Bits and pieces

A brief update addressing a few things and then, out of the kindness of my heart, a little gift.

First, a reader asks about the market for ADAs in Texas. Interestingly enough (right?!) I talked a little about this once before, not long ago. Here's the post, entitled "Who gets to be an ADA."

Next, another reader ask about "Affidavits of Non-Prosecution." These are sworn statements filled out by, usually, the victims of domestic violence who do not wish to see the person charged with assaulting them prosecuted. (As the name of the affidavit suggests...)
The bigger question is what we do with them and the answer is, "It depends." It depends on the defendant's criminal history, the severity of the assault, and other incident-specific factors. Sometimes they lead to reduced charges or dismissal, and sometimes they don't. We do try to make sure that whoever filled one out did not do so under pressure of any sort, and we also try and make sure they get counseling, separate and apart from what we do with the prosecution.

Third, and relatedly, the question: "As a victim of domestic violence can you request the defendant get court ordered counseling?" Short answer: kind of. The way it would likely work is that counseling is ordered as part of a probation plea. And here, we always get input from victims and take into account their wishes. Now, if it's the defendant's 50th vicious attack and he's been through counseling etc, he might face a prison sentence, and any counseling would be up to the prison folks.

Finally, the gift, in this case a recommendation. Oh, I know it's Thursday which usually means a book rec. But this time it's music. They are called Band of Horses. Fabulous. You can hear their music on their website, and I challenge you: go there and listen to Factory, the first track. If that doesn't blow your socks off and have you listening to the rest, I'm a monkey's uncle.

Trial Bumps

I'll post the trial schedule later, but one case will be missing: mine. Well, my colleague Jackie Wood's case, actually--I was going to second-chair her. But the case pled out right before we picked a jury, leaving us on the down-slide after getting all ramped up.

Trial is funny, you know, it really runs you through the gamut of emotions. And it does so almost every time. Here's one permutation of them:

Steely resolve: this is when the defendant turns down the lowest, most generous, absolutely reasonable-est plea offer. It's the slap with the white glove, the glint in the cowboy's eye: "We're going to trial."

Oh boy: a few days later when you sit down to draft the notices, witness lists, and subpoenas, and make sure all the evidence that exists has been pulled together.

What else, what else?: The paperwork is done, the witnesses prepped and ready. Final trial themes are being bandied about the team and we're making last adjustments to the witness list. (You don't want too many, they might distract from the central elements, but you don't want too few, the jury might not take your elements seriously). You cast around wondering what you've missed... anything?

All this for one case?: There's often a moment, for me at least, amid the mountain of work that is trial prep. A moment when I look at the files piling up around me, when a defense lawyer calls to talk about his or her case and I give them as much time as I dare. A moment when I think, "Wow, I have 150+ cases, and I'm devoting all this work to resolving just one of them. It feels a little like laying out the wedding china, the crystal glasses, the complete set of dinner silverware to eat a solitary pea. The moment passes of course. The defendant's constitutional rights are not to be measured against peas, and I'll always have 150+ cases, whether I try this one or not. Better to focus on my victim, my case, my witnesses.

Here we go...: Our jury panel has been selected and we have the data sheets. We go up to court in our best suits and new haircuts. For some, the nerves are setting in. For others, the jitters come from adrenaline and anticipation. I love doing voir dire, opening statements, closing argument. I don't get nervous, I get hyped up.

Bump: This comes after trial. The adrenaline seeps away and the exhaustion seeps in. Not just from the trial, but on seeing the new batch of cases grinning at me from my To Do bucket.

This week gave Jackie and me a small bump, I suppose, because the trial never really started and so the adrenalin never really kicked in. And any bump has been off-set by the look on the faces of those files in my To Do bucket.

They didn't expect me so soon.

Robbery is never the answer - even a polite robbery

I think I may be the last person on the planet to see this video, and certainly I'm late in posting it, but it's mesmerizing. It's almost like a Monty Python sketch, with the excess of politeness, the apologies, and the calm displayed by the victim.

But I'm guessing it was a real gun, which might have been used, and the robber's underlying sense of desperation makes this a bizarre and frightening exchange.

The most common question

You'd think the most common question might be to do with serial killers. Or growing marijuana in the back yard. Or the legality of gambling at home with friends (yes, Justin, this refers to your question... see Texas Penal Code Section 47.02 for guidance).

Those might, of course, be questions regular ADAs get, but I'm from England so I get different ones.

First is usually, "Dude, what's up with soccer? It's soooo boring," which produces a rant from me about baseball and a threat to make the questioner sit down and watch a five-day cricket match.

Next is, "What's the difference between England and Britain?"

