Bennett L. Gershman

Prosecutors often deal with crime victims who do not want to testify. Victims are afraid they will be harmed by their abusers, such as victims of domestic violence. Others are embarrassed to testify in public and undergo brutal cross-examination, such as rape victims. Others are traumatized by the courtroom and...

One of the key pieces of circumstantial evidence in the murder charge against George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin is a cry for help moments before the fatal shot that was recorded while a witness who heard the struggle made a 911 call to the police. Identifying the voice of...

George Zimmerman -- who, no one disputes, killed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. -- has now been formally charged with second degree murder in a hearsay affidavit filed by special prosecutor Angela Corey. But there is a huge question whether Zimmerman actually murdered Trayvon, or rather committed...

Have the nation's law schools been cheating their students? Have the nation's law schools been engaged in an ongoing fraud by misrepresenting the value of a legal education? Have law students accepted law school offers based on a law school's false or misleading representation of job opportunities upon graduation?

That...

People tell lies. Even politicians tell lies. And sometimes lies are punished; just ask Martha Stewart, "Scooter" Libby, and Bill Clinton. Lying involves speech, but the First Amendment's protection of speech provides no refuge for some lies, notably false statements to government, defamatory falsehoods, fraud, perjury, false advertising, baseless litigation,...

The hysterical arguments by officials of the Catholic Church (and mimicked by their Republican water carriers) about being forced to abdicate their conscientious religious beliefs to accommodate women who seek to obtain contraceptive devices is reminiscent of the moronic arguments about "Death Panels" for elderly under Obama's health care legislation,...

A recent debate in Florida between the Republican presidential contenders focused briefly on the subject of new statehood, namely, is there a chance that a 51st state will be added to the union soon? There seemed to be broad consensus that the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico would be the front-runner...

This insidious quotation was the tag line in Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's infamous opinion in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, which legitimized the eugenics movement in the United States, involving forced sterilizations on a massive scale of persons deemed "socially inadequate" to bear...

Pontius Pilate would have been proud of Haley Barbour. Pilate, the Roman procurator over Judea at the time of Jesus, pardoned Barabbas, a murderer/insurrectionist against Pilate's own authority (as the Gospel of Mark tells us), the most famous pardon in the history of the world. Barbour, the outgoing procurator (actually,...

Some of the comments to my recent piece, How Immigration Courts Contaminate American Justice, reveal a visceral outrage more virulent than that expressed over other hot-button issues, i.e., capital punishment, affirmative action, abortion. The anger, I sense, is based not so much at the fact that immigration...

Imagine a legal proceeding where the judge is hired by the chief prosecutor, the defendant is charged with an unintelligible offense, he has no lawyer to defend him, the proceedings are conducted in a language he does not understand, and the punishment is banishment from his home, his livelihood, and...

Newt Gingrich's recent pontifications about constitutional law have one redeeming quality -- they offer a teaching opportunity about the beginnings of our democracy, and the power of the courts to review and invalidate actions of the other branches of government. Gingrich's attack on the judiciary -- he would abolish courts...

How much, if any, protection does the First Amendment give to derogatory comments by police that involve racial, anti-semitic, or homophobic speech? Does it matter if the remarks are made in the officer's private capacity as a citizen rather than in his capacity as a police officer? Does it matter...

These are dark days for the British tabloids. Having operated like a kind of Mafia for years, the tabloids are now in the dock and their unscrupulous conduct is being scrutinized. An official inquiry led by high court judge Sir Brian Leveson is probing the conduct of the...

Jerry Sandusky already has been convicted by the media and the public of a series of atrocious sexual crimes against young boys committed over many years. He deserves no sympathy even if one-tenth of what is reported about him is true. He appears to be as bad a sexual predator...

Attacking lawyers for defending unpopular clients or advocating unpopular causes is one of the more unsavory features of American culture, recalling the famous injunction in Shakespeare's King Henry VI -- "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." But attacking students learning to become lawyers? That seems a...

Reflecting on the Penn State scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky's alleged serial rapes of children in the football locker room and showers, one is struck by the institutional complacency over such horrendous crimes: silence by eyewitnesses, failure of campus leaders to report the crimes, and a cover-up by...

Put aside Coach Paterno and the Nittany Lions for the moment. There's a much broader issue that the Penn State scandal highlights: What would you do under the same or similar circumstances? You, not a football icon or part of the football culture in Happy Valley, look out your window...

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in one of the most important privacy cases in decades. In United States v. Jones, the Court will decide whether the secret installation by police of a GPS device to the defendant's vehicle and monitoring his movements every day for four weeks...

Last Friday, sixteen New York City police officers were arraigned in Bronx Criminal Court on 21 indictments charging in over 1,600 counts a massive conspiracy to fix traffic tickets of friends, relatives and assorted big shots. The scene in the courthouse was raucous and ugly. Hundreds of...