I am sorely tempted today to write about The Clown and The Snake—the incompetent, biased judge and the lying prosecutor—and use their names, creating a permanent googleable record.

There would be good in it. The voters should know about The Clown, and if he knew that his hijinks might be published, it's not unimaginable that he would back off a bit. As for naming The Snake, I know there's no changing her—her malevolent dishonesty is the habit of more than 20 years—but it would just feel good, and that's worth something. Besides, one way or another the sunlight might do some disinfecting.

In the larger picture, prosecutors and judges are public servants, and should enjoy no impunity at all. There are some who have for decades broken the rules in the Harris County Courthouse, knowing that the mainstream media see tales of cheating in the courthouse as inside baseball, and would never bother with a story about a deceitful prosecutor or a judge prejudiced against the defense. Lying prosecutors like The Snake (I haven't met many, but there are some) rise to high levels in the District Attorney's Office; partisan judges—"prosecutors in black robes"—are reelected term after term by voters who don't give any thought to the criminal courthouse until they are invited down there as jurors or defendants.

The Clown and The Snake and Judge Biggs and all the others should never count on me keeping their identities even thinly disguised.

But I haven't made a habit of naming transgressing courthouse regulars here, and I don't know whether now—while courthouse equilibrium favors my clients—is the time to start. I'm not unwilling to cross that particular Rubicon, but neither am I in a hurry to explore the unintended consequences.

Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.

I'm in this for the long haul. I'll start naming names someday, when the balance has shifted and the others need encouraging. But not today.