Legal News

LawBeat on hiatus

Posted on May 10, 2009
Why 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, 2009
Dana 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
It 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...

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In an instant, the Court camera tide turns

Posted on April 23, 2009
It'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, 2009
This 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
Near 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, 2009
That 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, 2009
On 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, 2009
Last 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, 2009
Last 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
Mike 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, 2009
Tom 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, 2009
God 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, 2009
Veteran 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Does 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, 2009
Amy 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, 2009
No 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, 2009
Author 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Thanks 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Readers 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...

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