passion for civil liberties -- animated by reported fact, not just opinion derived from someone else's work...
WSJ scores with Gonzo interview
Posted on December 31, 2008The Journal's Evan Perez scoops everyone else on the DOJ and Gonzo beats with what he bills (and I have no reason to disagree) as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' "most extensive comments since leaving government." Perez leads with the not-so-surprising news that Gonzales plans a score-settling book, but goes on from there to quote the former AG with such zingers as these:"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" (referring to widespread pans of his performance in office)"[F]or some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with...
Herald questions Walsh "news," belatedly
Posted on December 29, 2008When police in Florida two weeks ago announced they were closing the investigation into the murder of Adam Walsh, I criticized news coverage in general for playing along with a publicity stunt. But I did at least give a positive shout out to David Smiley of the Miami Herald for recounting the history that put the cops' announcement in its proper context...
Madoff report is just empty hype
Posted on December 28, 2008The New York Post's business report is on my regular daily rounds -- not for its legal coverage, but for its coverage of the media business. Today provides a fresh reminder of why I should stay focused when I visit the tabloid's site. The headline on this story by Kaja Whitehouse seems pretty clear:LEGAL PROS GET PRIMED FOR A PAYDAY FROM MADOFF SCANDALInstead, the brief story only purports to show that Bernard Madoff's investment-scam victims are racing to court ("lawsuits are swirling," the story claims enigmatically), with no mention whatsoever about how many lawyers or which lawyers are getting work as a result of said swirl...
Woodstein in the data-mining age
Posted on December 26, 2008Miller-McCune editor John Mecklin clued me in to the latest rage inside the geek branch of investigative reporting: "computational journalism." He explains this nascent movement -- the next-generation computer-assisted reporting, using data-mining tools to help investigative reporters spot patterns in documents -- and ponders its potential to preserve accountability journalism in a hostile economy...
Assignment Desk: Rehab reform, state by state
Posted on December 23, 2008The New York Times series "The Evidence Gap" turns its gaze toward a quasi-legal topic today: drug-rehab programs mandated and paid for with public money. The series is rooted in science, "exploring medical treatments used despite scant proof that they work and are examining steps toward medicine based on evidence...
LAT, SF Chron shine in latest on Prop. 8
Posted on December 20, 2008When California Attorney General Jerry Brown yesterday changed his legal position in the Proposition 8 case, he threw journalists a challenge: Could they explain this latest twist in more than just raw political terms?The political story is obvious: Which side are you on? No matter what legal basis the AG provides for his position, it's clear that he has thrown his support to the anti-Prop...
Walsh news turns reporters into tools
Posted on December 17, 2008Why is fonta href=http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=enamp;tab=wnamp;ncl=1280759120 target=_blankpractically every news organization/a/font falling for the fake news event in Hollywood, Florida, in the Adam Walsh case? It's one thing for police to pull a PR stunt, announcing with a flourish (and with span style=font-style: italic;America's Most Wanted/span cameras rolling) that after 27 years they solved the case by naming the same suspect who was the chief suspect all along...
Haberman muffs line on Blago charges
Posted on December 16, 2008How bad is the newspaper business? The New York Times can't even get its own writers and editors to read it. Columnist Clyde Haberman was having some regional fun with the Rod Blagojevich scandal -- chiding New Yorkers for letting Illinois reap all the government-corruption glory -- when he used this line:It’s not easy topping someone who, if the federal charges against him are true, tried to sell the Senate seat of the president-elect...
Chicago dailies barely glance at law angle
Posted on December 14, 2008Until Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich announces whether he's resigning, the central question in the state's political crisis is fundamentally a legal one: Can Blagojevich's opponents remove him through impeachment or through a novel action filed with the state Supreme Court by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan? So how have Chicago's dailies done in covering those questions? Pathetically, at least so far...
Note to Sy Hersh: Get a listed number
Posted on December 14, 2008One of the juicier journalism tidbits in Michael Isikoff's Newsweek cover story -- profiling the former Justice Department lawyer who says he was The New York Times' whistleblower source for the infamous National Security Agency wiretapping story in 2005 -- shows how fate can be so random...
Speaking out against sex-offender notification laws
Posted on December 14, 2008Lisa Sandberg's Houston Chronicle story today sticks up for a politically dicey group: registered sex offenders who say their sex with minors wasn't all that bad. They may have a valid point, but it's a tough sell. Which is what makes Sandberg's contrarian story all the more thought-provoking...
California judges: a little thick?
Posted on December 11, 2008Yet another California trial judge has issued a blatantly unconstitutional prior restraint to protect a defendant's pretrial rights, reports the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. This one's against the Ventura County Star. Several weeks ago, for similar reasons, the Orange County Register was censored, temporarily -- until a higher court with better legal research skills overturned it...
Schwartz gets NYT legal beat
Posted on December 11, 2008For eight months I've been razzing The New York Times for not immediately naming a replacement on the legal affairs beat for Adam Liptak, once Liptak moved to the Supreme Court beat. True to the word editors gave two weeks ago, the Times finally came through -- with a great pick...
Innuendo watch: Jackson gets Blago'd
Posted on December 11, 2008Jesse Jackson Jr. is rightfully a key figure in second-day coverage of the Rod Blagojevich scandal. But too many reports have unfairly buried Jackson in buzzwords and innuendo that will forever link his name to public corruption, and the only proof made public so far is the unchecked, surreptitiously taped word of Blagojevich himself...
Pat Fitzgerald's quote spree
Posted on December 09, 2008What a day it was for legal reporting in Chicago. On the one hand, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is a reporter's dream come true. The man is a quote machine! Behold:Governor Blagojevich has taken us to a truly new low. Governor Blagojevich has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree...
Three levels of detail on Blackwater test case
Posted on December 09, 2008The Times' Ginger Thompson and James Risen, covering the indictment of five Blackwater security guards in the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians last year, made me hungry for more legal details. Thompson and Risen forecast that the case will revolve around "the first test of the government’s ability to hold private security contractors accountable for what it considers crimes committed overseas...
Kozinski cover-up: I plead guilty
Posted on December 08, 2008Scott Glover's latest revelations about 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski's sense of humor brought back some memories -- and a little discomfort. Did I betray my journalistic mission? I don't think so, but I'll tell the story and let my reader(s) judge...
WaPo zooms in on circuit courts
Posted on December 08, 2008Today's Washington Post shines a light on a judicial-nomination battleground -- in the circuit courts -- that usually is overshadowed by potential Supreme Court picks. It's an ambitious and deeply researched package. One story by Jerry Markon briefly but smartly makes the case for the circuit courts' importance, and why they're at a tipping point ideologically...
O.J. prison bids open at six, climb to 33
Posted on December 05, 2008Today's sentencing of O.J. Simpson in his Las Vegas robbery case produced utter confusion over his sentence and parole eligibility. With multiple counts, consecutive and concurrent terms, deadly-weapon enhancements, and parole factors, reporters were all over the place in trying to pin it down...
Gridiron jabber replaces legalese at Legalities
Posted on December 05, 2008Maybe this is why the Supreme Court press corps is so distracted lately. A sizable chunk of it -- namely, ABC News' Jan Crawford Greenburg and the Washington Post's Bob Barnes -- have been trash-talking each other over at Greenburg's Legalities blog yesterday and today...
Language corner: Indicted in? Or indicted for?
Posted on December 04, 2008It's nitpicking time. I used to argue with writers about this all the time. I won, because I was the editor. But I never quite convinced them of my point. Let me try it out here.If I say you were indicted FOR a crime, I am saying that I have decided you did it...
A justice's speech falls in a forest
Posted on December 04, 2008This is wild: A Supreme Court justice talks about judicial philosophy, with comments on a recent landmark decision. He makes his speech at a politically flavored public event. And yet the SCOTUS press corps is practically silent, as best I can tell. Last night, Justice Samuel Alito was the keynote speaker at The American Spectator's annual Robert L...
Camera ban = pen ban = eyesight ban?
Posted on December 03, 2008A holiday gift idea for the court that has everything: those memory-erasing flashy things from Men in Black. Evidently a D.C. Circuit panel could have used one last week when its attempt to control news from its court was foiled by an artist with a good memory...
Internet gambling's murky rules
Posted on December 03, 2008I just noticed that the Washington Post's Gilbert Gaul followed his Sunday report on cheating scandals in Internet poker -- "Inside Bet," an investigation conducted with "60 Minutes" -- with the legal angle in a front-pager on Monday. The story is an unusually detailed and lucid attempt to answer the question: is Internet gambling illegal? Gaul traces a tangled legislative and regulatory narrative to arrive at the answer -- sort of -- in all its ambivalent, complex glory...
Law blog list duped once again
Posted on December 01, 2008I'm flattered that the ABA Journal's editors didn't vote me off their law-blog island. For the second year in a row, LawBeat is among the Journal's 100 best law blogs (even though it's more a journalism blog, and even though it doesn't fit the list's description of by a lawyer for lawyers)...
WSJ spots gun angle in pardons-story folo
Posted on November 30, 2008Amir Efrati uses a reporter's nose, and shoe leather, to document a pattern among many of last week's recipients of presidential pardons. He writes in Friday's Wall Street Journal:On the surface, the list of the 14 people pardoned by the president this week shows few common denominators in terms of time served, geographic location or even type of crime, except that the felonies were non-violent...
"Sting" story months in the making
Posted on November 29, 2008Christopher Ketcham's story from the upcoming January issue of Vanity Fair shows what a magazine writer can do to break news in a tabloid-friendly murder case -- especially when one side in the case chooses to use publicity as part of its strategy. Ketcham tells the story of Doreen Giuliano, whose 25-year-old son, John Giuca, is serving 25 years to life for the 2003 murder of Mark Fisher, a 20-year-old college student...
Abrams: 650 so far have drunk the Kool-Aid
Posted on November 26, 2008Dan Abrams -- the NBC legal journalist scheming to hire out working or unemployed journalists as corporate consultants -- tells the Observer's Felix Gillette that in the first five days, he lured 650 journalists to his little honey pot. Gillette describes the early birds as "freelance journalists, people who are writing books and individuals who have recently been laid off or walked away from jobs in the media industry...
Good impending news on NYT legal beat
Posted on November 25, 2008This morning's reappearance of Adam Liptak's Sidebar column prompted me to wonder anew whether the Times will ever replace Liptak on the national legal-affairs beat. Good news: deputy national editor David Firestone predicts an announced hire is just days away...
LAT gives Prop 8 the drive-by treatment
Posted on November 23, 2008If this is the best that the LA Times can muster in covering a huge legal issue at a critical turning point, then I pity California voters -- and anyone else in the country, on either side, who's riveted to the Proposition 8 story. For starters, reporter Jessica Garrison tackled a worthwhile and logical angle, which her lede defines in clear and broad terms:In normal political campaigns, election day -- win or lose -- signals the end...
Boiling down without dumbing down
Posted on November 20, 2008SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston performs a feat of summarizing and packaging with this report on a remarkable series of cases that put into practice the Supreme Court's Boumediene v. Bush decision. It's been five months since that landmark decision set new parameters in war-on-terrorism legal challenges...
Recorder plays public-record watchdog
Posted on November 20, 2008Thanks to a brief and accidental disclosure of a court document meant to be sealed, Dan Levine of The Recorder shines a light on a court's casual decision to conceal public documents -- and a lawyer's demonstrably overblown justification for that sealing...
Abrams' conflict-o-rama
Posted on November 19, 2008What a colossally bad idea! NBC's chief legal correspondent, Dan Abrams, whose mandate at the network and at MSNBC has steadily shrunk, is starting a consulting firm that puts journalists in the employ of corporate clients. Not only will Abrams and his band of moonlighting journos be opinionators-for-corporate-hire, but the Times' Brian Stetler reports that Abrams will remain as NBC's chief legal analyst...
A Heller post-mortem, finally
Posted on November 18, 2008In the nearly five months since the Supreme Court's Second Amendment opinion in D.C. v. Heller -- heralded or denounced at the time as a civil liberties landmark -- mainstream journalists have done little to document the making of this major case. Perhaps I missed all of the tick-tock narratives, the personality-driven profiles on the people struggling behind the scenes, the policy-heavy analyses on where we go from here...
Covering the Court: Greenhouse and O'Connor
Posted on November 16, 2008How Appealing flags this legal-reporting-themed installment of C-SPAN's America & the Courts, with a link to C-SPAN's web stream of the show. I haven't seen it yet, but will soon, provided my trusty DVR worked. (LawBeat's home office is afflicted with the world's slowest DSL connection, so we don't do much web video-watching in these parts...
MLK Family: I have a claim!
Posted on November 15, 2008Is Martin Luther King's family greedy? That's the focus of a story that the Associated Press' Errin Haines broke on Thursday, which The New York Times followed today. Neither adequately explains to readers how intellectual-property rights work.There's no denying it's news...
WSJ's crime stats smell fishy
Posted on November 15, 2008Jennifer Forsyth and Leslie Eaton break little new ground in this profile today in The Wall Street Journal of Dallas DA Craig Watkins, who months or even years ago achieved national renown for his aggressive break with Dallas' lock-em-up history. The story traces Watkins' role in reexamining cases of suspected wrongful conviction, and using DNA to exonerate defendants...
SCOTUS reporting on the road (again?)
Posted on November 11, 2008It's good to see Adam Liptak getting out of the house more. Today's front-pager, datelined Pleasant Grove City, Utah, strikes a more reportorial tone than the scholarly approach that Liptak's iconic predecessor, Linda Greenhouse, typically took to previews of Supreme Court cases...
Mauro to Obama judge-screeners: be patient
Posted on November 11, 2008Tony Mauro shows what a curious mind and a telephone can do to inject some contrary facts into a speculative discussion. The topic is President-elect Obama's Supreme Court nominations, and whether the three oldest liberals might take Obama's election as their cue to exit soon...
NYT vs. USAT: Is there an echo in here?
Posted on November 09, 2008Two months after USA Today's Donna Leinwand reported that public defenders in a growing number of states are balking at handling unworkable caseloads, The New York Times' Erik Eckholm reports essentially the same thing. But what a different two months -- and a few other important factors -- can make...
