If you check below the blogroll on the right, you’ll see a little icon that says “Sitemeter.”  If you click on it, you won’t find anything, but if I do, I’ll be taken to a site which keeps track of how many people visit The Briefcase.  It also tells me from where; for reasons unknown to me, for example, I have a regular reader somewhere in North Carolina.  It will also tell me how they got here.  I still get people showing up here who’ve entered “christine agnello russo” into Google.  Some stories just die hard.

From time to time here on out, I’ll post the weirdest search phase that anybody has used to hit my site.  This week’s winner, hands down, is the phrase “blonde police foot worship.”  It was from someone in San Francisco.  Gee, there’s a surprise…

As you might have figured out, Friday’s become my day to pull stuff off the web that might be informative/interesting/entertaining.  Here’s a feel-good piece about a 75-year-old Dade County attorney that starts with this exchange in court:

Attorney: I’m here on a mission of mercy for this poor innocent child, your honor.
Judge: How old is this `poor child’?
Attorney: He’s 23 years old, your honor . . . a babe in the woods.
Judge: If I recall, once you reach 18, you’re not a child anymore.
Attorney: I have suits that are older, your honor.
Judge: You have speeches that are older. I’ve heard them all, Mr. Gaer. Motion denied.

And from Doug Berman’s Law and Sentencing Policy blog, here’s a feel-bad piece about a black man in Georgia who was sentenced to 10 years in prison without parole for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a New Year’s Eve party when he was 17 years old.  Links to the background stories, and good questions from Prof. Berman, one being, “Doesn’t this story sound like one we might hear from some repressive foreign country, and not from a state in a country that supposedly prides itself on liberty and freedom?”

Here’s a short post on why legalizing marijuana and taxing it probably wouldn’t result in the bonanza that many people think.  Good piece, but what jumped out at me was that 43% of all drug arrests last year involved marijuana. 

Closer to home, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected, by a 4-2 vote, a proposed change to Criminal Rule 16 which would have basically provided the defense with the same information available to the prosecution, with protection for work product and some restrictions on copying, use, and disclosure.

If you feel bad about charging that client $2500 for representing him on a DWI — the one where if he’d gone in without you the day of arraignment and pled no contest, he’d have wound up with the exact same sentence – you’ll feel better after reading this.  Seems that the lawyers for Jeff Skilling, the Enron CEO, are billing him — wait for it — $70 million in attorney fees for their representation in his criminal case.  You remember, the one where he was found guilty and sentenced to 24 years in prison.  They already got $40 million, and are asking for another $30 million for the 12 lawyers and 5 paralegals they brought down for the trial.  Good thing they used all those guys.  If they’d only had, say, 10 lawyers and 3 paralegals, he might have been convicted on all the counts.  Oh, wait, he was…

I’ll be taking a break from blogging over the holidays, namely, all next week and New Year’s Day.  I’ll be back on January 2 with two weeks of court updates, tips on how to win an inventory search case, an explanation of why Ohio Jury Instructions have screwed up the instructions on assumption of risk, and whatever else pops into my mind between now and then.  See you in a little over a week, and have the best of holidays.