Reviewing the case to determine whether the evidence was legally sufficient under Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307 (1979), the court considered the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict to determine whether any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt.

The court first noted that evidence of intoxication near the time of driving was probative evidence that the defendant had been intoxicated at the time of driving. The defendant admitted that he arrived home about thirty minutes before the officers arrived, and the officers testified the defendant was intoxicated when they found him there Furthermore, the court found there was circumstantial evidence of the defendant’s intoxication at the time of the collision, specifically his involvement in a single-car collision, the lack of skid marks prior to impact, and the defendant’s flight from the scene while driving nearly seven miles on a tire rim with a shredded tire.

As to the defendant’s claim that he became intoxicated after arriving at his home, the court found the jury, as the sole arbiter of credibility, was free to consider or disregard the defendant’s testimony that his consumption of three glasses of wine after arriving at his home was the cause of his intoxication. The court concluded that while each circumstance alone might not support a finding of legal sufficiency, “the cumulative force of the incriminating circumstances” was sufficient to support the conviction.

Overall, less than two percent of all criminal cases went to trial in 2010. However, trial rates were much higher for capital murder and murder cases, which went to trial in 21.3% of the cases and 18.2% of cases, respectively.

Seventy five percent of the cases that went to trial, were tried before to juries. Overall, defendants were convicted in 76.4% of cases that went to trial before a jury.

Other interesting tidbits from the report include:

• Felony assault or attempted murder cases increased 113 percent.
• Felony and misdemeanor drug offense cases increased 153 percent.
• Other felonies increased 115 percent.
• The highest conviction rate for felonies was for felony DWI cases, at 84.8 percent.

The complete Annual Report for the Texas Judiciary for Fiscal Year 2010 can be found here: http://www.courts.state.tx.us/pubs/AR2010/AR10.pdf

However, neither the Supreme Court nor the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas have adopted the implied bias doctrine. Instead, where there have been allegations of juror partiality, courts have held the remedy is a hearing to determine whether the juror had any actual bias.

On November 17, 2010, the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the implied bias doctrine in Texas in Uranga v. State. In Uranga, a juror in felony possession of methamphetamine case was watching a video of the defendant evading the police when the juror realized the yard the defendant drove through to evade the police was the defendant’s own yard. The trial court questioned the juror outside the presence of the jury. The juror stated the fact that the defendant had driven through the juror’s yard would not affect the juror’s decision in the case.

On appeal, the appellant claimed that he was denied his right to an impartial jury because the juror in question was allowed to remain on the jury. The Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the appellant’s claim that bias could be implied. The Court noted that the proper procedure was to question the juror to determine if there was an actual bias, and rejected the theory that bias must be implied to jurors.

Here’s an excerpt:

How competitive is it to get a job with the Justice Department?

Highly competitive. Highly, highly competitive. You may send a resume to any USAO and it will be placed in an applicant file. Hopefully, your resume will have that something-special, i.e., bi-lingual, information technology expertise, outstanding trial work-qualifications that will put you high on the list. Openings now are generated primarily by attrition. When a “slot” opens, the U.S. Attorney has the applicant files pulled for review by several staff AUSAs, who begin the resume weeding-out process. Some offices may have 200 applications for one slot, others may have close to 1,000. Whether they winnow it to 10 or 25, several prospects are called in for intensive interviews, usually by several members of senior management. That interview may be the most important “jury trial” of your career. Here’s a caveat: if you don’t have an ego, don’t even try.

Then, perhaps, to three, then one. Every office has a procedure, not necessarily the one I described, but something similar. But this is where personality, prosecutorial experience, and high-level recommendations become the deal-maker or deal breaker.

For the complete article, visit the Art of Manliness.