Secret justice? WaPo shrugs; Times shines a light
Posted on November 07, 2008Should readers care whether justice is determined in secret? You'll get opposing answers to that question by looking at today's New York Times and Washington Post. In the first habeas corpus hearings for Guantanamo detainees in a federal court, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of Washington, D...
AmLaw mafia rides again
Posted on November 07, 2008Here at LawBeat, we look for a legal journalism theme in practically anything. It's not hard to find in the latest Time Inc. shakeup. Replacing Money magazine managing editor Eric Schurenberg is Craig Matters, who first landed his job at Money due to his American Lawyer connection to then-Money chief Bob Safian...
To the victors go the backhand
Posted on November 06, 2008In his report yesterday on California voters' approval of Proposition 8 -- endorsing a state constitutional amendment to reverse the effects of the California Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage -- NPR's Richard Gonzalez is guilty of telling the news from the losers' perspective...
Court's move right: leaning more than lurching?
Posted on November 04, 2008Tony Mauro's story in Legal Times isn't so remarkable for its claim that the conservative makeover of the Supreme Court is not yet complete -- it's pegged, after all, to a new law review article, other experts' claims, and Mauro's own reading of the cases -- as it is cheeky for naming names of journalists whose stories Mauro is diplomatically knocking...
Watching Gitmo from afar
Posted on November 03, 2008Speaking of Guantanamo watchdog journalism, The New York Times' William Glaberson and Margot Williams produced an impressive front-pager today that does what AP's David McFadden did in the story that I praised yesterday, by looking at Gitmo's prospects in the next presidential administration...
Gitmo press corps dwindles at times to three
Posted on November 02, 2008AP's David McFadden reveals in this story that the original burst of journalist attention paid to Guantanamo Bay trials of terror-suspect detainees has evaporated. He writes:The heyday for journalists seems to be history. Only months ago, the military periodically flew dozens of print reporters, TV crews, pool photographers and sketch artists to Guantanamo Bay from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington...
Digging deeper in judicial campaign finances
Posted on November 01, 2008There's no shortage of judicial campaign stories -- and horror stories -- this election cycle. A two-part story by Mark Lagerkvist at Judicial Reports this week serves as a useful example of smart reporting that goes beyond the usual stories about attack ads and heavy spending...
LAT/Tribune mashup looks grim
Posted on November 01, 2008The rumored cutbacks in D.C. at the Los Angeles Times and Tribune Co. bureau suggest bad news, no matter how you cut it, for legal journalism. The combined operation now is home to a diverse crew of legal-affairs and Supreme Court experts, including David Savage, Richard Schmitt, and Jim Oliphant...
The Docket: 10/29
Posted on October 29, 2008From the criminal to the profane, this week's portfolio of thought-provoking legal journalism has it all. Feel free to send your own thoughts to rsmascarenhas [at] gmail [dot] com.When 15-year-old Bukhari Washington was shot and killed in Newark, police quickly realized that identifying his killer was only the start of the mystery...
Stevens sentencing math: a triumph of good PR?
Posted on October 28, 2008Every high-profile criminal verdict brings a new opportunity for reporters to explain how sentences really work. The O.J. Simpson verdict earlier this month served as a reminder of a very old and very stupid journalistic habit: adding the maximum possible sentences on all counts and treating the sum as the possible sentence...
Fact checker fails to explain abortion fight
Posted on October 26, 2008This Washington Post "Fact Checker" column by Michael Dobbs purports to explain the truth behind an abortion-related controversy in the presidential campaign. Trouble is, I read it a few times and I still don't know what the facts are. Call me dense, but the piece -- which acknowledges the "legally complex" issues surrounding Barack Obama's opposition to Illinois' "born alive" legislation -- does not make clear what changes the bills would have made from existing Illinois law...
A thousand-word legal history lesson
Posted on October 23, 2008David Savage, the veteran Los Angeles Times Supreme Court correspondent, used a recent Sarah Palin controversy to expose readers to some legal history in this story today. It's a creative idea, and done well under tight time and space constraints. But I wish Savage had added one or two more grafs of explanation to make the lesson for laymen that much more valuable...
Playing catch-up to bloggers on child-porn story
Posted on October 23, 2008Amir Efrati's story in the Journal today takes a look at a law-enforcement controversy that's been percolating for some time, and that has received heavy attention already by law bloggers. Noting a growing judicial backlash against mandatory-minimum sentences for downloading child pornography, Efrati quotes judges and advocates on both sides while using Justice Department stats to good effect...
Anatomy of a smear: pro bono version
Posted on October 23, 2008There's nothing like a recording or speech text to serve as a check on faulty reporting. As I and others suspected, 2nd Circuit Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs' remarks to a Federalist Society gathering in Rochester were wildly misinterpreted by the reporter covering the event, and then by critics who seized upon Jacobs' supposed views as evidence of his hate for all pro bono (and by implication for all poor people in need of free legal help)...
Pro bono hater, or victim of a misquote?
Posted on October 23, 2008Did a legal newspaper rip a judge's comments about pro bono out of context, and did critics then rush to judgment about the judge's meaning? I'm still trying to figure out the answers to both questions. Walter Olson reports at Point of Law that 2nd Circuit Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs claims he was quoted "grossly" out of context when he made critical remarks about pro bono work and impact litigation at a Federalist Society event in Rochester...
The Docket: 10/20
Posted on October 21, 2008Before we get to this week's excellent samples of legal journalism, I wanted to remind readers to feel free to send any thought-provoking articles to rsmascarenhas [at] gmail [dot] com. The internet's just too big for this intern to handle.While Gov. Sarah Palin has quickly become Alaska's most famous export, it's hard to keep the state's other luminary, Ted Stevens, out of the picture for too long...
Cleveland rocks: crack, prison, and race
Posted on October 20, 2008Cleveland Plain Dealer's Bob Paynter powerfully combines anecdotes and his paper's own statistics to document disparate treatment of black drug defendants. It's convincing and damning stuff, told in part 1 Sunday and part 2 today. Paynter is transparent about his methodology -- which cases he's considering, and why -- and gives law enforcement ample opportunity to poke holes in the stats...
Times too quick to see trial lawyer PR boost
Posted on October 18, 2008Jonathan Glater takes a savvy look at the litigation potential in the financial crisis today. He examines the potential deep pockets, theories of recovery, and other strategic calculations now being made by investors and lawyers. The net effect is a solid legal sidebar to the Wall Street mess...
Lat dumps notebook from Lithwick UVa talk
Posted on October 18, 2008Above the Law's David Lat has this report -- almost a transcript, really -- of Dahlia Lithwick's talk at the University of Virginia Law School. It's notable at this blog because it's all about legal reporting, and about Lithwick's role as Slate's columnist at the Supreme Court...
Cameras invade federal courts. Film at 11.
Posted on October 16, 2008American Lawyer's Litigation Daily (fifth item) reports that the ingenious argument by Boies, Schiller's Jonathan Sherman to crack open federal courts to camera access has won two trial judges' support. AmLaw's report, by Andrew Longstreth, links to the two orders...
Recalling "a stitch in time saves nine"
Posted on October 15, 2008Jess Bravin has this readable, brief constitutional-law sidebar today to the ongoing story of the government's intervention in the banking industry. It's old hat to con-law scholars and even first-year law students. But, to the average reader, it's an enlightening and engaging history lesson about the clash between competing constitutional and policy views that tilted us toward an activist government in the Depression...
The Docket: 10/15
Posted on October 15, 2008Unlike the rest of the university, I took Columbus Day off, which means I missed my Monday deadline. Thankfully, the rest of the profession has picked up for my slack, giving us some powerful examples of legal journalism this week:Eyewitnesses often are a crucial part of crime investigations, but how reliable are they? The Dallas Morning News looked at robbery trials in Dallas County over two years and found a disquieting reliance on eyewitness testimony, even when corroborating evidence was weak...
ChiTrib domestic violence probe, in brief
Posted on October 11, 2008When I saw the words "lengthy article" used by the ABA Journal to describe a Chicago Tribune story, and then saw the story itself emblazoned with the telltale term "Tribune Investigation" and touting a "Tribune analysis" of court records, I braced myself...
How the system really works in Baltimore
Posted on October 10, 2008Courthouse beat reporters -- and, worse still, the horde that descends on headline-making trials -- distort reality when they gravitate to the rare juicy trial to the exclusion of the plea-bargaining machine that disposes of the vast majority of cases and makes all courthouses hum...
Greenhouse still enduring Q&As, and still worth listening to
Posted on October 10, 2008Charles Kaiser interviews Linda Greenhouse at Radar Online, and finds her in a feisty mood about her ethical dustups at the Times. There's nothing really new here, but Greenhouse is perhaps more pointed and quotable about the well-known episodes concerning her participation in a pro-choice march and her talk at Radcliffe...
"Not about the money" cliche archive
Posted on October 10, 2008In kindly linking to my earlier post that mocked NPR's unquestioning acceptance of a plaintiff's claim that her lawsuit was "not about the money," Overlawyered's Walter Olson reveals his archive of "not-about-the-money" claims by plaintiffs. Genius! Courts reporters, could we please consider a ban on such quotes because they simply don't pass the laugh test? Thanks!
Mob gossip on the Times site
Posted on October 10, 2008Famed mob reporter Jerry Capeci is holding court this week on The New York Times' site to answer questions from readers. There's been no shortage of such questions, and Capeci has tackled a number of them in two takes (so far). Capeci, whose Gang Land News site adopted a paid-subscription model about four months ago, is getting some promotional mileage, and sharing some of his voluminous knowledge of New York's mafia families...
When they say it's not about the money. . .
Posted on October 07, 2008We're hearing a lot these days about evil, biased "mainstream media" who are best bypassed so that newsmakers can speak directly to the public. That's a crock in politics, and likewise in business. Case in point: today's Q&A on NPR between host Melisssa Block and Daphne Hereford, owner of the descendants of Rin Tin Tin...
Stohr catches Breyer's switch
Posted on October 06, 2008I'm just now coming up for air from the workday, so I'm not up on what everyone else might be reporting from the first Monday in October at the Supreme Court. This Greg Stohr story strikes me, though, as smart and enterprising. Using Stephen Breyer's latest financial disclosure form, context on Breyer's history of finance-related recusals, a good eye for cases Breyer is participating in (despite his past holdings), and good questions that got direct answers from the Supreme Court press office (on Breyer's recent stock sales), Stohr gives his business readers important intelligence...
Preview most likely to wake you up
Posted on October 06, 2008I've been stifling yawns or going into OCD mode with the past few days' worth of Supreme Court previews. But Jim Oliphant snapped me out of my trance with his entertaining and smart storytelling in this story today. Simple labeling and packaging elevate dry material to something readable by the average hockey mom or average Joe.
Totenberg and the runaway lede
Posted on October 06, 2008Who can blame Nina Totenberg for trying to entice listeners to pay attention to her Supreme Court preview by looking for a device to make the very unsexy theme of this term so far -- pre-emption -- a little sexier? But her attempt at perspective on today's Morning Edition ran into some troubling facts...
The Docket: 10/06
Posted on October 06, 2008If you have come across any examples of compelling legal journalism lately, please send them to rsmascarenhas [at] gmail [dot] com. Not that this week's edition is wanting: we have soured financial deals, immigration snafus, and mackerel dollars. Over at The American Lawyer, Andrew Longstreth has compiled a good summary of the Citibank-Wachovia dispute, with obsessive linkage to court documents and story updates...
O.J. sentencing math: SI wins
Posted on October 05, 2008Coverage of the O.J. Simpson verdict in Las Vegas is largely guilty of breaking one of the most basic legal-reporting rules. Rather than explain what sentence Simpson realistically faces -- what discretion the judge has to impose minimums, and whether it's common to stack sentences in such a case with such a defendant -- we're told endlessly about his possible life sentence...
First legal reporting fellows named
Posted on October 03, 2008Drum roll, please .... announcing the first Carnegie/Newhouse School Legal Reporting Fellowships. The program, described more fully here, subsidizes the work of four freelance writers with $3,000 awards -- and then sweetens the deal by paying Newhouse School journalism students to serve as the reporters' research assistants...
Mauro picks up fallen SCOTUSblog banner
Posted on September 30, 2008Thanks to Legal Times' Tony Mauro, I now have a more-than-adequate substitute to link to for the missing Lyle Denniston analysis of the Supreme Court's possible role in the financial crisis. Mauro's story is more traditionally and explicitly sourced than Denniston's off-the-top-of-his-brainy-head article...
Bashman watches the setting Sun
Posted on September 30, 2008How Appealing's Howard Bashman gets wistful over the loss of The New York Sun -- specifically over his admiration for two law-beat reporters, Josh Gerstein and Joseph Goldstein. I, too, have noticed the little paper's ambitious, national legal coverage, and have had it on my to-do list to do enough research of the archives that I could come to some sort of conclusion about the quality of that coverage...
The Docket: 9/29
Posted on September 29, 2008While not on the level of today's dramatic bailout vote, this week's stories still pack a punch, featuring GITMO detainees, damning government e-mails, and jury snooping. If you have any other links to compelling legal journalism, please send them to rsmascarenhas [at] gmail [dot] com...
Leaked document puts Post ahead
Posted on September 25, 2008The New York Times' William Glaberson has ruled the Guantanamo-justice beat for quite some time. But today was an off day. He and the Washington Post's Peter Finn both write today about the resignation of a prosecutor in the detainee cases at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...
Did Liptak cook up a trend?
Posted on September 23, 2008Since I'm often an Adam Liptak cheerleader, I should point out that Joshua Friedman has more critical things to say in CJR about Liptak's "American Experience" swan song. Based on what seems to be a careful reading, and conferring with experts who are debating the story's premise, he argues that Liptak had little evidence to support his thesis that the worldwide influence of the U...
Dreaming of "the enlightened newsroom"
Posted on September 23, 2008Steve Weinberg has just published a major contribution to the literature of criminal justice journalism. Writing in Miller-McCune magazine, Weinberg -- a freelancer and veteran University of Missouri journalism professor -- turns the tables on the usual tales of heroic investigative reporters freeing innocent prisoners...
