Search Engine for Cases Under Supreme Court Review
by: Ryan • March 22, 2011 • no comments
You can be the greatest defense lawyer in Oregon and you never need to have an original idea. It's true. There are enough geniuses out there, but no one can come up with all the good ideas. No, the really great attorneys simply know how and where to find the exceptional work of other people and shamelessly plagiarize.
That's one of the theories behind MPDtrainer. There is an enormous gulf between those attorneys who take advantage of MPDtrainer or SCOTUSblog or OCDLA conferences to find arguments that other people have thought of, and those attorneys who are still practicing the same way they did twenty years ago.
Another great resource is the search engine for the Oregon appellate courts media releases. Type in a topic - such as "drug dog" - and you will find that the Oregon Supreme Court has granted review to two cases on the reliability and training of dog drugs to provide probable cause. Or type in "automobile exception" and you'll find that review was recently granted in a case that could shrink the vastly expanded exception.
Keep in mind this isn't the most user friendly search engine. It will require a little bit of digging through the weeds. But if the COA opinion on a topic is bad, knowing that the OSC has granted review will give you a reason to raise the issue and maybe, just maybe, set a depth charge that could go off - like it did this morning - three years into a 25 year sentence. (In that case, the trial attorney preserved the grounds for reversal so well, he had an extra one to spare.)
