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    A recent study estimates that thousands of innocent people are wrongfully imprisoned each year in the United States. Some are exonerated through DNA evidence, but many more languish in prison because their convictions were based on faulty eyewitness accounts and no DNA is available. Prominent criminal lawyer and law professor Abbe Smith weaves together real life cases to show what it is like to champion the rights of the accused. Smith describes the moral and ethical dilemmas of representing the guilty and the weighty burden of fighting for the innocent, including the victorious story of how she helped free a woman wrongly imprisoned for nearly three decades.\
    For fans of Law and Order and investigative news programs like 20/20, Case of a Lifetime is a chilling look at what really determines a person's innocence.\
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Michael was in a hurry. He was scrambling up the ladder at Drake &amp; Sweeney, a giant D.C. law firm with eight hundred lawyers. The money was good and getting better; a partnership was three years away. He was a rising star with no time to waste, no time to stop, no time to toss a few coins into the cups of panhandlers. No time for a conscience.But a violent encounter with a homeless man stopped him cold. Michael survived; his assailant did not. Who was this man? Michael did some digging, and learned that he was a mentally ill veteran who'd been in and out of shelters for many years. Then Michael dug a little deeper, and found a dirty secret, and the secret involved Drake &amp; Sweeney.The fast track derailed; the ladder collapsed. Michael bolted the firm and took a top-secret file with him. He landed in the streets, an advocate for the homeless, a street lawyer.And a thief.

This is a book with four stories about famed Attorney Roy Black's most memorable cases of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. The first story is about a Miami police officer who was, for political reasons, prosecuted for Manslaughter after he shot and killed an armed black man in a Miami video arcade. The similarities between this case, and the case of Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO, are uncanny, including rioting, looting and burning in the black community. The irresponsible and false reporting of the news media is also apparent in both cases. The turning point in the trial came when Black called Massad Ayoob to testify for the defense as an expert witness. Ayoob was able to successfully demonstrate to a prosecutor (and to the jury) that the technique being argued by the prosecutor that the officer should have used would have allowed the armed man to access, and to potentially shoot, his gun. The demonstration was dramatic, and it helped Black to win his case. The message of the story was to point out how politics influenced when and how somebody might be prosecuted, even when the evidence is very weak, as in the George Zimmerman case. The second story is about a mentally ill, possibly insane, black man who had been convicted of murder in Florida and sentenced to death. Attorney Black handled the man's appeal of the sentence, and was able to demonstrate to a panel of Florida Supreme Court Justices that the man had not been adequately represented by his court-appointed attorneys. The death sentence was, ultimately, vacated and reduced to life in prison. The case highlighted the inadequacies of the public defense system, and the biases of some judges. The third story is about a man who was accused of murdering his live-in girlfriend in Plantation, Florida, near Ft. Lauderdale. Attorney Black was able to show that the shooting was accidental, and that the police investigation was totally incompetent. Once again, he called Massad Ayoob as an expert witness to testify about the gun, and about how the police had failed to adequately test it for malfunction. Once again, the prosecutor demanded a demonstration, this time with a loaded gun in a courtroom. Ayoob did not want to conduct any kind of demonstrations with a loaded weapon, but was ordered to do so by the judge. Ayoob successfully demonstrated that loaded cartridges from a Dan Wesson .357 Magnum revolver might not always be easily removed from the cylinder, leaving one loaded round in an otherwise empty gun. In a further demonstration, the prosecutor demanded that Ayoob show the jury how the gun could possibly be taken away from him when he was holding it tightly, and Ayoob showed him. He took the gun away in less than one second and pointed it at the prosecutor's nose. Ayoob later told Black that he could have broken the prosecutor's finger but thought it probably wasn't a good idea to do so. The last paragraph in this story tells us how important Ayoob’s testimony was to Black’s case:“But the key was that dramatic moment when the prosecutor insisted that Ayoob try the demonstration. This was not some abstraction about bagging the hands of a corpse. This was something that all the jurors could see right in front of their eyes. When they saw it, the State’s case collapsed.” The take-away from this story was to point out the fact that shoddy police investigations could cause innocent people to be prosecuted, and that cases could be lost by prosecutors who rely on those investigations. Too bad the LAPD and Marsha Clark had not been made aware of this case before the O.J. Simpson trial ... The fourth and final story in the book highlights the awesome and undefeatable power of the US Department of Justice. It highlights the ruthlessness with which the DOJ can, and will, trample provisions of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights in order to pursue its aims. It is about an honest banker from Miami who is accused of laundering money for drug dealers and, in spite of being acquitted, is then charged with different crimes. Because Black beat the government in the first case, the US Attorney was able to take legal actions that prevented Roy Black from defending the banker a second time, and he was convicted and sent to prison. It is a story that will make you absolutely disgusted with the way that men, operating in the name of our government, sometimes abuse their power. I never would have believed that the government could prevent a criminal defendant from choosing his or her own attorney. Incredible!

INSPIRED BY REAL CRIMES A serial killer is littering the south shore beach of Long Island with the bones of his victims stuffed into burlap bags. Nick Mannino (THE GOOD LAWYER), a former South Bronx Legal Aid Attorney, is now middle-aged. A complex and compelling character, Nick has a disturbing family history--his constant court battles nothing more than a futile effort to hide and deny a haunting truth about himself and a sinewy bloodline marred by unspeakable crimes. Then this brutal serial killer turns on him, and worse, his family. Is this payback for a comfortable life begot from his mafia uncle's dirty money? Has his ambitious South Bronx years of the 1980's-crimes he was forced to commit-innocent lives lost-come back to haunt him? As much a thriller as it is a mystery, with an ending as riveting as that in Silence of the Lambs, The Criminal Lawyer is also a love story, a novel of family secrets and crimes beyond forgiveness.

Criminal & Lawyer

book

Eleni Stevens (Gecko)

American crime comedy-drama television series (2005-2017)

American crime fiction television series (2000–2015)

Criminal & Lawyer

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