The Docket: 09/22
Posted on September 22, 2008As week two of the Wall Street crisis dawns, all the talk is still of bailouts, acquisitions, and questionable assets. That's as it should be, but the legal background of this story cannot be ignored for long either. This week's Docket gives the meltdown's lawyers the spotlight: Law...
Wall Street bailout and the courts: an early heads-up
Posted on September 22, 2008One of journalism's leading constitutional experts (self-taught category) has weighed in on the emergency financial bailout plan with this fascinating analysis of the role that the courts might play in any legal challenge. SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston did what he's so good at -- reading a document (in this case, the administration's legislative plan racing toward a vote in Congress this week) and running it through his enormous database of Supreme Court precedent (that would be his brain)...
Mystery solved: a blog with (gasp!) editorial standards
Posted on September 22, 2008I raved this morning about a Lyle Denniston story on SCOTUSblog, and by the time I got back to my computer late in the day it was gone. I asked Denniston why and got this response:After I put up the post, early this morning, we had a conversation about it -- initiated by me, incidentally -- that follows from some recent efforts we have been making to keep the blog more focused on the Supreme Court -- that is, on activity directly before the Court, on the way predictably to the Court (for example, the domestic detention case from 4th Circuit), and in direct reaction to the Court (for example, the Guantanamo followups to the Boumediene decision)...
Where did all the laws go? A reporter explains.
Posted on September 20, 2008WaPo's Jerry Markon has a smart folo on last week's Virginia Supreme Court ruling striking down a state law that punished e-mail spammers. Markon notices a pattern where the state passes aggressive, boundary-pushing legislation, and then gets slapped down by state or federal courts...
Times comes clean about flawed report
Posted on September 20, 2008When Adam Liptak's Sidebar column gave national exposure to a new Tulane Law Review study last January, it set off much blog chatter and followup articles elsewhere. This month, with Sidebar still on hiatus and Liptak busily diving into his new Supreme Court beat after moving to D...
Murky handling of Palin e-mail hack
Posted on September 18, 2008Did the hackers who broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account break the law? Michael Shear and Karl Vick don't help put their readers anywhere near an answer to that question in this Washington Post report on the hacking incident. They quote John McCain's campaign manager as saying it's "a violation of law...
American Exception: the book?
Posted on September 18, 2008Say goodbye to the Times' extraordinary American Exception series. Its author, Adam Liptak, confirmed in an e-mail that today's installment probably was its last -- which I had pretty much guessed, since Liptak is busy preparing for the new term on his new beat, starting in less than three weeks...
The Docket List
Posted on September 17, 2008Since there's no such thing as too many lists, we're happy to announce a new blog feature that will highlight some of the best investigative and interesting legal reporting out there. If you have any suggestions, feel free to send them to rsmascarenhas [at] gmail [dot] com...
Did Gellman shamelessly recycle Cheney material?
Posted on September 16, 2008Was I too quick to see fresh insight in Barton Gellman's excerpts from his Dick Cheney expose Angler, published Sunday in The Washington Post (and followed up with part two yesterday)? Yes, according to a review today in the Times by Michiko Kakutani, who all but accuses Gellman of a clip job -- one bordering on story-theft:“Angler” grew out of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of the same title that Mr...
Leen dusts off old notes for remembrance of cocaine cowboy
Posted on September 16, 2008Search the Washington Post's site for bylined articles by Jeff Leen, and you'll come up empty. He has a desk job -- but a critically important one in the paper's devotion to public-affairs journalism -- as the assistant managing editor in charge of investigative reporting...
Book excerpt: Gellman advances NSA story
Posted on September 14, 2008What with all of the books published on the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping -- see a good starting point on related posts here -- I would not have assumed there were many new stories to tell about the lawyers involved, and the events surrounding their drafting and debates...
Two very different takes on Larry Craig arguments
Posted on September 12, 2008Give a reporter a decent amount of column inches -- and a gift for explaining complex legal arguments in plain English -- and his readers are much better able to form an opinion about a news event that otherwise invites snap judgments. That's the lesson from today's coverage of appellate arguments in the Larry Craig airport-restroom case...
Blogger reminds AmLaw to tell whole story
Posted on September 11, 2008Overlawyered's Walter Olson wins the legal-journalism editor's award of the week. When Olson read Brian Baxter's report in yesterday's AmLaw Daily about the $688 million legal-fee award to plaintiffs' class counsel for their work in the $7.2 billion Enron class action settlements, he zeroed in on Baxter's use of one source: John Coffee...
Hype alert: A trend in search of solid proof
Posted on September 11, 2008Donna Leinwand and her editors should have looked a little more closely at the headline and lede of this USA Today story, which race beyond the evidence that she has dug up. Headlined (at least online) "Public Defenders Reject New Cases," the story starts: Public defenders are being hit so hard by budget cuts and growing caseloads that offices in several states are refusing to take on more cases because they say defendants' rights are being hurt...
Symposium explores new media and legal reporting
Posted on September 10, 2008A University of Arizona Rehnquist Center symposium, "New Media and the Courts," held yesterday in Tucson, looks like it was a thoughtful, star-studded affair, with reporters Joan Biskupic and Tony Mauro, among others -- not to mention a Supreme Court justice (Stephen Breyer) for added spice...
Greenburg and veep race: now it makes sense
Posted on September 09, 2008Back when Jan Crawford Greenburg announced she was pulled from the Supreme Court beat to cover the vice presidential races, I groused about ABC's lack of support for the law beat. But Greenburg's remarkable Legalities blog post today -- cheekily titled "Girltalk" -- wipes away any regrets...
Chron scrutinizes Kent case gag order
Posted on September 09, 2008The Houston Chronicle's federal courts reporter Mary Flood reports on a strict gag order imposed in the pending criminal case against federal judge Samuel Kent. Flood's straight-news approach is nonetheless transparently skeptical about how far the visiting judge in the case, Roger Vinson of Pensacola, will go to inhibit publicity -- and public information -- including his revelation in the gag order that he intends to hold some hearings in chambers...
Conservatorship: the mystery of the day
Posted on September 08, 2008So, by what authority can the U.S. Treasury take over the two publicly owned mortgage-finance giants, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? Good luck finding the answer in first-day coverage by the big three that you'd expect have more answers than others: the Journal, Times, and Post...
New book on Nebraska Press case
Posted on September 05, 2008In his post about a panel discussion in Washington last night, Tony Mauro breaks the news -- well, news to me -- that a University of Nebraska historian, Mark Scherer, has written a new book on one of the most important Supreme Court cases for legal reporters...
Final reminder: Monday's fellowship deadline
Posted on September 04, 2008There's still time to apply for a $3,000 legal-reporting fellowship. The deadline is Monday. If you want to get all legalistic about it, that means by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Monday. Let your freelancer friends know.
The death of legal journalism (slightly exaggerated)
Posted on September 04, 2008Journalist Sarah Kellogg wrote a long reported piece in the September issue of Washington Lawyer, published by the D.C. Bar, on the decline of traditional legal journalism and the rise of citizen media and other forms of Web-based legal information outside the confines of mainstream news media...
Kristof's readers write a valuable P.S.
Posted on September 04, 2008When I praised Nick Kristof for the way he handled his Steven Hatfill apology, I promised to revisit the public comments on his column. And they're worth everyone's time. On a single day, before the Times closed the discussion, the board filled with 149 comments that remind me why we journalists need more direct exposure to our readers...
Glater exonerated in yachting-story mishap
Posted on September 03, 2008On Sunday, I dinged Jonathan Glater of the Times for incompletely telling the tale of an America's Cup yachting dispute between two billionaires. Today's Times puts the blame where it belongs: on Glater's editors. The updated version of the story includes a correction that explains what I found lacking...
Brandweek writer's two-year quest for court file
Posted on September 02, 2008Jim Edwards may have just screwed the pooch. But I applaud his moxie -- not only pressing for access to public court files for two years, in a New York civil suit that's newsworthy and inexplicably kept private, but now he's taken it public in this Judicial Reports story...
Law in the Green Zone
Posted on September 02, 2008Discussions between magazine writers and their editors aren't always fit for public consumption. But this one is: Robin Sparkman interviewing Ben Hallman about his cover story in the September issue of The American Lawyer. Sparkman, the magazine's executive editor, walks Hallman through a how-he-did-it discussion that's a useful and interesting lesson in telling complicated, deeply reported tales...
Newsweek critic shoots, misses
Posted on September 02, 2008A University of Texas-El Paso psychology professor, who volunteered his consulting to the defense in the Mineola Swingers case in Tyler, Texas, used the well-read Romenesko letters section to accuse reporters covering the case of "shallow, sensationalistic coverage...
Fetal-homicide followup: enterprising, but a few holes
Posted on September 02, 2008Kudos to D.C.-based Michael Doyle for asking whether the claims, pro and con, that were made when Congress debated the Unborn Victims of Violence Act have proven true. The answer: No, on both counts. Neither the great benefits nor the horrors that proponents and opponents predicted have happened, Doyle reports...
Yachting and lawyers in a confusing mix
Posted on August 31, 2008Usually when I get frustrated about lawsuit stories, it's because a beat reporter from another field -- say entertainment, fashion, business, or sports -- writes about litigation without clearly or accurately explaining what's going on. Here we have a sporting dispute mired in litigation, with an incomplete story that happens to have been written by one of the Times' best legal writers...
Reminder: 9/8 deadline for fellowship bids
Posted on August 29, 2008Attention, freelancers: After the Labor Day holiday, you have less than a week until the application deadline for the Carnegie/Newhouse School Legal Reporting Fellowships program. I announced the program here last month. The program is explained fully here, and that's where you'll find the program guidelines and application form...
Kristof's anthrax apology doesn't overreact
Posted on August 28, 2008Times reporter-columnist Nicholas Kristof (pictured here) has written the public apology to Steven Hatfill that the paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, referred to nearly two weeks ago. But if Hoyt, Hatfill, or Times critics hoped that Kristof would go beyond simple regret to renounce aggressive coverage of uncharged criminal suspects, they'll be disappointed...
Where are the Biden legal profiles?
Posted on August 28, 2008Journalists are starting to outline Joe Biden's legal-policy stances (as onetime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee) and his political affiliation with trial lawyers in tort-reform debates. Two stories flagged by Overlawyered -- in yesterday's USA Today by Ken Dilanian and today's LA Times by Chuck Neubauer and Tom Hamburger -- examined various aspects of Biden's longtime policy preference for plaintiffs, his alliance and financial dependence on their lawyers, and the ethical implications of his opposition to asbestos-litigation reforms while his son and a former aide stood to gain...
Barbie v. Bratz: a fizzled ending
Posted on August 27, 2008The Journal's Nicholas Casey and his editors have given enormous amounts of smart coverage to the dispute between Mattel and MGA Entertainment over the rights to the Bratz line of dolls. From a front-page preview of the trial through weeks of testimony and post-verdict wrangling, the paper was all over the story...
Making news from an obscenity case's hiatus
Posted on August 26, 2008The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Paula Reed Ward gets a gold star for curiosity, memory, and perseverance in this story about a case that federal prosecutors once bragged about but have seemingly deep-sixed. Ward traces the five-year history of an obscenity prosecution against Extreme Associates, a California pornographer...
Did Katrina-litigation reporters hide sources' motives?
Posted on August 25, 2008The imprisoned former personal-injury star lawyer Dickie Scruggs still has investigators -- and Fortune's Roger Parloff -- on his trail. Parloff wrote a long, powerful feature on Scruggs' case in April. And now he's used his blog, Legal Pad, to track what's happened since -- as he phrases it, to "put that new evidence in some context, add some original reporting, and mention a few things that look important to me that haven’t been noted yet...
Localizing child-porn prosecution story with data and examples
Posted on August 24, 2008Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News provides this overview of the big increase in child-porn prosecutions by federal authorities. He notes both the nationwide caseload and the local scene, colored in by examples of men caught possessing or trafficking in illegal images and now facing stiff prison terms...
Greenhouse exit interview: good overview, few surprises
Posted on August 23, 2008I finally had a chance to watch C-SPAN's interview with Linda Greenhouse, which aired Aug. 16 on its "America and the Courts" series. No great surprises for serious watchers of the Supreme Court and its press corps. But it's a wonderful piece of plainspoken, accessible public education about the Court's role, and secondarily about the press' work...
DOJ punches back, but misses
Posted on August 22, 2008Joe Palazzolo at Legal Times' BLT posts about this interesting twist in a story that AP has been following. In her report on the Justice Department's decision to delay new rules designed to help the FBI track terror suspects, Lara Jakes Jordan drew an unusually pointed attack from DOJ flacks in this release titled “Setting the Record Straight: AP's Misleading Article on the Proposed Changes to the Attorney General's Guidelines...
Death case yields a just-in-time lesson on law
Posted on August 21, 2008Allan Turner and Rosanna Ruiz wrote a compact, informative, and well-researched story for today's front page of the Houston Chronicle, informing the raging debate over tonight's scheduled execution of Jeff Wood. Wood faces the death sentence for the murder of a convenience store clerk during a robbery...
Abrams' "Verdict" gets bumped
Posted on August 20, 2008The Times' Bill Carter is reporting that NBC chief legal correspondent Dan Abrams is losing his evening MSNBC program "Verdict," in a shift to more partisan political programming (just what the world needs... ugh). That downgrades the network's legal-issues coverage, which is a shame...
Murder or manslaughter? Sorry, just the facts
Posted on August 19, 2008Here's an example of a verdict story that's long on facts and short on the law. Albany Times-Union reporter Bob Gardinier does a decent job of explaining key testimony in the trial of a man charged with second-degree murder in a street-fight stabbing...
Time explores another drug-and-murder capital
Posted on August 19, 2008There's a depressing sameness to this Time story on Culiacan, and it's not the fault of the magazine or its writers, Tim Padgett and Ioan Grillo. In what the story calls "the sweltering cradle of Mexico's $25 billion-a-year drug-trafficking industry," Padget and Grillo -- with a powerful photo gallery on the Web by Anthony Suau -- competently and compellingly describe a town overrun with narco-murders and money...
