The idea of a false confession never seems to gain enough traction to cause real changes to the criminal justice system because most will never believe that an innocent person would confess. John Schwartz's New York Times Article describes the latest research:

But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at theUniversity of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by persistent interrogators.

A jury is looking for details in a confession that make it seem that only a guilty person could have known them.

Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied. “I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy,” like someone saying simply, “I did it,” he said.

The hallmark of the false confession is "contamination":

Instead, he said, “almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,” rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. “I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,” he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. “I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated.”

   

Share | Comment

Many hire an attorney believing that the most aggressive lawyer is best. They are looking for an advantage and they believe the aggressor has one.  So what is the best case scenario? The other side fears your attorney so much that they fold. Unfortunately, it rarely works out that way. For example, if your attorney is so aggressive that he offends the court or prosecutor or the opponent in a civil case, you may find yourself up against an attorney or judge who hates your attorney so much that you get a worse result. If your attorney is jerk, it often makes it less likely the other side will give in. We all know stories in which someone harms their own interest just to screw someone else over. You shouldn't underestimate the impact of the personal on litigation. When you hire a surgeon, good doesn't require diplomacy; but your lawyer should be diplomatic. If he seems like an asshole to you, you don't want him acting as your diplomat. I suspect that clients seek aggressive attorneys because it is recognizable. Good attorneys who are subtle are tougher for a potential client to discern. Mark Hermann argues that you don't need to be aggressive to be good:

First, having a larger-than-life personality does not mean that you’re a good litigator. Loud is not necessarily bad; it just isn’t a substitute for good. Some of the finest litigators I’ve known have been low-key people who would quietly and methodically unearth great legal theories and disembowel witnesses on cross. No muss, no fuss — just victory.

Share | Comment

The Wall Street Journal's Rachel Emma Silverman writes about office meetings held while standing:

Holding meetings standing up isn't new. Some military leaders did it during World War I, according to Allen Bluedorn, a business professor at the University of Missouri. A number of companies have adopted stand-up meetings over the years. Mr. Bluedorn did a study back in 1998 that found that standing meetings were about a third shorter than sitting meetings and the quality of decision-making was about the same.

Maybe stand-up meetings shouldn't be limited to the workplace:

Obie Fernandez, founder of Hashrocket, a Jacksonville, Fla., software design firm, says his team passes around a 10-pound medicine ball during stand-ups. For newcomers unaware of the practice, "it's pretty mean," he says, "but really the main thing you want is to avoid people pontificating."

Share | Comment

Mocking and vilifying attorneys has always been good sport. While Joseph Tartakovsky's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times celebrates Dickens's depictions of attorneys, he also points out that the very thing that is so galling to so many is actually a virtue:

But before we resign our bar licenses in shame (and I only got mine in November), let us call, for the defense, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan. He tells me lawyers are scorned because “they think there are two sides to most stories, while many people think there is just one side: theirs.”

This reminds me of the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

Share | Comment

It is taken for granted that sports build character. Mark Edmundson's piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education pulls apart the contradictions and forces us to face how the very nature of sports can foster the opposite of what we wish for in our children and ourselves:

Sports can teach participants to modulate their passions—sports can help people be closer to Hector than to Achilles—but they can foment cruelty as well. Athletes, as everyone who went to an American high school will tell you, can be courtly, dignified individuals. But they're often bullies; they often seek violence for its own sake. Some athletes take crude pleasure in dominating others; they like to humiliate their foes, off the field as well as on it.

Share | Comment