"My client didn't do it, but I know who did."

When lawyers try to defend criminal cases by arguing not only that their client didn't do the crime, but also that the lawyer knows who did it, judges start to panic. (This defense is known as the wrong-person defense or the third-party defense.) Judges don't like it when defense lawyers start questioning the prosecutor's charging decision. They would much rather that the defendant simply take his medicine instead of trying to cast blame on someone else. After all, things get complicated once we entertain the possibility that the prosecutor charged the wrong person. And sometimes, judges get so crazy about this that their thinking process crosses the line that separates the merely irrational from the clinically insane. For example, one judge denied a murder-defendant's right to put on a wrong-person defense, "[e]ven where a third party was seen fleeing from the scene of the crime and admitted to killing other people and burying them in the very woods in which the victims' bodies were later found." Why did the judge exclude this defendant's evidence of innocence and of third-party guilt? It was simply "too threadbare to be admissible." (Interestingly, this defendant's evidence against the third party was much stronger than the prosecutor's evidence against the defendant, yet it was still considered inadequate.) In any case, this stuff makes for interesting reading, as long as it's not happening to you or your client! So check out my newest article, An Alternative to the Wrong-Person Defense, 24 George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal 1 (2013). For links to my other articles, click here.