Soldiers in hock and a legal shield with holes
Posted on August 18, 2008Adam Hochberg has latched onto a hot issue in this NPR Morning Edition story today about the law's failure to protect military personnel serving in Iraq. The story has some problems, but deserves attention and praise nonetheless. At issue are debt-related disputes that service members' families find themselves in -- foreclosure on a home, or repossession of a car or other big purchase, after the spouse stuck at home falls behind on debt payments -- and the federal law that's supposed to protect service members' families from these problems...
Sound advice on when to name suspects
Posted on August 17, 2008Times public editor Clark Hoyt treats one of the toughest legal reporting issues -- whether and when to identify criminal suspects by name before charges are filed -- thoughtfully and fairly. But some of the most thoughtful and fair comments come not in Hoyt's voice, but from one of his quoted sources, L...
Psychiatric patients' rights vs. safety
Posted on August 16, 2008Elizabeth Bernstein and Nathan Koppel use a tragic case of matricide in Maine to spotlight the public-policy tensions between public safety and psychiatric patients' rights. Their powerful front-pager today in The Wall Street Journal -- bolstered by access to records showing how advocates sent William Bruce home, depriving him of care in a psychotic state -- focuses on the government-funded Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness program, or PAIMI, created by Congress in reaction to reports of abuse and neglect of the mentally ill in institutions...
Secret military justice documented in pair of studies
Posted on August 15, 2008Thanks in part to a survey conducted by the Tully Center for Free Speech -- located just down the hall from me and headed by my Newhouse School colleague, broadcast journalist and media-law expert Barbara Fought -- the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has just published an important and damning study documenting the barriers to public access in the military justice system...
Schiavo coverage medically flawed, study says
Posted on August 15, 2008A new study documenting inaccuracies in four newspapers' coverage of the Terri Schiavo case focuses on the medical facts in hundreds of stories, rather than on the political and legal aspects. Here's the editors' synopsis of the study by five researchers in the journal Neurology of coverage from 1990 through 2005 in The New York Times, Washington Post, Tampa Tribune, and St...
Stiff-arming an "unGoogle" demand
Posted on August 15, 2008I hope there's a press-freedom award in the works for the student editors, past and present, at Seattle Pacific University's student paper -- and a special place in hell for the folks who run their school. As Isaac Amsdorf reports today in the Seattle Times, the students have resisted heavy-handed pressure from their school over a long period of time in a dispute with a former student who's unhappy that an embarrassing 10-year-old story about him remains accessible on the Web...
Weak explanation of Stevens defense
Posted on August 15, 2008One of the great challenges of writing about the law is fitting cogent explanations into tight spaces without repelling lay readers with overly technical explanations (actually, that sounds like several challenges wrapped in one, but you take my point)...
Edwards scandal: a half-baked scoop
Posted on August 14, 2008I'm not trying to obsess about Ted Frank, despite our little scuffle earlier this week. But when I saw this item on the fallout from the John Edwards adultery story, I couldn't hold back. This ought to be framed and hung on the wall of every journalism school...
Jack Goldsmith hates a free press!
Posted on August 13, 2008OK, maybe that headline is a bit overstated. But I can't help but suspect that's the bottom line after a remarkable exchange of erudite volleys between former Justice Department legal policymaker Jack Goldsmith and The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau. I wrote here about Goldsmith's sharp attack in The New Republic on Licthblau's national-security reporting...
News from Mahler book starts to dribble out
Posted on August 11, 2008Now this is the kind of juicy reporting that I wished a reviewer would pluck out of Jonathan Mahler's new Gitmo-justice book, The Challenge. Thanks to Pro Publica's Eric Umansky, a close reading of the book yielded a newsy tidbit about the Hamdan case, complete with links to the relevant excerpt and the book's prologue.
Frank vs. Forbes: Correction or spin?
Posted on August 11, 2008Ted Frank of the American Enterprise Institute is one of several experts that Forbes senior editor Daniel Fisher quotes in this story about the likely fate of federal tort-reform policy, depending on who wins the presidential election. But Frank isn't just any old source...
Judge-bashing panel bashes media
Posted on August 10, 2008Based on this report in Judicial Reports, I'd have to conclude that the organizers of a panel discussion at the ABA Annual Meeting are as guilty as the journalists their panelists took aim at. The charges? Bias, unfairness, and blaming a class of professionals without digging into the facts...
Burrough on Mahler: Writing, not reporting, is key
Posted on August 10, 2008The Times Book Review assigned a heavyweight journalist to review the latest book by a journalist on law in the war on terror. But reviewer Bryan Burrough is so fixated on storytelling technique that I barely learned anything about the substance of Jonathan Mahler's The Challenge: Hamdan v...
Small news site challenges El Paso court secrecy
Posted on August 10, 2008A news Web site in El Paso, Texas, is raising hell about the secrecy imposed by a federal judge and law enforcement officials in the courtroom phase of a long-running public-corruption investigation. The Newspaper Tree reported last Wednesday that it had renewed a battle that last May yielded an order by U...
Abrams' bully pulpit: a lost opportunity?
Posted on August 08, 2008Why does NBC's Dan Abrams think it's his place to spout off with his opinions about stories he's covered and other political goings-on? Couldn't a chief legal correspondent for one of the networks -- one who, by the way, usually does a thoughtful job in how he handles his work on the air -- instead use his forum at the ABA Annual Meeting to talk about the role of the reporter, or relations between press and bar, or to agitate for improved public understanding of the law? Just asking!
Circumstantial Evidence 101 on NPR
Posted on August 08, 2008After a report by Laura Sullivan that was described as the "first sit-down interview" with anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins' attorney, Paul Kemp, NPR's Ari Shapiro used his reporting to contribute to the ongoing debate over the strength of the government's case against Ivins...
Announcing a new reporting fellowships program
Posted on August 07, 2008One of my best experiences as a student happened in grad school at the Missouri j-school. I was in the Washington Reporting Program, and the director at the time, Steve Weinberg, got a call from a freelancer who needed help from a student researcher. Steve recommended me...
Jurors and reporters gagged after Rochester verdict
Posted on August 06, 2008This one's close to home. A Rochester federal judge who's scheduled to sentence three people later this month has reaffirmed his order barring jurors from talking to anyone about their deliberations and, remarkably, barred anyone (including reporters) from contacting them...
Portolio drinks the law Kool-Aid
Posted on August 06, 2008When Conde Nast launched Portfolio magazine in early 2007, I fretted that it didn't have the kind of legal reporting in it that Fortune excels at, and that Forbes and Business Week (headed by former American Lawyer editor Steve Adler) also emphasize from time to time...
Behind the scenes of "Homicide 37"
Posted on August 05, 2008Brendan McCarthy, the New Orleans Times-Picayune cops reporter who wrote the "Homicide 37" series that I raved about, gives some peeks behind the scenes of the project in this Q&A with CJR's Katia Bachko. On the second day of shadowing a pair of detectives -- in a deal he struck with New Orleans P...
Ruling supports openness in jury selection
Posted on August 04, 2008A panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has written a lengthy opinion explaining why a trial judge erred in trying to hide the names of jurors in a government-corruption trial. The decision is reported in this detailed story by Shannon Duffy of The Legal Intelligencer in Philadelphia...
Amerithrax backlash: cooler heads prevail?
Posted on August 04, 2008The more that reporters dig into the Bruce Ivins anthrax case, the less certain we are of key facts asserted in the first- and second-day reports. David Willman of the LA Times led his big scoop last Friday with the news that Ivins killed himself "just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks...
"Homicide 37" series: bleak and powerful
Posted on August 03, 2008Despite a frustrating Web presentation that obscures the project's ambitions, this New Orleans Times-Picayune series by Brendan McCarthy -- touted in E&P as a refreshing contrast with the Washington Post's recent "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" serial (which is unfair to the Post's excellent series) -- is pure urban despair...
Another take on the mortgage mess
Posted on August 03, 2008While the backlash from the housing-bubble burst has focused on Wall Street finances, the Miami Herald's "Borrowers Betrayed" investigation shows that the problems also involve crimes of a lower sort. In a series eight months in the making and a marvel of high-volume record-crunching, the Herald's Jack Dolan, Rob Barry (yes, Dave Barry's son), and Matthew Haggman pack a punch by showing how badly regulated Florida's mortgage business is...
Amerithrax, Day Two: Revenge of the followups
Posted on August 02, 2008We know who won the anthrax-scoop contest on Day One. What about the all-important Day Two, when the major papers scrambled to fill in as many blanks as possible? My comparison of the LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today stacks up like so:Best new twist: LAT's David Willman, who plays the scoop artist game expertly, having held back a fresh angle (on suspect Bruce Ivins' patents and stake in anthrax vaccine discoveries) while teasing his competitors with a mention deep in his story that he had been onto Ivins "earlier this year...
Court records yield rich spy story
Posted on August 01, 2008For the second time this year, Mother Jones' venerable James Ridgeway -- this time with an assist by the magazine's DC bureau chief, David Corn, and associate editor Daniel Schulman -- has mined a cache of records and depositions from a lawsuit over a business investment to dish dirt about opposition research...
LAT anthrax scoop chock full of detail
Posted on August 01, 2008The LA Times' David Willman scoops the competition about the apparent suicide of a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Anonymously and occasionally vaguely sourced -- except for direct quotes from the suspect's sworn statement to investigators -- Willman's story is packed with detail about an investigation that has now burst into the open with the death Tuesday of the suspect, Bruce Ivins, who worked at the government's biodefense research laboratories at Ft...
Oliphant cranks up the legal-reporting/blogging heat
Posted on July 31, 2008Chicago Tribune's law and Supreme Court reporter Jim Oliphant is blogging on his own now, rather than just at the Trib's Swamp blog. The blog is called Writ Large (cute). Prolific and playful (check out his introductory post Infrequently Asked Questions), Oliphant is worth keeping an eye (or an RSS feed) on...
Goldsmith vs. Lichtblau: It's payback time
Posted on July 31, 2008In his book last year, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith recounts a "friendly" introductory chat over coffee he had with The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau. The meeting, requested by Lichtblau, ends with Goldsmith lying to Lichtblau to avoid spilling national security secrets that the reporter asked about -- and then his anger over being subpoenaed to testify in the Justice Department's leak investigation over the Lichtblau-Risen stories...
Why not inject legal facts into Scrabulous debate?
Posted on July 30, 2008This Heather Timmons story in today's Times is about outrage across the Internet, and among Facebook users in particular, over the demise of the game Scrabulous in the face of Hasbro's copyright infringement claims. So would it have killed Timmons and her editors to spend a graf or two explaining what exactly are Hasbro's claims, and whether experts think it's a slam-dunk case? What features of a game can be protected? What are the usual remedies? Does the name Scrabulous itself pose a trademark problem, or is this really all about copyright, as the story seems to imply? Those of us who haven't read the pleadings and scouted out more in-depth treatment of the case -- and who aren't already IP-law aficionados -- are left in the dark...
Mauro's tickler file comes through
Posted on July 30, 2008Bravo to Tony Mauro for returning one year later to the story of Chief Justice John Roberts' health. Even though his questions go unanswered, Mauro calmly makes the case why it's still news in this post at BLT.His report also makes me regret the snarky tone I took last year about coverage of the chief's blackout and seizure...
Johnston vs. GE: hardball PR plays out in pleadings
Posted on July 30, 2008Leave it to David Cay Johnston to turn a tax-law story into a threat-laden tale of hardball corporate PR. The dogged and feisty former New York Times reporter is the talk of the tax-law blogs, and has set General Electric lawyers' hair on fire, with his June 30 report in Tax Analysts' weekly Tax Notes International on allegations of improprieties involving a GE subsidiary in Brazil...
Glimpses of Hamdan trial news coverage
Posted on July 29, 2008Two recent stories from the trial of Guantánamo detainee Salim Hamdan combine to provide a snapshot of the logistics involved in providing coverage of the trial. Yesterday, Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg noted that the majority of reporters who flew in for the start of the trial flew right back out after only two days...
Playing catch-up with legal-reporting news
Posted on July 28, 2008A few brief updates on previously blogged stories that advanced while I was away:The New York Sun's Josh Gerstein travels to California to cover the hearing that he wrote about earlier involving a leak investigation and Washington Times reporter William Gertz (here's my earlier post on his reporting, plus a folo he did)...
Recommended reading: Lane and Hajdu
Posted on July 28, 2008I'm back from the mountains: tanned, rested, and ready. Thank goodness I already was tanned before leaving, considering the amount of rain northern New York saw during my week there. But it was a good, unplugged getaway. Before I plunge back in to blogging and real work, a couple of plugs for the two books of legal history by journalist authors that I read when I wasn't hiking or snoozing:Chuck Lane's reason for leaving the Washington Post's Supreme Court beat -- upon his return from book leave he moved to the editorial pages -- was well worth it...
WaPo tries an old trick, and succeeds
Posted on July 28, 2008There's been much chatter about the Washington Post series "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" Much of that chatter has been on the Post's own site, including the comments attached to a running Reporters' Notebook and in a live chat today with series editor Jeff Leen and reporters Sari Horwitz, Scott Higham, and Sylvia Moreno...
Above the Law's next move
Posted on July 18, 2008Legal Times' blog reports that Above the Law's David Lat is getting a promotion. He's moving from D.C. to NYC to take a broader role at ATL's parent company, Breaking Media. He tells BLT he'll still write for the law-gossip blog, but he's in the market for a writer whose interest and location may take the blog in new directions...
Heading for the (bigger) hills
Posted on July 18, 2008One of the little-known facts about LawBeat is that world headquarters is a log home, nestled in the woods several hundred yards off the road, in New York's lovely Finger Lakes region. If blogging actually paid the bills, it would be a pretty sweet gig...
Greenhouse reader chat winds down
Posted on July 18, 2008Today Linda Greenhouse is wrapping up her turn in the "Talk to the Newsroom" feature, and 40 years at the Times. The Q&A with readers throughout the week has been mildly interesting, but not remotely as memorable as her Week in Review story last Sunday, which I blogged about here -- and which evidently will stand as her last byline in the paper, at least while on staff.
Is Mukasey a reporter's best friend at DOJ?
