Harvey Silverglate is full of it and I wouldn't trust him to tell me the time. When you look into the cases he mentions you always find all kinds of incriminating detail that he left out of his articles. I've debunked some of his claims in detail before here on HN but I can't be bothered to dig that up again now. You should probably be able to find with a Google search though, I'm pretty sure they addressed this very WSJ article.