1. Be sure to select someone knows you well and is familiar with your work.
2. Ask the potential recommender if they are willing, and have time, to complete a letter of recommendation for you. Understand that your potential recommender is busy, so be sure to approach the potential recommender as early as possible.
3. Follow up with the initial conversation to provide the recommender with specific information about the requested letter, including who the letter should be addressed to, when the letter is due, and what qualities the selection committee or recipient is looking for.
4. Provide the recommender with a copy of your resume.
5. Let the recommender know, in a couple of sentences, why you are an ideal candidate for the position or award you are applying for. You need to be able to articulate this before you expect your recommender to.
6. Include a list of items that you have worked on that the recommender has reviewed so the recommender can comment on specific tasks that you have completed.
7. Consider providing the recommender a copy of your transcript, especially if the recommender is a professor or will be addressing your potential for academic success.
8. If the letter needs to be mailed, provide the recommender with a stamped, self-addressed envelope. This ensures the letter will be mailed without delay. If the letter needs to be uploaded, faxed, or sent electronically, provide clear instructions to do so.
9. If the letter is not made out to a specific individual or group, consider asking for more than one undated, original copy of the letter. This allows you to have an original letter of recommendation on file that you can use at a future date. Be sure to get the recommender’s permission before you use any additional copies of the letter.
10. Finally, send a letter thanking your recommender for taking the time to write you the letter of recommendation. Let the recommender know if your application was successful so that they know their letter was beneficial to you.

2. Switch between text case: Highlight a portion of text and use the Shift+F3 combination to switch between text case. Word will toggle through sentence case, upper case, and lower case.

3. Switch to small caps: Use Control+Shift+K to switch highlighted text to small caps. This is especially useful for citations on law journals.

4. Delete entire words: The Ctrl+Delete combination will delete entire words, which will save you some time when you are making substantial changes to documents.

5. Quickly add annotations (also called “comments”): This shortcut works even if you don’t already have the Microsoft Word reviewing Pane open: hit Ctrl+Alt+M to insert an annotation (comment) into a document.

6. Switch between open Word documents on a Mac: If you are using Microsoft Word on an Mac, you may have noticed that the standard key combination to switch between open windows, Command-Tab, does not switch between open Word documents, but instead switches to the next open application. There is a shortcut to switch between open Word documents on a Mac:  Command +`. The ` button is the same as the tilda (~) button on the keyboard. It is usually right above the tab key, to the left of the 1 key.

7. Add a footnote in Word documents: If you are using Word on a Windows PC, the Alt+Ctrl+F combination will insert a footnote for you with out having to go through the insert-menu at the top of the page. If you are using Microsoft Word on a Mac, the combination is Option+Command+F.

8. Use the built-in thesaurus: The Shift+F7 combination will look up a highlighted word in the thesaurus sidebar in Microsoft Word.

9. Insert the date: The Alt+Shift+D combination will enter date quickly into a document.

10. Move entire paragraphs: The Shift+Alt+Up or Down Arrow combination allows you to move entire paragraphs up or down in a document.

Bonus Tip: Set your auto-recover to one minute: By default, Microsoft Word automatically saves documents every ten minutes. Since recreating ten minutes worth of work often takes more than ten more minutes, play it safe and change the auto-recover time to one minute. That way, if Word does crash, most of your work is easily recoverable. Here is how to change your auto-recovery time in Word 2007:

1. Click on the Office Button (the Office icon in the circle on the top-left of the window
2. Click on Word Options (it is on the bottom border of the menu).
3. Click on the Save tab.
4. Make sure the AutoRecover box is checked and change the interval to one minute

This is also a good time to change the AutoRecover location to something you can easily locate if you ever need to. I have my location set to a folder within the Documents folder on my computer.

If you are on a Mac, the steps to change the AutoRecover save interval are as follows:

1. Go to the Word Menu
2. Select Preferences
3. Click on the Save icon
4. Set the “Save AutoRecover interval to one minute.

As the amount of scholarly material available on the web increases, so to does the need to an efficient means to find, sort, organize and cite the material. Below are twenty of the best tools available on Firefox that researchers can choose from to build a customized, highly efficient research tool.

Part I: Find What You Are Looking For.

1.  Use Firefox Quicksearch

Setting up a quicksearch allows you to run searches from the address bar using very simple customized search commands instead of visiting a search engine or installing a toolbar to run searches.