Posted on July 17, 2008Intriguing hints in this New York Sun story by Josh Gerstein that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has set the bar higher for prosecutors seeking to question journalists about sources. The story's a bit confusing, and the hints come at the end of the piece...
Levy series critics ask "who cares?"
Posted on July 15, 2008Is the Washington Post series "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" sensationalism and exploitation, or solid journalism? Put another way, can there be real news value in the story of a single unsolved murder? Or is it transparently cheesy to select for such prominent treatment the story of a pretty, young victim involved in an illicit affair with a married congressman, in a case that was full of media hype until it was forgotten post-9/11? That's the debate raging on the message board attached to the series' reporters' notebook...
Wittes redraws outline of terror-law debate
Posted on July 14, 2008Miller-McCune magazine just published on its Web site my review of Ben Wittes' book Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. It's from the August issue of this new public-policy magazine.
Greenhouse retrospectives, Parts I and II
Posted on July 12, 2008Hours after appearing on NPR's Weekend edition for a Q&A with host Linda Wertheimer to talk about her career and where the Supreme Court seems to be headed, Linda Greenouse has published a personal remembrance of her 30 years covering the Court for The New York Times...
Gertner on media: A call for cameras
Posted on July 12, 2008Massachusetts federal district judge Nancy Gertner makes some thoughtful comments on judges' interactions with the public, and with journalists, in this half-hour interview on Legal Talk Network by hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams. She ends it with a provocative statement, amid a discussion of what judges can do to improve public understanding of the law and courts...
Classic WSJ narrative on "Law and Order" battle
Posted on July 12, 2008Rebecca Dana weaves a marvelously rich narrative on the front of today's Wall Street Journal about the legal battles between NBC and Dick Wolf, producer of the network's cash cow, "Law and Order." Dana breezes through the parties' long, troubled history and intelligently places the conflict in a broader regulatory context: the end of the rules more than a decade ago that separated production of TV content from its distribution...
Mayer book gets newsy launch
Posted on July 12, 2008The New Yorker's Jane Mayer is getting serious bounce for her new book of reporting on the Bush administration's legal tactics in the war on terror. The book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals , isn't due out until next week...
Useful, if slightly stale, report on terror probes
Posted on July 11, 2008Ari Shapiro's report on today's Morning Edition gets its numbers on the simultaneous decline of terrorism prosecutions and increase in terror-investigation wiretaps from administration critics Human Rights First. But, if anything, the administration's views on why intelligence gathering has eclipsed law enforcement priorities are voiced more clearly and forcefully through Shapiro's sources...
2 legal journos join new UC law school
Posted on July 10, 2008Erwin Chemerinsky, the founding dean of the new School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, has hired two prominent legal journalists as part of his inaugural team of faculty and administrators. Former longtime LA Times legal writer Henry Weinstein, who took a buyout from the paper recently, will teach in both literary journalism and law...
Nichols trial coverage weak on insanity defense
Posted on July 10, 2008Few criminal cases have received as much attention in Atlanta lately -- and deservedly so -- as the Brian Nichols case. Nichols is charged with capital murder in the deaths three years ago of four court and law enforcement officials in a wild courthouse shootout and escape...
Same-sex marriage analysis skips the law
Posted on July 08, 2008Tom Curry, MSNBC.com's national affairs writer, contributes to a weekly series called "Briefing Book: Issues '08" in the site's politics section with this piece on the courts and same-sex marriage. I'm not a big fan of the briefing-book format -- no named sources, no he-said/she-said debate of the experts -- but it's a pretty straight (pun!) account of where the two major-party presidential candidates stand on the issue, and what role the courts have played at the state and federal level thus far...
Times vows to fill legal slot . . . eventually
Posted on July 08, 2008Nine Tuesdays ago, Adam Liptak's Sidebar column on legal affairs in the Times ran with this note:Beginning next week, the Sidebar column will be on hiatus for a few months. It will resume after Adam Liptak begins coverage of the Supreme Court later this year...
Can "narrowcasting" change the cameras debate?
Posted on July 08, 2008Andrew Longstreth reports on The American Lawyer's Litigation Daily blog that longtime cameras-in-the-courts champion Jonathan Sherman is trying to open a federal courtroom to video cameras. The showdown will be decided by tomorrow, when Boston federal district judge Nancy Gertner is scheduled to hear a motion to dismiss the race-discrimination lawsuits against subprime-mortgage provider Countrywide Bank...
WaPo immigration-law trend story misses mark
Posted on July 07, 2008Karen Bruillard and her editors at the Washington Post should have taken a closer look at this trend story today, to avoid the trap that they have fallen into. It's a familiar trap for journalists who suspect their story is true and timely, but they either lack the energy or the luck to prove it convincingly...
Sympathetic portrait of an accused plagiarist
Posted on July 04, 2008Attention, flacks -- er, PR professionals. Any time a client under fire for ethics violations wonders whether to cooperate with a reporter who's digging into the facts and profiling your client, show him this piece today by Adam Liptak. It should help both of you resist the urge to hunker down...
CAAFlogger adds a p.s. to Kennedy story
Posted on July 03, 2008A followup to my post yesterday on the origins of Linda Greenhouse's much-talked-about story on the gap in legal research in the Supreme Court's Kennedy v. Louisiana decision. I asked the blogger whose post tipped off Greenhouse, Dwight Sullivan, how obscure this information was in his legal world...
Relentless K.C. reporter finally gets results
Posted on July 02, 2008The Kansas City Star's Mike McGraw (pictured here) has to feel a sense of accomplishment today. His extensive, documents-intensive investigation of a major arson case has finally yielded a decision by federal authorities to call for an investigation of his findings...
Greenhouse and Fidell's last laugh
Posted on July 02, 2008Linda Greenhouse has taken heat for her husband's legal expertise in military law -- specifically for his advocacy in causes that have come before the Court. But on today's front page, barely two weeks before her retirement, Greenhouse nails a good story thanks to that familial connection...
Greenburg takes politics detour
Posted on July 01, 2008ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg reveals on her Legalities blog that her bosses have reassigned her this summer, now that the Supremes are on break. She'll spend the next four months covering the candidates for vice president. "It’s not as big a transition as you might think," Greenburg cheerfully argues, as she points out the prominence of legal issues and potential Supreme Court nominations in the presidential campaign...
Good questions reveal fake-cop scam
Posted on July 01, 2008Linda Trest wins the award for skeptical reporter of the month. The 51-year-old reporter for the weekly Gasconade County Republican in Missouri has given various explanations for what started her reporting that led to revelations that the police in Gerald, Missouri, had been duped by a man posing as a federal agent and leading local cops on warrantless raids...
Locy may be off the hook, but Congress isn't
Posted on June 28, 2008Assuming now that the Toni Locy contempt case is over -- and let's hope that the judge doesn't try to punish Locy for her principled refusal to betray her sources in the Steven Hatfill privacy case, now that the government has coughed up millions to settle Hatfill's claims -- we can breathe a sigh of relief and move on...
Biskupic scooplet on Scalia's public persona
Posted on June 27, 2008After yesterday's Second Amendment decision penned by Antonin Scalia, Joan Biskupic rightly decided to focus on the justice. It's a quickie, but it has this original gem:"I have decided to try to do more writing, apart from just writing court opinions," he told USA TODAY...
Bob Barnes, call your agent
Posted on June 26, 2008If I were the Washington Post's Supreme Court beat reporter, Robert Barnes, I'd be jealous of some of my competitors today. Yesterday's decisions included two highly newsworthy ones, on the death penalty for child rape and the Exxon Valdez punitive damages case...
All hail SCOTUSblog. Now, attack it.
Posted on June 26, 2008I've been pondering since yesterday what to say about SCOTUSblog and its impact on legal reporting. Comment is called for because of the great service that the site provides on crunch days like the past two days, when multiple newsworthy decisions came down...
A glimpse at covering the FBI
Posted on June 26, 2008"Talk of the Nation" host Neal Conan and his two guests, FBI assistant director of public affairs John Miller and NPR's FBI reporter Dina Temple-Raston, did a good job in this 30-minute Q&A of educating the general public about reporter-source relationships, specifically on law enforcement stories...
Tyler "swingers" case reveals reporter-DA relationship
Posted on June 25, 2008Ah, life in a small-town courthouse. This Tyler Telegraph story by Kenneth Dean attempts to prove one thing, but actually proves the opposite. The story -- reporting that the judge hearing a child sex-abuse case has allowed reporters back in to cover the proceedings, even though they are subpoenaed to testify in a change-of-venue hearing -- quotes the paper's executive editor, Jim Giametta, in a First Amendment-flag-waving statement...
Explaining a new twist on community standards
Posted on June 24, 2008After growing frustrated yesterday by confusion in some news stories over the distinction between obscenity and broadcast indecency (George Carlin, RIP), it was a pleasure to read Matt Richtel's front-pager in the Times today about an inventive defense in a Florida obscenity prosecution...
Detainee post mortem: all politics, no law
Posted on June 21, 2008Michael Abramowitz's front pager today in the Post provides useful historical perspective on last week's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush. It has the requisite back and forth between opposing experts (with some excellent, pithy quotes). And it seems to do an adequate job of explaining the politics of the Bush administration's strategies concerning Congress and the courts...
FISA bill a victory for watchdog journalism
Posted on June 20, 2008In his story today on the deal struck in Congress to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Times' Eric Lichtblau calls it "the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years" and "a major victory for the White House after months of dispute...
How "Beyond the Law" series overreaches
Posted on June 18, 2008I've been waiting for the McClatchy series "Guantanamo: Beyond the Law" to conclude before commenting on it. But tomorrow I won't be able to blog, so here's my critique after four of the five parts have run. McClatchy explains the genesis of the series:Early in 2007, as the Bush administration indicated that it intended to release most of the detainees at the prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, McClatchy set out to track down as many of the freed prisoners as possible to help determine who they were, what had happened to them in the prisons the Bush administration set up in Afghanistan and Cuba and what had become of them...
Salon scoop finally gets some bounce
Posted on June 18, 2008Freelance criminal justice journalist Alan Berlow (pictured here) and Salon magazine deserve a victory lap for exposing an injustice that spared, at least temporarily, a Texas convict from execution last night. The bizarre twist is that Berlow's article exposing the issue was published three years ago -- prior to an the convict's previously set execution date...
Holes in story on grand jury by petition
Posted on June 17, 2008Monica Davey provides an interesting look, on the front of today's New York Times, at the use of citizen-petitioned grand juries, particularly those instigated by anti-abortion activists in Kansas. The case has received periodic national attention, but this story goes beyond earlier ones I've seen on the history and politics of the state laws that allow citizens to launch a grand jury investigation by petition...
Correction: Giving Totenberg her due for tenure
Posted on June 16, 2008In keeping with today's mea culpa theme, I now believe I erred when I assumed (and at least confessed that I was winging it) that Linda Greenhouse's departure puts Tony Mauro in second place for SCOTUS beat seniority, behind only Lyle Denniston. That skips Mauro over NPR's Nina Totenberg, whose tenure at NPR predates Mauro's on the Supreme Court beat (originally for Gannett News Service, then USA Today) by four years (1975 vs...
Second thoughts on Kozinski
Posted on June 16, 2008Patterico's Pontifications runs a letter from Alex Kozinski's wife, lawyer Marcy Tiffany, that puts the LA Times' revelations in a very different light. I still think that it's fair to question Kozinski's judgment, and his ethics in hearing an obscenity case (and I wonder when critics will ever stop accusing journalists of merely trying to "sell newspapers," considering that hardly anyone buys newspapers any more)...
Greenhouse (almost) has left the building
Posted on June 12, 2008Linda Greenhouse got a classy, if premature, sendoff today at the beat she's covered with distinction for three decades. Here's a report by Tony Mauro (now No. 2 in seniority on the beat, if memory serves me) quoting, among others, the longest-serving SCOTUS reporter, Lyle Denniston...
News judgments about Kozinski's porn
Posted on June 12, 2008Did the LA Times practice good journalism by outing 9th Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski's porn stash in this blockbuster story by Scott Glover? That's a question asked in a number of ways by various bloggers, most extensively so far by How Appealing's Howard Bashman...
Law held hostage in essay on presidential politics
Posted on June 11, 2008The CJR series "Turning Point" on press coverage of the presidential election turns to coverage -- or lack of it -- of likely Supreme Court appointments. Writer Zachary Roth, former media editor at the New York Observer and writer at Washington Monthly, has the politics and media smarts to weigh in on this...
Pro Publica's legal chops? The jury's out
Posted on June 10, 2008Now that Pro Publica has gone live, what kind of legal-reporting leg is it showing so far? Some, not a lot. But it's a good sign that one of its six main news categories is "justice and law," and that there are at least a couple of experienced legal-reporting types -- not to mention a number of hard-core investigative reporters, all of whom presumably know their way around a docket sheet...
"Locked in Limbo" series keeps readers in limbo
Posted on June 10, 2008Larry Oakes takes a skeptical look at a newsworthy topic: the Minnesota Sex Offender Program, an unusually extensive and long-running system of civil commitments of sex offenders to prison-like treatment centers. The three-part Star-Tribune series ends today after casting light on the problem but with more he said/she said than clear insight into the problems and potential solutions...
O'Connor's legacy: a slow-moving target
Posted on June 10, 2008Joan Biskupic has a thoughtful, high-altitude view of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's legacy on the front of today's USA Today. The only thing that's curious about it is its timing. What's the hook? The story seems to say, in essence, that while O'Connor's carefully crafted compromise rulings took some hits last term, they've fared a little better this term -- so far...
Toobin on Stone and Spitzer: No there there
Posted on June 05, 2008Jeff Toobin's recent piece on Roger Stone drew a sideswipe from Kathleen Parker, at National Review Online's "The Corner." She couldn't come right out and accuse Toobin of plagiarism, but she crows about noticing similarities between his New Yorker profile of the Republican prankster/hitman and this piece last November in The Weekly Standard by Matt Labash...
Post yawns over Times regulatory scoop
Posted on June 04, 2008How lame. This is the Washington Post's folo to the Times' scoop last Saturday on the Bush administration's regulatory strategy: a Bloomberg column on page D3, published three days later. If the Post believes the Times blew the story, or blew it out of proportion, it should report and write that...
