a public defender

Everyone’s making a list. It’s the year-end list disease. A list for top crime stories, a list for top blog posts, a list for top lists (yes, they’re out there).

So, not wanting to buck convention or anything and feeling the immense peer pressure, I am offering my own list. An utterly useless list of shameless self-promotion. Below you will find the Top 5 most commented posts of the last year, the Top 5 most viewed posts of the year and the 5 posts that I wished people read more.

Then I will open it up to you to nominate your favorite visual accompaniment to a post. If you do not comment, I will kill a bee (and as you all know, since the great bee exodus, they’re an endangered species). So, time for some “me, me and me”.

Most comments:

• The most commented post in the last year was this meticulous exercise in legal analysis and insight, garnering 36 comments.
• Here’s a post that was neither meticulous, nor insightful, just whiny (29).
• That was followed by my groundbreaking exposition on the correct usage of legal terms (25).
• Coming in 4th was some throwaway post on the death penalty (24).
• Number 5, I suspect, got a lot of hits for the titillating title (16).

Most views – two of these posts are recent posts, which is testament to the immense power of getting linked to by Radley Balko. If it weren’t for him, this blog would’ve had 3 hits all year. So thanks Radley!

• Drunk driving is different (37 billion hits).
• Why this got a lot of hits is pretty self-explanatory (27.56 billion).
• Junk “science” and missing evidence (250 hits).
• Sex offenders on probation – setting them up to fail (4 hits) [note that this is a post from last year].
• It seems every teen in the world has landed on this page at some point (1 hit) [also, this is from 2007. Yeah, two years ago. F*ck me].

And finally, because this nonsense has gone on long enough, here are my personal favorites from the last year:

• Do pedophiles have free will?
• It’s a game of numbers.
• This I believe.
• Crazy? Jail’s the place for you.
• When is an assault not an assault?

Now, go talk amongst yourselves while I write another post or something.