For example, I’ve set up a quicksearch for Google, so that all I have to do to run a Google search is go to the address bar and type in “g searchterm” and hit enter.

Example:

Typing in “g olympics” and hitting enter

results in:

Adding thumbnails next to your Google results is covered later in the story. You can skip directly to it by going to Tip #12.

Creating a QuickSearch is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Visit any webpage that has a search field that you commonly use. (For example, go to http://google.com)
2. Right click on the search field. Choose Add a Keyword for this Search…

3. The Add Bookmark dialog will appear. Give the bookmark a name, e.g. “Google” and create a keyword e.g. “g” and click “Add.” The Keyword is going to be the command you use to run the search so keep it short and make sure it is something that is intuitive to you.

Now to run a quicksearch, all you have to do is go to your address bar and type in the keyword and search term to run a quicksearch. If you set up the Google Quicksearch described above, try typing in “g olympics” in the address and then hit enter to see your results.

2. Find in Tabs

With the advent of tabbed browsing came the need to be able to sort quickly through open pages. The Find in Tabs extensions allows users to search multiple open tabs at once. It displays all occurrences of the search terms from your open webpages in  a display pane that also highlights the search results in context, making sifting through search results a breeze.

3. Resurrect Pages

Resurrect Pages allows researchers to bring webpages back after they have shed their ethereal coils. When a webpage is not longer available, either because the content changed or the website no longer exists, Resurrect Pages searches caches and archives that mirrored the content while it was available, so that in many cases you can still retrieve the information you were looking for. Resurrect Pages searches the best caches including Google, MSN, and Yahoo Caches, CoralCDN, the Internet Archive.

4. BugMeNot

BugMeNot allows users to bypass registration at many free websites. This is a great way to skip registering for news websites merely to read archived articles.

5. BlueOrganizer

BlueOrganizer creates “smart menus” and “smartlinks” based on the page you are visiting to offer helpful features that aid in research. For instance, it recognizes book names, movies, individuals, and songs to find more information about those items quickly and effortlessly.

6. Surf Canyon

While Google is often a researcher’s search engine of choice, there are times when you don’t find what you are looking for on Google. For those times, there is Surf Canyon. It adds top search results from Yahoo, MSN, Craigslist to your search results. The additional results remain hidden under a bull’s eye icon and can be easily displayed and hidden again by clicking on the icon. Surf Canyon can also find the most relevant results from deep in your search results and bring them to the forefront.

7. Customize Google

This add-on removes Google ads from search results, suggests topics as you type, and allows you to quickly search other engines like Yahoo, Technorati, and Ask Jeeves.

8. Update Scanner

If you have a page you want to watch for changes, Update Scanner will notify you of changes made the to the page. It highlights the changes made to a page since you last visited the page and can notify you when the page changes.

9. Breadcrumbs

If you have ever found what you were looking for, only to lose it again because you forgot to bookmark or print out page, you will understand just how useful Breadcrumbs is. Breadcumbs can search through the pages you recently visited so you can find the result you were looking for without retracing your steps by running the original search over again.

10. Read It Later

Read It Later is a tool specifically built for those pages you want to get back to to finish reading, but aren’t certain you want to bookmark just yet. Read It Later offers a simple interface that makes marking a page to read later as simple as clicking a check mark at the end of your address bar. Once you’ve read the story, click on the checkmark again to remove the page from your to-read list. You can also have your to-read list delivered to you as an RSS feed so it is accessible wherever you are.

11. Highlight All

This add-on highlights every instance of a given word or string of words on a webpage. To use Highlight all, hit F8 to enable the extension, and then select any word with your mouse, all other occurances of the word on the page will also be highlighted. This is an excellent way to focus you initial read of a long document when you are going through a large number of search results.

12. GooglePreview

GooglePreview adds a thumbnail image next to each of your Google search results so that you can quickly determine if the page is worth a further read.