Inside the post-Abu Ghraib security machine
Posted on June 02, 2008Alissa Rubin's on-the-ground reporting succeeds at elevating this story on the American system of detention and trial of Iraqi terror suspects from generalities to specifics. Loaded with numbers and animated with examples, from her observations of hearings held to decide whether to hold or release prisoners, the story is a clear example of why such reporting done from afar cannot hope to provide a clear enough picture...
Savage jumps to the head of the class
Posted on May 31, 2008That didn't take long. Charlie Savage's first New York Times byline is played above the fold on A1, and as the lead on the Web's "today's paper" page. He shares a byline with Robert Pear, but still it's clear: he's getting a lotta love from the editors since moving his D...
Scalia's reflexive answer about journalism needs rethinking
Posted on May 30, 2008Dan Slater interviewed Justice Antonin Scalia about his book and for general musings at The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog (parts one, two, and three). The interview concludes with a good question about Scalia's journalism critique, now that he's been attracting ample coverage on the book tour, and has generally been a talkative, engaging interviewee wherever he has appeared...
Maudlin emotion in polygamist ranch coverage
Posted on May 30, 2008Back in the day, CNN Headline News was an actual headline news service: the latest news stories, told in rapid-fire succession. It was a reliable place to tune in when you wanted a quick news update. In recent years, however, it's devolved into a carnival of smarmy showmanship, with entertainers using news as a jumping-off point to vent rage at easy targets...
R. Kelly faceoff: Trib wins
Posted on May 29, 2008What's more important: good reporting or good writing? Here's a side by side comparison from coverage of the R. Kelly trial in Chicago that shows the ugly downside of having a bad dose of both.On Wednesday night, both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago's CBS 2 published stories on their Web sites about a surprise twist in the Kelly trial...
Denver Post wins big in ABA Gavel contest
Posted on May 27, 2008The American Bar Association has announced this year's Silver Gavel Awards. There are four -- in books, documentary, newspapers, and television -- plus six honorable mentions. Most notably, a single newspaper -- The Denver Post -- took both the award and honorable mention in newspapers...
LAT's terror-trial profile needs a folo
Posted on May 27, 2008Josh Meyer profiles the Navy Reserve JAG officer defending Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom Meyer describes as "the world's most notorious captured terrorist." The profile of Prescott Prince benefits from good timing (it's early in the military commission trial of the infamous KSM), prominence (front-page in Sunday's LA Times), and access (Prince spoke at length to Meyer, despite unhelpful military restrictions)...
A daringly early take on High Court patterns
Posted on May 23, 2008Linda Greenhouse's penchant for thematic conclusions about the Supreme Court's output is on display today at a remarkably early point in the term. As every Court-watcher knows, the hardest cases -- those most likely to split the Court, and the cases that typically are most newsworthy -- come in June, as the term winds down...
Wanted: real courthouse reporters in Boston
Posted on May 21, 2008What's wrong with the Boston papers? A respected bankruptcy judge gets arrested and pleads no contest to DWI and DWCD -- driving while intoxicated and driving while in a cocktail dress. He resigns, then reconsiders. And then ... nothing. No reporter evidently has good enough sources on the district court bench or the 1st Circuit to report on why the May 15 deadline on the judge's status has come and gone...
A long, long feature with little purpose
Posted on May 20, 2008Adam Higginbotham's profile of William Heirens in GQ leaves me cold. Titled "The Long, Long Life of the Lipstick Killer," the feature uses about 6,000 words -- admittedly nicely crafted words -- to paint a picture of a decrepit prison inmate who may, or may not, be wrongfully imprisoned for three infamous murders in post-WWII Chicago...
Spears-mania? Eh.
Posted on May 19, 2008This AP story by Sandy Cohen, on the months-long media frenzy over the child-custody battle between Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, makes me feel like a visitor from another planet. And I want to go home now.Am I the only one who not only finds these folks' fame inexplicable, but who can't recall seeing even one installment of what Cohen portrays as a daily, intense media storm over this ongoing proceeding in (where else) L...
Liptak's balancing act
Posted on May 19, 2008Adam Liptak has now served his time in the Times' "Talk to the Newsroom" feature. Looks like it was a lot of work, considering that the reader questions he chose were mainly substantive, and from all over the legal and U.S. map. There were, however, a few legal-reporting moments worth sharing...
Beat reporter gets chief justice to talk
Posted on May 18, 2008The LA Times' California Supreme Court reporter, Maura Dolan, produced a revealing piece on Chief Justice Ronald George, author of Thursday's 4-3 majority opinion holding that the state's ban on same-sex marriage violates the state constitution. Dolan reports that George sat for a two-hour interview, and shares his thoughts about the case's place in history and how the opposing justices reflected honest differences of opinion without rancor...
Note to Oregon pol: Don't ask Enron reporter for a blurb
Posted on May 16, 2008John Kroger, a candidate in next week's Democratic primary for Oregon attorney general, has just published a memoir, Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves. Willamette Week reviewer Matt Buckingham called it "a thoughtful, compulsively readable assessment of the American justice system’s struggles with the greatest social evils of our time...
Heads up about same-sex marriage ruling
Posted on May 14, 2008Now here's an innovation worth copying. The California Supreme Court announced a day in advance that it will make news in a particular case -- its ruling on whether a ban on same-sex marriage violates the state constitution. The notice of the impending ruling, at 10 a...
To the authors goes the access
Posted on May 14, 2008USA Today's Joan Biskupic and ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg both cashed in on their relationships with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to produce pieces today advancing O'Connor's public testimony about her husband's Alzheimer's. Biskupic, who wrote a biography of the justice three years ago, snagged a copy of O'Connor's written testimony, but no interview...
Scruggs scoop has some problems
Posted on May 12, 2008The usually fabulous Jerry Mitchell has a scoop in yesterday's Clarion-Ledger in the Dickie Scruggs case, but it's marred by two problems. First, Mitchell's sourcing is opaque. He declares in his lede that "Justice Department officials now are looking at racketeering as a possible next charge to pursue against the legendary trial lawyer...
A "testilying" story misses its target
Posted on May 12, 2008Benjamin Weiser's piece today in the Times goes off half-cocked. Weiser examined more than 1,000 cases in which a convicted felon was caught with a gun and whose case was transferred to federal court. He found 20 cases where judges distrusted cops' testimony enough to toss the evidence...
Liptak interview on "American Exception" series
Posted on May 08, 2008NPR's "Fresh Air" features Adam Liptak in a discussion about his "American Exception" series, which I've raved about here and here. Mostly it's a stroll through the many topics Liptak explored in the series, starting with his latest installment, on imprisonment rates...
Thoughts on the Thurman-stalker jury story
Posted on May 07, 2008Emily Steel is taking some flak for her tell-all story about serving on the jury that convicted Uma Thurman's stalker. New York's Noelle Hancock says that the A1 play is yet more proof that Rupert Murdoch really owns the Journal. Blame Murdoch if you must, but a newspaper would have to be brain dead not to publish this story, and play it prominently, once it lucked out with a reporter picked for the jury...
Scalia on the breakdown of anonymity
Posted on May 07, 2008Tony Mauro zeroes in on a gem of a comment by Justice Antonin Scalia in a C-Span interview about why he's made peace with the notion of playing a more public role. Apologies to my reader(s) for the slow pace here. It's because of the fast pace in that part of my work that pays the bills...
A "poisonous tree" grows in Iowa
Posted on May 03, 2008Here's another small-market crime-reporting investigation of note: "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree," a two-week series ending today in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Gazette. It was led by reporter Jennifer Hemmingsen. Packaged in multimedia on a slick site, the series had as its starting point our old reporting friend -- curiosity...
Tracking the "Janklow 36" in South Dakota
Posted on May 03, 2008Are early prison release programs safe? That's the question that the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus Leader assigned 10 reporters to answer by tracing what happened to 36 South Dakota prison inmates released en masse 22 years ago -- the so-called "Janklow 36," named for the governor who commuted the sentences...
Drawing a bead on Client 9
Posted on April 30, 2008Dallas-based Fortune writer Peter Elkind -- a veteran of long-form legal coverage in the magazine and in books -- landed a fat contract to produce an Eliot Spitzer book for Penguin Portfolio, the Observer's Leon Neyfakh reports. Interesting twist: His collaborator is filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose Spitzer documentary will be timed to coincide with the book's publication...
Bell judge: just another unhappy customer
Posted on April 29, 2008The Daily News' Nicole Bode gets Judge Arthur Cooperman on the phone long enough to hear him unload on journalists who tried to talk to him at home over the weekend. "That's not journalism," says the judge whose ruling in the Sean Bell police shooting was a big story in New York City...
Mauro fills in some blanks
Posted on April 28, 2008Tony Mauro explains more about the private musings by Antonin Scalia that Lesley Stahl used to good effect in her "60 Minutes" interview (How Appealing links to CBS's video and transcript versions). Mauro also critiques high points from the Scalia/Bryan Garner book on legal writing.
Scalia on "60 Minutes": a brilliant portrait
Posted on April 27, 2008Lesley Stahl and her producer Ruth Streeter deliver a smart, entertaining portrait of Justice Antonin Scalia. I've been hard on "60 Minutes" for failing its storied history, including recently. But not this time. Scalia displays his feisty charm, and Stahl covers the substantive arguments while giving viewers a full-on view of the dynamism that is Scalia...
The greening of terror law
Posted on April 26, 2008Vanity Fair's definition of a "green issue" is remarkably expansive. I refer not only to the Madonna S&M pictorial or the Doris Day tell-all. The legal-reporting goods are in this article by British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, wittily called "Green [get it? green issue??] Light...
Bell verdict, examined from multiple angles
Posted on April 26, 2008Stellar work today by a Times team explains what to some may seem inexplicable: the acquittals of police in the shooting death of Sean Bell. Bell was killed in a hail of 50 shots on the day of his wedding outside of a New York strip club. The number of shots makes it easy to jump to the conclusion that the police did wrong...
AmLaw's leap into the blogosphere
Posted on April 24, 2008The American Lawyer's long-awaited (well, among a select audience) overhaul of its Web site includes a surprisingly ambitious legal-news blog, The AmLaw Daily. It's legal news as defined by the magazine, meaning mostly the business of Am Law 200 firms...
Mauro: Flogging books isn't enough
Posted on April 23, 2008Legal Times' Tony Mauro uses this USA Today op-ed piece today to chide the Supreme Court for its secretive ways. He pegs this perennial lament to Justice Antonin Scalia's scheduled appearance on Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes." Mauro admits that when a justice takes to the airwaves to promote a book, the public gains -- but not as much as if the Court were more systematic about its transparency and accountability...
Hoyt lends column to the Locy cause
Posted on April 20, 2008Clark Hoyt takes his Times Public Editor column on a detour today, veering from critiques of the Times' work to write a sympathetic piece on Toni Locy and her contempt case. I'm glad for the detour, and for his slant on Locy (see my earlier pro-Locy post)...
How did sex-offender ruling run off the rails?
Posted on April 20, 2008Pity Jim Leusner. The Orlando Sentinel reporter had a tough assignment on Friday: to explain an esoteric legal principle that had an incendiary result. Judging from the comments that readers posted on his article, he wasn't entirely successful. But I only assign some of the blame for that to him...
Covering polygamists' custody hearing with attitude
Posted on April 19, 2008I've been closely reading accounts of the child-custody hearing in Texas involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's a case ready made for all sorts of legal-reporting heroics or sins. First we have odd-looking and -acting people accused of heinous crimes against children...
Harry Potter and the fair-use goblins
Posted on April 18, 2008Copyright's fair use doctrine gets an unusually thorough airing in this story today by the Journal's Dan Slater, who's analyzing the challenges facing the judge in the trial over infringement claims by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling against the publisher of an unauthorized reference guide...
Standing-O for "legal" "news" "reporter"
Posted on April 17, 2008This is great: NBC's Chris Hansen has lots of student groupies who evidently don't appreciate that his "To Catch a Predator" show -- sanctimony from the host aside -- is neither news nor applause-worthy. He manufactures a crime and serves as a law enforcement tool, all to generate shock video that ruins lives and does nothing to solve a real problem...
Holes in Shafer's shield logic
Posted on April 17, 2008In his two-part rant against a federal shield law (Part 1 and Part 2), Jack Shafer pegs much of his argument to this pair of assertions: (1) there is no crisis requiring such a legislative response, and (2) limiting the privilege to journalists as legislatively defined puts us on a path to licensing of journalists and turns its back on the blossoming of citizen journalism to favor mainstream corporate media...
Duke loses bid to muzzle students
Posted on April 16, 2008The N&O reports today that a North Carolina federal judge has rejected Duke University's bizarre and shameful attack on the PR tactics of the lacrosse players who are suing the university. With the end of that controversy, which I previously posted on here, Dukelawsuit...
Friends don't let friends write with POV
Posted on April 16, 2008Dahlia Lithwick continues the discussion that she started, and I joined, by summarizing her readers' suggestions about what the Supreme Court beat needs most. The big sticking point: whether a beat reporter also should offer straight-up opinion, in the reporter's voice...
Scalia's charm offensive: more charm than offensive
Posted on April 13, 2008You gotta love him. I've mentioned recently Antonin Scalia's surprising embrace of high-profile appearances (here and here), but I didn't appreciate what he could do with this forum until I watched C-Span's Students & Leaders show aired last Wednesday (I recorded it and finally got to it tonight)...
What the SCOTUS beat needs, Part II
Posted on April 12, 2008Jack Shafer's and Dahlia Lithwick's recent musings on the future of Supreme Court reporting prompt me to think more about the opportunities that exist with the changing of the guard at the Times. It all started with Shafer's characteristically over-the-top call to abolish "the ugly stranglehold the boomers have over the press," which he evidently sees possible with the replacement of 61-year-old boomer Linda Greenhouse with 47-year-old boomer Adam Liptak...