It used to be, when I told people I had boy-girl twins, "Cool, are they identical?"
I'm dead serious, people used to ask that all the time, and I'm talking intelligent people with advanced degrees. I got fed-up being nice about it after a while, and responded with, "No, one of them has a penis," which (a) shut them up and (b) really seemed to highlight the idiocy of the question for anyone listening to the conversation.

Anyway, back to the England v. Britain thing. All you ever wanted to know about it, actually, thanks to the suggestion of a reader. Here's the simple version:



And if you want to really get into it, try this on for size (credit to Grey's Blog):



Any more questions?

Great job team!

Just a quick pointer to a verdict in our court today. The two ADAs who tried the case, Jackie Wood and Kelsey Mckay, did a truly bang-up job.
Also, kudos to the two cops who were shot at, Justin Berry and Valentin De Los Santos. I spent a few hours with them this week and I tell you this: APD should be proud of the way they handled themselves during this incident and also during the trial. Classy guys.
Here's the story.

Author interview: John Gilstrap

You know, the one thing I'm discovering as I go about finding authors to interview is just how nice so many of them are. I mean, these are guys and gals stacked with talent and extremely successful, yet more than happy to spend a few minutes talking about the craft of writing, and their own work, with me.

John Gilstrap is one of those authors. I emailed asking if he'd do an interview and he responded within a couple of hours. My mum doesn't respond that quickly, for heaven's sake. He was also kind enough to correct a couple of factual errors in my questions without saying, "Hey, fool, this is the third Grave novel!" Nice, prompt, and classy. When I'm a famous author, I shall aspire to be the same.

Anyway, if you read in the thriller genre you almost certainly know his name, and if you haven't read his books I strongly suggest you do so. He's won awards, been a NYT bestselling author, and he has a new book out this summer.

Here he is:

• Did you always want to be a writer growing up, or did you come to it as an adult?

Writing is the only thing I've ever been really good at. Well, communication, in general, I suppose. Even as a small child, I would entertain myself by writing stories, or by telling stories to my friends. Curiously enough, I never gave a lot of thought growing up to being a professional novelist. Instead, I always thought I'd work for a newspaper. Then reality intruded after college when I couldn't get a job at a real paper. That's when I went back to graduate school to get a master's degree in safety engineering, and my life wandered far away from my writing roots. I was 38 when my first book was published.

• Did you have a lot of support when you began writing, or did you suffer the same raised eyebrow most of us do? In other words, what kept you motivated at the start of your career?

I didn't suffer so much from a lack of support as I did from a sense of embarrassment. I was an engineer and a business professional, for God's sake. To tell my colleagues that I was writing book in my spare time would have felt capricious, and would have set the stage for constant cynical questioning. Can't you just hear it? "So, Shakespeare, how goes the writing dream?" When I finally sold my first novel for well over $1 million, the biggest shock among those colleagues was the fact that they had no clue that I'd been writing a book.

• What is your writing schedule?

I write whenever I can, mostly during evenings and weekends. Full-time writing didn't suit me. I'm too much of an extrovert to toil in the silence of my writing studio. About seven years ago, I went back to a day job--a fairly demanding one at that--so I need to carve out writing time whenever I can find it. My dirty little secret is that I'm more prolific as a part-time writer than I ever was when I wrote full time.

• Do you actively look for story ideas (combing newspapers etc), or do they just come to you?

They pretty much just come to me, but mostly when I'm looking for them. When I need an idea or when I need to solve a problem, the last thing I want to do is address it directly. The harder I think straight at the problem, the more I become aware of the fact that the solution evades me. Solutions come to me when I'm diverted by other things. It's weird, but it's the way I'm wired.

• Have you ever thought about writing in a different genre?

I am writing in a different genre; at least on a diferent spin of the old genre. My early books dealt with normal people in mortal jeopardy who had to figure a way out for themselves. Now I'm writing about normal people in mortal jeopardy who are rescued by my recurring protagonist, Jonathan Grave. The Grave books were in fact inspired by the one nonfiction book I wrote, Six Minutes to Freedom, which exposed me to the world of black ops and Special Forces. In fact, that book is the only one that ever got direct input on the record from Delta Force. SixMin is a terrific book, I think, but I learned the hard way that very few fiction fans will follow an author to nonfiction.

• Your third Jonathan Grave novel is coming out in July - how did you come up with him as a character?

While working with the guys from the Unit--Delta Force--I was fascinated by these guys' unwavering dedication to mission. When Americans are kidnapped on foreign soil, the US government starts working right away to secure their release. In a perfect world, our diplomats leverage local law enforcement personnel to do what needs to be done; but the world is often not perfect. When negotiations break down, the task of hostage rescue falls to the US military. Once the go-order is given, these Special Forces operators' whole mission is to bring the good guys home, whatever it takes. There are no warrants served, and no one cares all that much about the rights of the kidnappers. If the bad guys put down their weapons and cooperate, they get to see tomorrow. If they don't, they don't. Jonathan Grave brings that clarity of mission to civilian rescue here in the United States. As he likes to put it, he almost always operates outside of the law, but never on the wrong side of it.