13. Cooliris (Formerly PicLens)

Cooliris is to image and video searches what the iPhone is to phones. Cooliris offers an amazing interface that allows you to sort very quickly through hundreds of images and supports sites including Google Image Search, Youtube, Flickr, and Picasa. It is hard to imagine an interface that beats coverflow on Macs and iPhones, but the CoolIris interface does.

Check out the demo:

The interface is so good, that in response to user requests, CoolIris has even come out with a PowerPoint plugin and instructions for users of Keynote to add CoolIris functionality to desktop presentations.

Part II: Save, Organize, Annotate, and Cite Your Search Results.

14. Iterasi

As previously mentioned, Iterasi allows you to save dynamic webpages for future reference, even after the content of the original page has changed. Since I posted my review of Iterasi, Iterasi has added support for Mac OS X, and a scheduler which automatically archives webpages on a regular basis. In a conversation I had with Alex Williams, the Director of Product Marketing for Iterasi, I mentioned the availability of short permanent URLs to access the notarized pages would be a feature I thought users would really appreciate so they can more easily use Iterasi for citations in professional publications. I am happy to report that the most recent version of Iterasi offers this new feature. This is a company that is listening to what users want and responding quickly. Keep an eye on this add-on for additional features in the future.

Scheduler Tool Unveiled:

15. Zotero

Zotero allows you to “collect, manage, cite” your research sources. What is great about Zotero is that it not only organizes saved webpages, and search results, it also allows users to add external material like files or documents to the organized structure.

16. Delicious Bookmarks

Delicious Bookmarks lets you to save bookmarks and tag the pages so you easily find them later. The bookmarks are available from any computer with access to the Internet by logging on to your Delicious account, which make it an ideal took for users who research from more than one location. Delicious bookmarks also allow you to find the most popular pages for any tag and access your bookmarks  from any computer.

17. Fireshot

At its most basic level of functionality, Fireshot allows users to capture images of the pages they are visiting. Unlike taking a screenshot using your operating system, Fireshot can take a picture of an entire webpage, even when portions of the page are not visible on the screen. Fireshot also features a built-in editor that allows you to crop the pictures, annotate them, and save them for future reference or to share with colleagues.

18. Diigo

Diigo allows you to highlight, annotate, and save annotated webpages for future reference. While registration is required, and it adds a toolbar to your browser, pages 2 and 3 of the registration process can be skipped and the toolbar can be hidden.

19. Clipmarks
This allows you to save portions of webpages for future reference, print only the parts of pages you want, and email portions of pages to yourself or others. It is the perfect tool for printing or saving multiple non-continuous sections of a page.

20. PrintPDF

If your computer does not already have the capability of “printing” a file to PDF format, PrintPDF adds the capability to save webpages as PDF files directly from your browser.

If you have a favorite Firefox plugin or tip for researchers, or if you agree or disagree with the suggestions, leave a comment. Thanks!

[ratings id="756"]

Top Marks by Category:

Career Services Office: Southern Methodist University

Students Felt Prepared to Practice on Graduation: Baylor University

Collegiality: University of Houston

Technology: Southern Methodist University

Teaching Quality: Southern Methodist University

Library Services: Texas Wesleyan

Faculty Accessibility: Texas Tech School of Law

Student Diversity: Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law

Click for full-size image

Most Influential Professors:

SMU – Gregory S. Crespi

Texas Wesleyan – Aric K. Short

Texas Tech – Gerry W. Beyer

University of Houston – John Mixon

South Texas – Geoffrey S. Corn

Baylor University – Larry Bates

St. Mary’s – John W. Teeter Jr.

Texas Southern – Fernando Colon-Navarro and April Walker

Overall Rankings:

1. Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law (103 students responding)

2. Texas Wesleyan University School of Law (72 students responding)

3. Texas Tech University School of Law (164 students responding)

4. University of Texas School of Law (246 students responding)

5. University of Houston Law Center (153 students responding)

6. South Texas College of Law (126 students responding)

7. Baylor University School of Law (113 students responding)

8. St. Mary’s University School of Law (76 students responding)

9. Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law (79 students responding)

Check out the complete story and the law school deans’ responses at Texas Lawyer.