A book tour, without the book
Posted on April 10, 2008The Post's Bob Barnes, with a gracious nod to Tony Mauro's earlier report, expands on the Scalia-as-media-debutante theme in this story today that's pegged to yesterday's C-SPAN telecast of the justice's meeting with high school students. Barnes notes that Scalia never bothered to plug his book -- the ostensible reason for his charm offensive -- and adds this depressing reality check on any hopes that greater openness signals a thaw in the cameras debate:Even yesterday, he repeated his opposition to allowing cameras at the court's oral arguments, because he said the clips shown by the media would not accurately represent what happened there...
Dogs and cats lie down together
Posted on April 09, 2008Jack Shafer's recent rant about useless links in the major papers' Web reports was right on the money. But he might also have noted that the major papers' bloggers might handle this better -- even, remarkably, with links to the competition.Shafer focused on the junk links that papers litter their stories with...
Scalia drinks the "60 Minutes" Kool-Aid
Posted on April 08, 2008Tony Mauro breaks the news that Justice Antonin Scalia will flog his new book on "60 Minutes" on April 27. What makes the news so remarkable, as Mauro explains fully, isn't the PR strategy -- it's becoming something of a Court tradition -- but the fact that it's Scalia doing it...
A reporter's take on a Reconstruction legal tale
Posted on April 08, 2008The book that Chuck Lane took leave to work on -- ushering in the Robert Barnes era for Washington Post SCOTUS coverage -- is out, and he's blogging about it at the Volokh Conspiracy (here, here, and here). I can't top Ed Whelan's succinct summary at Bench Memos, which first tipped me off that The Day Freedom Died was published...
Pirates of the courtroom
Posted on April 07, 2008One of my favorite, most memorable assignments as a young newspaper reporter was to cover treasure hunter Mel Fisher's discovery in 1985 of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, still considered one of the great shipwreck finds. True to my nerdy law-reporter roots, I spent part of my time in Key West tracing Fisher's legal history, a tortuous string of battles between academic and profit-minded marine archaeologists (I spent another part of the week partying with Fisher's newly rich divers, but that's another story for another blog)...
Forbes.com: Judicial-reporting hellhole
Posted on April 07, 2008The junk science on display in the American Tort Reform Association's annual "judicial hellhole" study -- remember, Adam Liptak documented how the rankings are meaningless because the underlying survey has no actual validity, which ATRA cheerfully admitted -- now propagates itself on Forbes...
R. Kelly's "star" chamber
Posted on April 04, 2008Chicago Sun-Times' Eric Herman reports on the secrecy measures imposed by the judge presiding over the upcoming child porn trial of R. Kelly (pictured here). Sealed motions, a gag order, sealed witness lists, sealed dockets, closed hearings. Gitmo comes to Chi-Town? Actually, Judge Vincent Gaughan may have some valid arguments for the secrecy provisions, as Herman's sources point out...
Liptak's the one
Posted on April 04, 2008Now that the Times has made the most natural choice of all to replace Linda Greenhouse -- it's Adam Liptak, as first reported by the Observer's John Koblin (who reprints D.C. bureau chief Dean Baquet's memo) -- the first question I have concerns legal affairs reporting in the Times...
Laurie Cohen breaks our hearts again
Posted on April 03, 2008If Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici is right about this -- and his blog about the media biz is usually spot-on -- Laurie Cohen's return to the Journal, which I recently extolled, was short-lived. But is he right that she's leaving the Journal this time for a hedge fund? That's so 2007!
How censorship will work at Gitmo trials
Posted on April 03, 2008Carol Rosenberg's story today in the Miami Herald is the most detail I've seen yet on how public the military commission trials will be at Guantanamo, and what access journalists will have. The government, in short, will open the hearings but keep strict control over what reporters see, hear, and report...
Assignment desk: Vaccine case's real meaning
Posted on March 31, 2008Why does it take a scientist's op-ed piece in the Times to put a much clearer -- or at least nuanced and different -- perspective on a recent court case that alarmed many parents? I haven't paid close enough attention to the fallout from an announcement earlier in March that the government supposedly admitted that vaccines could cause autism...
On the docket: TRO against doomsday
Posted on March 29, 2008Dennis Overbye, the Times' deputy science editor, deftly and entertainingly meshes the science of physics with the mechanics of law in this front-pager today. He writes about a quirky lawsuit in a Hawaii federal court that seeks to shut down the Large Hadron Collider, which this summer is to begin smashing protons to study the most basic elements of the natural world...
LAT: Call your liability carrier
Posted on March 27, 2008Well, this is awkward. Less than a day after The Smoking Gun accused the LA Times of publishing a bogus report on supposed revelations into the 1994 attack on rapper Tupac Shakur, the paper and its Pulitzer-winning reporter, Chuck Philips, apologized...
Lichtblau book: full employment for bloggers
Posted on March 27, 2008The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau sparks a raging debate with excerpts published last night on Slate from his new book, "Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice." Lichtblau, who with fellow reporter James Risen broke two of the more notable stories on the administration's post-9/11 surveillance techniques -- warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency, and snooping on international financial records -- used his excerpt to telescope in on some of the most interesting journalistic insights the book provides (I've read the galleys, so I can say that with some authority)...
Buyout-bound Linda Greenhouse won't
Posted on March 26, 2008Buyout-bound Linda Greenhouse won't stay idle for long. She's landing at Yale Law School in January, where, according to a YLS press release she will be:the Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow. In that capacity, she will advise on the framing and development of the new Yale Law School Law and Media Program (LAMP), work on her own research about the Supreme Court and constitutional law, teach through lectures and seminars, and participate in various Law School activities, including Yale Law School’s Supreme Court Clinic...
IRE winners include "Mississippi Cold Case"
Posted on March 26, 2008Investigative Reporters & Editors announces its prestigious awards, and legal reporting, as usual, plays a prominent part. Reviewing the list of medalists and certificate winners and finalists always cures me (at least temporarily) of the blues, when I'm down about the prospects for news organizations of all sizes to support important, enterprising, and resource-intensive journalism...
More on Yale's Law and Media Program
Posted on March 26, 2008Harold Koh, Yale's law dean, explained in an interview what is new about the Law and Media Program (and I thought more explanation was called for, given that the school's Greenhouse announcement described aspects of the program as longstanding and new)...
Freep's mayoral scandal gears up
Posted on March 25, 2008The Detroit Free Press' months-long coverage of the financial and sex scandal involving Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick yields indictments. Does it yield anything surprising in the Freep's pages? Not really. But today's package is admirably complete, if nothing else, covering scads of angles with seemingly solid, careful coverage...
Journal vs. Keker: It's your fault!
Posted on March 24, 2008A little over a week ago, I chided The Wall Street Journal for missing the impending guilty plea of Dickie Scruggs and wondered why the paper hadn't sought payback from Scruggs' defense counsel, John Keker. It took a while, but payback time it is, compliments of Dan Slater at the Journal's Law Blog...
Polygraphs get pedophile seal of approval
Posted on March 22, 2008The Journal's Laurie Cohen takes an unusual tack in this story about increasingly common use of polygraph testing. The much-maligned lie detector, widely discredited as reliable courtroom evidence, is nonetheless a useful and trusted tool in post-conviction proceedings, Cohen reports...
Portrait of a "tough broad"
Posted on March 20, 2008Kevin Rector's profile of Toni Locy in American Journalism Review starts out slow and fairly generic-sounding. And then it kicks into gear, providing a genuine-sounding portrait of a classic courthouse reporter. Locy's the real deal, and her explanation in this story -- an implicit excuse -- for why she can't satisfy the legal hounds baying at her to cooperate rings true...
Cautious policy foiled by citizen journos
Posted on March 20, 2008What good are policies against publishing the names of criminal suspects who've been arrested but not charged if the news organization that follows those standards in its main product is also publisher of a forum for citizens to post anything they please? That's the question that Minneapolis writer David Brauer explores thoughtfully and thoroughly in this reported piece on MinnPost...
The antidote to litigation spin
Posted on March 19, 2008Could there be any plainer or more compelling argument for thorough legal reporting, and against litigation spin doctors, than this illustration from the Paul McCartney divorce case? As Kevin Sullivan writes in today's Post, Heather Mills asked that the judge not release his written findings...
Oral arguments as spectator sport
Posted on March 19, 2008I love this story by the Post's Mary Beth Sheridan. Taking an ordinary assignment (do a color sidebar on the scene outside the Supreme Court during a high-profile argument), she focused not just on the shouting protesters, but also on the ordinary citizens who went to the Court yesterday to glimpse history being made...
Content analysis ranks our team low
Posted on March 18, 2008The Project for Excellence in Journalism ranks reporting on courts and the legal system among the least covered domestic issues, occupying four-tenths of a percent of the annual newshole in all media last year. That doesn't ring true. I'd like to see how the researchers define terms, for starters...
Scruggs' switch catches Journal flat-footed
Posted on March 15, 2008Is it payback time for the Journal against John Keker? If I were Paulo Prada or Ashby Jones, the Journal reporters whose bylines topped this front-pager on Friday, I would have felt one of two emotions yesterday: self-loathing or Keker-loathing. That's because the story -- a lengthy preview of the upcoming judicial-bribery trial of Mississippi trial-lawyer legend Dickie Scruggs, represented by equally legendary criminal defense lawyer John Keker -- was followed a few short hours later by Scruggs' guilty plea...
Questions for the Times on how it started
Posted on March 13, 2008Kudos to the Times for agreeing to answer reader questions about its work on the Spitzer story. But, because the message board was overwhelmed with more than 200 postings (some with multiple questions) in the first seven hours, I can't get a word in edgewise over there...
Client 9's legal picture comes into focus
Posted on March 12, 2008After a slow start on the legal angle in the Spitzer affair, the Times weighs in with this report by David Johnston and Stephen Labaton, plus an intimidatingly long list of 17 contributing bylines. Even though it's still focused almost exclusively on potential financial crimes, nearly ignoring any possible prostitution-related charges, it's a decent comeback...
Locy pressure eases, for now
Posted on March 12, 2008A good-news update in the Toni Locy case: A D.C. Circuit panel has stayed the fines, which were to start accruing today. So now Locy and her lawyers have some breathing room to fight Judge Walton's punitive order. Also today, USA Today editor Ken Paulson published a measured but effective op-ed on the case, including links to the two Hatfill stories that Locy wrote -- neither of which was the anonymous smear jobs of the sort for which Hatfill is now suing the government.
Free Toni Locy
Posted on March 11, 2008I'm one of those old-fashioned reporters who tries hard not to let personal biases creep into my work. I strive for a level of open-mindedness in my work that leaves readers (or students) in the dark about my own beliefs. But this time I'm going to cite the Tony Mauro Exception to Journalistic Neutrality (Tony calls it the Walter Cronkite Exception, but Walter's never personally counseled me on the need to make this exception, and Tony has)...
Law and Client 9: WSJ 1, NYT 0
Posted on March 11, 2008The Times' big Eliot Spitzer scoop may cover the paper in political-journalism glory. But the Journal takes the prize in first-day coverage of the legal jeopardy that Spitzer may face. Considering that the New York governor's downfall all stems from decisions of whether to investigate criminal wrongdoing, it's curious that the Times let the competition walk away with this one...
"60 Minutes" drops the ball in wrongful conviction story
Posted on March 10, 2008Shame on "60 Minutes," correspondent Bob Simon, and producers Robert C. Anderson and Casey Morgan for squandering a chance to tell an important story well. Their report last night on the case of Alton Logan was "60 Minutes" at its best (powerful on-camera interviews with all the key players) and at its worst (cheap emotion, lacking any intellectual engagement with the real issues)...
Yale's openness on display in two stories
Posted on March 10, 2008Yale University makes news on two related fronts in this Yale Daily News story about the university's debate over the gossip site JuicyCampus.com (via How Appealing) and this NPR Morning Edition story on a fight over public access to Yale campus police records...
Spanish-language reporters see NY trial differently
Posted on March 08, 2008The Times' Annie Correal examines a markedly different tone between English- and Spanish-language tabloids' coverage of a big New York trial, over the death of Nixzmary Brown. The 7-year-old's death elicits nothing but condemnation for her defendant-father, Cesar Rodriguez, from the Daily News and Post, while El Diario-La Prensa and by New York 1 Noticias, among others in the Latino media, are friendlier to defense claims that Brown's mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, is the culprit...
Contempt of cop story lives up to its name
Posted on March 07, 2008The Post-Intelligencer's Eric Nalder, Lewis Kamb and Daniel Lathrop continued the paper's "Strong Arm of the Law" series on police misconduct with this story last week documenting racial disparities in "contempt-of-cop" arrests. That's shorthand for "obstructing a police officer" charges...
Duke's 19th Century media concept
Posted on March 06, 2008If it weren't so offensive, Duke University's legal assault on a litigation opponent's PR strategy would be downright funny. But not funny ha ha. Funny sad.In this memorandum filed last week, Duke seeks a gag order against lawyers for the unindicted lacrosse players who announced their civil suit against the university in a well-publicized press conference in Washington last month...
True or false? Fake Bad Scale is voodoo science
Posted on March 05, 2008On the same day that the Post's Frank Ahrens quoted an anonymous Wall Street Journal reporter as saying that he and his colleagues "have noted a change in the paper's front page toward more 'urgency' and away from the longer, off-the-news features that have been a trademark of the paper," the Murdoch-owned Journal featured a longer, off-the-news feature on an interesting law trend...
Law-free coverage of same-sex marriage arguments
Posted on March 04, 2008On NPR's Morning Edition, I heard a story on today's upcoming California Supreme Court arguments (I'd provide a link, and quotes, but the story hasn't shown up on the Web site). It was routine coverage of the case, which tests the state's ban on same-sex marriage...
Telecom immunity: Follow the money?
Posted on March 02, 2008Dan Eggen and Helen Nakashima provide a reasonably thorough and balanced account in today's Post of what the fight is about over immunity for telecommunications companies in the renewal of the law authorizing continued surveillance of terrorism suspects...
Echoes of Enron in banks' balance sheets
Posted on February 29, 2008Floyd Norris shows why he's one of the most respected business writers around -- and lives up to a journalist's highest calling, to demand government accountability -- in his "High & Low Finance" column today. Considering the nature of his topic -- accounting rules on writing off bad bank investments -- Norris' writing is a model of plainspoken clarity...
