Will Google Cars Eviscerate the Personal Injury Bar? Eric Turkewitz, New York Personal Injury Law Blog, December 23, 2014
With human error crashes reduced by software that automatically stops or slows the car, the number of broken bodies and cars will be reduced. The number of deaths will be reduced. Your insurance premiums will be (theoretically) reduced.
And that means the need for my services as a personal injury attorney will be reduced. (Likewise reduced will be the need for trauma health teams and emergency rooms, not to mention car body shops.)
Has anyone ever cheered being put out of business? I am. Because I drive, too.
See also Personal Injury Lawyer Says Self-Driving Cars Will End His Business, Damon Lavrinc, Jalopnik, December 31, 2014
The Untouchables: America’s Misbehaving Prosecutors, And The System That Protects Them, Radley Balko, Huffington Post, August 1, 2013
The wrongly convicted often show remarkable grace and humility. It’s inspiring to see, if a little difficult to understand; even after years or decades in prison, exonerees are typically marked by an absence of bitterness.
Not Thompson, but you can hardly blame him. Even among outrageous false conviction stories, his tale is particularly brutal. He was wrongly convicted not once, but twice — separately — for a carjacking and a murder. He spent 18 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 14 of them on death row. His death warrant was signed eight times. When his attorneys finally found the evidence that cleared him — evidence his prosecutors had known about for years — he was weeks away from execution.
But what most enrages Thompson — and what drives his activism today — is that in the end, there was no accountability. His case produced a surfeit of prosecutorial malfeasance, from incompetence, to poor training, to a culture of conviction that included both willfully ignoring evidence that could have led to his exoneration, to blatantly withholding it. Yet the only attorney ever disciplined in his case was a former prosecutor who eventually aided in Thompson’s defense.
“This isn’t about bad men, though they were most assuredly bad men,” Thompson says. “It’s about a system that is void of integrity. Mistakes can happen. But if you don’t do anything to stop them from happening again, you can’t keep calling them mistakes.”
