Some films shout. Others whisper. Shepherds and Butchers doesn’t do either. It stares you down and waits for you to flinch. This is one of the finest courtroom and moral injury dramas most people have never heard of. That is not an accident. It is a consequence of a film that refuses to pander, refuses to sermonize, and refuses to dumb itself down for distracted audiences. The acting is uniformly exceptional. Not “good for a foreign film.” Exceptional, period. The performances feel lived-in, not performed. The accents matter because they are real. The silences matter because they are earned. An imported A-list American cast would have turned this into dialect theater. Instead, the filmmakers trusted actors who understood the world they were portraying. That decision carries the entire film. The story is devastating in its restraint. Rather than attacking capital punishment head-on, the film exposes the psychological wreckage left behind. Not just on the condemned, but on the men tas...

We now live in a country where police encounters are streamed like reality television and judged by people whose legal education consists of YouTube clips and reruns of cop shows. Every stop suddenly produces a self appointed constitutional scholar. They are confident. Loud. Wrong. And aggressively committed to proving it. These individuals believe they understand the law better than the officer standing three feet away with a badge, a radio, and the legal authority to end their day or their life. They escalate minor encounters into career ending events through obstruction, resistance, and theatrical defiance. Had they simply complied, stayed calm, and shut up, they likely would have driven away with a warning. Instead, they insist on testing dominance over someone whose job requires split second decisions under threat. Police officers typically know almost nothing about the person they are confronting beyond what dispatch relays. Witness statements are often exaggerated or outright ...

Some media outlets breathlessly announce that “60 percent of Americans want stronger gun laws.” Fascinating. Deeply moving. Also legally meaningless. Gun rights are not decided by opinion polls, TikTok vibes, or cable news panels. They are written into the Second Amendment. Changing that requires a two thirds vote of Congress and ratification by three quarters of the states. In other words, a process deliberately designed to survive public mood swings and bad headlines. This is what happens when you live in a republic instead of a national group chat. Gun control organizations are currently having a full emotional collapse because Texas keeps repealing laws that clash with the Constitution. Texas lawmakers are not impressed by press releases or emotional monologues. They read the Constitution and act accordingly. Shocking behavior. There are also two inconvenient realities that keep ruining the gun control business plan. First, there are already roughly 400 million firearms in private ...

  If you want to know where many unconstitutional weapons laws actually come from, do not bother digging through crime data or history books. Just watch a musical. Enter West Side Story. A beautifully crafted, emotionally manipulative stage and film production from Bernstein and Sondheim. Tragic. Romantic. Memorable. Also fictional. That part mattered to everyone except lawmakers. Legislators across the country watched a stylized gang melodrama, dried their tears and promptly went to work banning objects. Switchblade knives, in particular. Not because of statistics. Not because of real world trends. Because a movie made them feel something. Italian stilettos were suddenly public enemy number one. Yes, they opened fast. So what. If speed were the issue, a fixed blade hunting knife would have ended the battle much sooner. But logic does not test well in legislatures. And legislators, as it turns out, do not take intelligence exams. They pose for cameras, shake hands and smile w...

After a run of high-profile cases where I helped clear people falsely accused of serious violent crimes, I crossed paths with a man headed straight for death row. It was the fall of 1989. The crime was unspeakably cruel. He had not yet been convicted. He begged me to take his case and conduct a defense investigation. The problem was simple and brutal. The evidence against him was overwhelming. He already had a public defender and a full investigative team. His criminal history ran for pages. The media had branded him “The Devil.” That was not hyperbole. That was the headline. He called me from the jail, and later from death row, at least two dozen times. I never treated the calls as an annoyance. I listened every time. My answer never changed. There was nothing to impeach. No loose thread. No unexplored lead. No alternate theory that survived contact with the evidence. I watched his case climb the appellate ladder year after year. Nothing improved. In modern capital litigation, tim...

The Steven Steinberg Case and the Lawyer Who Rewrote Reality.  In 1982, Arizona pulled off a legal magic trick that would be funny if it were not so grotesque. Steven Steinberg stabbed his wife, Elana Steinberg, twenty six times. Not once. Not twice. Twenty six. He admitted it. And then he walked. No plea bargain. No prison. No hospital commitment. Just a courtroom exit and a lesson in how far a jury can be pushed if the story is slick enough. Welcome to State v. Steven Steinberg, the case that forced Arizona lawmakers to admit they had created a monster. THE FACTS THAT NEVER CHANGED On January 15, 1981, inside a Scottsdale home, Steven Steinberg killed his wife with a kitchen knife. Police found no intruder. No defensive wounds suggesting mutual combat. No evidence pointing anywhere else. Steinberg did not deny the killing. He claimed he could not remember it. This was never about who did it. It was about how badly the defense could blur responsibility. ENTER THE LAWYER The archit...

  Rob Reiner had talent. Real talent. Once upon a time, he made people laugh instead of lecturing them. That version of Rob Reiner was worth celebrating. Then he became angry. Loudly angry. Permanently angry. For ten straight years, his public identity narrowed to one obsession. Smear Trump. Repeat. Reload. Do it again tomorrow. It wasn’t clever. It wasn’t brave. It was tedious. And eventually, it poisoned the well. When the ranting began, I stopped watching. Not out of protest. Out of exhaustion. America treated Rob Reiner extraordinarily well. He lived the dream most people never touch. And yet he spoke as if the country had personally wronged him. That kind of bitterness is hard to sell as moral clarity. The phrase “shut up and sing” was never about silencing anyone. It was a warning. If you turn art into scolding, the applause will stop. Reiner ignored that warning. He was wealthy enough to ignore it. I don’t mourn his death. That doesn’t make me heartless. It makes me hon...