Help wanted: Times SCOTUS search begins
Posted on February 28, 2008Who will replace Linda Greenhouse? The 30-year veteran of the Supreme Court beat announced yesterday she's taking a buyout and leaving the Times at the end of the Court's term, which would mean in June. (In the delicious irony department, the news was broken by Greenhouse nemesis Ed Whelan at Bench Memos...
Immigration, buried in complexities
Posted on February 27, 2008Ernesto Londono's front-pager in today's Post breaks new and important ground on the immigration-law beat. He documents the government's beefed-up efforts to track down and deport immigrants for their criminal convictions. Londono does a good job of looking at the issue from several angles -- the effects on criminal and immigration courts and lawyers, for example -- but in one key respect his story comes up short...
When a judge answers a reporter's call
Posted on February 25, 2008One of the recurring themes in this course that my legal reporting program offers with Syracuse University's Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics and the Media is on the relations between reporters and judges. Tony Mauro will be here next week to talk about that from his perspective as a veteran Supreme Court reporter...
Law meets tech in child-porn story
Posted on February 24, 2008AP Internet writer Anick Jesdanun shows in this enterprising piece that reporters not on a law beat can be called on to produce stories requiring legal sophistication. Jesdanun catches the pass ad scores, serving up an interesting and clear explanation of the fallout from a Supreme Court ruling that struck down a law outlawing computer-generated images of child rape...
Liberal conspiracy? Or egregious shorthand?
Posted on February 19, 2008David Rossmiller at the Insurance Coverage Law Blog slams the AP for this lede on a spot-news story this morning:The Supreme Court has refused to offer help to Hurricane Katrina victims who want their insurance companies to pay for flood damage to their homes and businesses...
Polk goes to TPM blogger Marshall
Posted on February 19, 2008The prestigious George Polk Award for legal reporting goes this year to a blogger/reporter: Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, for his site's reporting on the U.S. attorneys scandal. The Polk Awards folks at Long Island University don't seem to have published their press release yet, which I read about in the Times...
Biglaw's race to "reveal"
Posted on February 14, 2008Law blogs and magazines are abuzz as major law firms voluntarily report their revenues and profits per partner. WSJ Law Blog's Ashby Jones rightly notes that the trend is remarkable, and he notes the lingering controversy as traditionalists hold onto their belief that disclosure is too crass for a Professional Firm...
Report stirs pro bono bar
Posted on February 14, 2008A small-town newspaper's investigation of a possible wrongful conviction continues to yield results. I blogged last month about Christine Young's impressive report on murder convict Lebrew Jones in the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record. Jones is 19 years into a prison term for a New York City murder...
Steroids angle couldn't wait
Posted on February 13, 2008The curse of the monthly magazine editor or writer is to see into the future, and know which stories will be fresh when they reach readers -- despite a lag time that's often weeks long between shipping the issue to the printer and its arrival in mailboxes...
Times dissembles about Berenson e-mail
Posted on February 11, 2008The Alex Berenson email-scoop controversy just won't die. First was a report by Portfolio's Katherine Eban that Alex Berenson landed his scoop in the Times on Eli Lilly's settlement talks with the government by getting an e-mail accidentally. Then the Times slammed the story, claiming that the e-mail wasn't all that crucial after all...
WaPo spanked on Gitmo story
Posted on February 11, 2008Was the entire Washington Post staff at a retreat over the weekend? Or simply asleep? What else would explain why it failed to fight back after getting scooped on Saturday by William Glaberson's front-pager in the Times reporting that 9/11-conspiracy charges were imminent against half a dozen Guantanamo detainees...
Ambition and glitches in project on DNA and parole
Posted on February 09, 2008It's a good thing for journalists that USA Today doesn't pay by the word. There's a double byline on this story. But assisting Kevin Johnson and Richard Willing were 27 contributors, 23 of them at other Gannett papers. And the word count? A brisk 428...
Scoop on Lilly scoop gets scooped
Posted on February 07, 2008The Eli Lilly settlement-talks story just got weirder. When I first saw Katherine Eban's story at Portfolio.com on the making of this story by the Times' Alex Berenson -- Eban reported that "a pharmaceutical consultant" told her that a misdirected e-mail dropped the blockbuster story into Berenson's lap -- I didn't have anything profound to add to the discussion...
Abortion probe story has a hole
Posted on February 05, 2008AP's Carl Manning is covering a Kansas story destined for national attention. It's on the touchiest of subjects -- abortion regulation, and late-term abortions in particular -- where politics and law are clashing in a criminal investigation. Manning's story is clear and factual, for the most part...
Questioning the DNA backlog
Posted on February 04, 2008Barely a day goes by when someone, somewhere, isn't charged in a cold case or cleared of a wrongful conviction based on old biological evidence that's just now been run through a DNA database. Rarely do criminal justice journalists examine in general what governs the timing of matching or clearing DNA samples, and whether that system works efficiently...
David Cay Johnston, with passions in check
Posted on February 02, 2008We might have every reason to suspect the Times' David Cay Johnston of biased reporting in his coverage of the Wesley Snipes tax-evasion trial in Florida. First, there's his previous book Perfectly Legal, the veteran tax reporter's slam against federal tax policy that lets the super-rich dodge their fair share...
NFL v. churches: a Super Bowl tradition
Posted on February 01, 2008It's become as much an annual rite as the hype over Super Bowl TV commercials: the NFL's copyright stance against churches that hold Super Bowl parties and show the game on a big screen. All too often, such stories take the lazy route, painting the NFL as a bully acting arbitrarily and greedily, with no explanation of the law...
Another nail in the coffin of judicial openness
Posted on January 31, 2008An unguarded comment by an Atlanta judge to The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin gets the judge booted from the prosecution of courthouse murder-spree defendant Brian Nichols. Superior Court Judge Hilton Fuller, whose controversial handling of the case had drawn national attention in the first place, was quoted by Toobin as saying this about Nichols' mental-health defense: "That's their only defense, because everyone in the world knows he did it...
Another "American Exceptions" installment
Posted on January 29, 2008I was right about the timing of Adam Liptak's next "American Exceptions" dispatch. Today's is right on schedule, and a lamentably infrequent schedule it is. Still, it was worth the wait. Liptak's curiosity this time takes him to the weird world of bail bondsmen...
Capital punishment's price tag
Posted on January 28, 2008Jeffrey Toobin's New Yorker feature on the Brian Nichols case breaks little new ground. But, for those of us outside Georgia who haven't followed every blip in the case, it serves as a thorough, thoughtful summary of a case that has ground to a halt over arguments concerning the state's financing of Nichols' defense...
Laws on photos in soft focus
Posted on January 25, 2008The Orange County Register's Scott Reid and Dan Albano did admirable digging to tell this story on gay-porn Web sites that thrive on photographs surreptitiously made of young boys at swim and water-polo competitions. The photos of the boys in swim suits, caught sometimes in suggestive poses, are juxtaposed with explicit sex photos...
Left-right logic on Planet Whelan
Posted on January 24, 2008So now I've entered Ed Whelan's orbit, or he mine. Just one response is needed: What in my postings about the Greenhouse controversy would lead one to believe I am a lefty? Evidently we can only be one thing: Enemies or Friends, Left or Right. I thought his attack on Greenhouse to be over the top -- not unfounded, as I said at the outset, just overblown -- so therefore I am not with him, I am against him...
Jena coverage, in three takes
Posted on January 24, 2008Raquel Christie's analysis of media coverage of the Jena, La., incident wins points for the most words published so far on the topic. But that's about it. The story's a muddle. Throughout the first 3,000 words of the 7,000-word story, the message is as clear as it is outdated: The national media were slow to grasp a story of racial injustice...
Lay off Linda
Posted on January 22, 2008OK, I was trying to be polite. Slate's Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick did a much more thorough job of putting Ed Whelan in his place. Meanwhile, Whelan has posted part 4 in his exclusive, 4,387-part series.
Greenhouse's "conflict," again and again and again
Posted on January 22, 2008Ed Whelan at Bench Memos answers Clark Hoyt, the New York Times public editor who wrote on Sunday about Whelan's conflict-of-interest accusations against Linda Greenhouse. The answer is in three parts (so far), here, here, and here. Its third part conveniently indexes Whelan's dozen or so past posts on -- or, I should say, against -- Greenhouse's Supreme Court coverage...
Canary in a Cleveland coal mine
Posted on January 21, 2008That wacky Congress! Rachel Dissell and Gabriel Baird of the Cleveland Plain Dealer document the early, and messy, fallout from one state's enactment of legislation to comply with the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. Their story serves as a map for others to localize the story of what's meant to be a nationwide crackdown on sexual predators...
Amicus filings and conflicts
Posted on January 20, 2008New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt sides with Linda Greenhouse and Times editors in a dispute over an alleged conflict of interest. Hoyt articulates sensible policies, and takes a justified shot at Greenhouse's accuser. But what he doesn't articulate clearly enough is an ethics policy that responds directly the central questions posed by the complaint...
Texas indictment provides teaching moment
Posted on January 19, 2008A state Supreme Court justice is indicted. The district attorney immediately dismisses the charge for lack of evidence. Grand jurors speak out, claiming the DA is playing politics. The grand jury could keep investigating -- or not -- and keep indicting...
Margolick to Portfolio's rescue
Posted on January 18, 2008I've been one of Portfolio's happy charter subscribers (unlike the many commentators who mock the big Conde Nast business start-up). But one thing lacking has been prominent legal affairs stories. Now that may change, big time. The New York Observer's John Koblin reports that Vanity Fair's David Margolick is joining Portfolio as a contributing editor...
A 9-0 reversal? Sorry, my bad!
Posted on January 17, 2008What a perfect example of the difference between judging and policy-making. The Supreme Court's decision yesterday in New York State Board of Elections v. Lopez Torres (pdf file) -- a challenge to New York's much-maligned system of electing trial judges -- neatly illustrates several points that I and my fellow teachers in this new course on law, politics and media were making yesterday in our first session...
A 19-year-old question produces results
Posted on January 17, 2008Christine Young of the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record has produced an impressive investigation of a possible wrongful conviction. Her report -- told in an ambitious multimedia package from a team of editors and designers who are given full credit on the site -- focuses on claims of a false confession that put Lebrew Jones in prison for the 1987 murder of prostitute Micki Hall...
Can "The Wire" teach good journalism?
Posted on January 16, 2008Watching my favorite show, HBO's "The Wire," has become far more than a one-hour weekly commitment, what with a non-stop yakfest among journalists over creator David Simon's depiction of his former newspaper home at the Baltimore Sun. It's a great sport -- neatly summarized today in the Washington Post by David Montgomery -- and helped in no small measure by journalists' endless fascination with themselves, and with Simon's pugilistic responses to perceived critical and personal slights...
In praise of resource pages
Posted on January 15, 2008The excellent Sex Crimes Blog has started a resources page on this term's Supreme Court case on the death penalty for child-rape. Beyond the pleadings in the case, it's a rich archive of the blog's previous posts (which in turn link to news stories). A variety of sites already do a good job of tracking the Supreme Court's docket...
Hometown advantage in l'affaire Scruggs
Posted on January 15, 2008Readers of the dead-tree version of The Wall Street Journal learned today (subscription required, for now) that the judicial-bribery investigation centered on Mississippi plaintiffs' lawyer Dickie Scruggs has widened. Citing a plea agreement unsealed in court documents yesterday, Ashby Jones lays out the basic facts: Lawyer Joey Langston has admitted to a role in an alleged conspiracy to funnel money and a federal judgeship to Hinds County Circuit Judge Bobby DeLaughter to rig a ruling on attorneys' fees favoring the already-wildly-rich Scruggs...
BusinessWeek's new DC legal writer
Posted on January 11, 2008BusinessWeek has filled a long-vacant position in DC with Douglas McCollam, most recently a senior editor at Legal Times. McCollam, an American Lawyer veteran, helped run Legal Times in the interim between Jim Oliphant and new editor David Brown. A former practicing lawyer in his native New Orleans, McCollam also has written frequently for Columbia Journalism Review...
Lewis to leave Columbia
Posted on January 11, 2008Tony Lewis, one of the legends of legal reporting, is leaving the faculty of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism at the end of 2008. Dean Nick Lemann mentioned this on Wednesday at a meeting of the schools in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education (Syracuse being one of them, in part because of Carnegie's funding of my legal reporting program)...
Quote of the day
Posted on January 11, 2008"What's the difference between a bookkeeper in New York's garment district and a U.S. Supreme Court justice? One generation."--Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking in D.C. about her participation in PBS' "The Jewish Americans," and quoted by AP's Mark Sherman...
Jena 6 portrayed in shades of gray, but incompletely
Posted on January 10, 2008Amy Waldman makes an important contribution to the reporting and commentary on the Jena 6 controversy in the January/February issue of The Atlantic (only a tease available here). Unfortunately, she and her editors oversell what her story actually accomplishes...
Throwing the book, methodically, at a victim's betrayers
Posted on January 10, 2008Here's what dogged reporting and cautious, transparent storytelling can do to shine the light of accountability on public officials -- without giving in to the natural urge to point immediate blame until the facts are in. Last month, a judge in Los Angeles released a man with a criminal history of abusing his wife...
Programming note
Posted on January 08, 2008I'm headed down south (New York City) for a conference. Returning Thursday afternoon. So my reading and blogging time will be limited. To all my NYC friends whom I did not grace with this knowledge in advance . . . um, this is awkward! Sorry, but I'm booked solid...
Getting bloggy at the ABA Journal
Posted on January 07, 2008Stephanie Francis Ward's feature on blogs' coverage of trials is a mishmash of anecdotes, barely making a point before rushing off to make another. Some points are old news -- Blogs are by anyone, including nuts! And they're opinionated! But they're here to stay, so we have to pay attention! -- and some are just plain old (yet another tale of KC Johnson's influence on the Duke rape case)...
AmLaw's newest No. 2
Posted on January 07, 2008Robin Sparkman is the new executive editor of The American Lawyer. She was named to the vacancy that was created, in chain-reaction fashion, nearly two years ago by Jan Crawford Greenburg's move from the Chicago Tribune to ABC. Greenburg's post was left vacant for 14 months, and then filled last July by Jim Oliphant, editor of Legal Times...
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