• Tell us about the new novel.

In Threat Warning (July, 2011), a group of domestic terrorists wreaks havoc across the US through a series of small but brutal attacks against mid-America. Think commuters and high school football games. In order to up the terror ante, they kidnap a mother and her son as they drive home from the boy's high school track meet, and it falls to Jonathan and his team to bring them home.

• How much energy do you put into the language aspect of your novels, the “art” so to speak?

In writing, language is the only tool I have, so I like to think that I work that tool very hard. Voice is very important to me--far more important than proper grammar or formal sentence structure. In fact, my most liberating moment on my path to publication came when I made a conscious effort to stop writing a book and instead to tell a story. For me, I realized there was a significant difference. I realized that when I tell stories verbally of what happened to me in my various adventures, I use far more dynamic vocabulary than when I was writing. I interspersed humor and an underlying cynicism that made people want to listen. Once I started channeling that voice onto the paper, I found that the storytelling to the page became much, much easier.

• Who are your favorite authors?

I like Vince Flynn, Jeffery Deaver, Tess Gerritsen, Nelson DeMille. Jeeze, too many to list.

• If you could offer just one piece of advice to aspiring novelists, what would it be?

Truthfully, it would be to ignore 99% of the advice that's given to aspiring authors. Quit listening and write. Quit reading books about writing and write. Quit thinking about writing, quit attending seminars about writing, and quit studying the creative process of other writers. Read books that you wish you'd written and dissect them. Ask yourself how the author made you laugh or made you cry or made your heart pound. Then sit down and write and write the story that most resonates in your soul. Accept the fact that first books always suck. (My "first" novel was the fourth novel I'd written.) I find that far too many struggling novelists spend far too much time fantasizing about being a writer and not nearly enough actually writing and honing their craft.

• Do you outline your novels?

I used to outline more thoroughly than I do now--probably because I'm writing a series that has recurring characters. That said, I always know what the last scene of the book witll be before I start writing the first scene.

• Do you recommend any specific "how-to" writing books for mystery/thriller writers?

I've never read one, so I'm not the best judge of such things. Actually, that's not true. I read Stephen King's On Writing and enjoyed it a lot. I'm not sure I learned anything I didn't know about the craft, but I love King's writing style, and I found the biographical details to be very interesting. I'm of the school that writing is a craft, and like any craft, it has to be practiced. When I teach writing seminars, my very first slide says, "No one can teach you to write," and that pretty much sums it up for me. You can't learn a good golf swing by reading about it, either. You have to do it. Over and over and over again. If you don't get better over time, accept that this might not be your bag.

• What is the value of writing conferences -- do you attend, or have a favorite?

This is an interesting question, because the value of conferences is 100% dependent upon the attendees' expectations. Pitch sessions to agents can be a valuable experience, but only for those who come prepared with a well-rehearsed pitch, and who are prepared to process the feedback they receive. Outside of the very specific environment of the pitch session, attendees who think they can sell their book by pitching it at the bar are wasting their time and potentially alienating valuable contacts for the future. Conferences are great places to make contacts and hang out with current and future friends. My favorites are ThrillerFest, Bouchercon and Magna Cum Murder.

• You participate in a blog, The Kill Zone: is that for marketing purposes, to connect with other writers, or just 'cos?

It started out as a marketing thing, but it's evolved into a very nice little community. I feel as if I truly know the regular posters, and that's pretty cool.

• What do you think of the e-book debate - is the trend away from paper books it good for authors, readers, publishers, anyone, everyone?

I think the trend is most definitely away from paper, but that paper will be around for a long time. I believe that eBooks will send mass market paperbacks and hardcovers the way of the dinosaur in the next five years.

What's cooking in court this week

Starting with the most important court (mine, of course) here are the jury trials going on in the courthouse (district courts):

167th JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ VISITING JUDGE PERKINS

Defendant: Joel Lara-Cruz
Offense: Aggravated assault on public servant
Prosecutors: Jackie Wood and Kelsey McKay
Defense attorney: Raymond Espersen


390th JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ JUDGE KOCUREK

Defendant: Cody Duggan
Offense: Murder
Prosecutors: Marianne Powers and Kathryn Scales
Defense attorney: Kyle Lowe

403 rd JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ JUDGE KENNEDY

Defendant: Daniel Arriaga
Offense: Aggravated assault of public servant
Prosecutors: Mona Shea and Katie Sweeten
Defense attorney: Karyl Krug


427th JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ JUDGE CORONADO

Defendant: Thomas Wyatt
Offense: Aggravated assault w/ deadly weapon
Prosecutors: Bill Bishop and Jeremy Sylestine
Defense attorney: Adam Reposa