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Criminal defense is war and battle. Lawyer Jon Katz (contact) knows of no better martial art to prepare for courtroom battle than t'ai chi ch'uan, which he practices daily for trials and life. Our law firm's above-displayed symbol incorporates the essential battle harmony exemplified by the t'ai chi symbol and the scales of justice. 301-495-7755, Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland 20910 Virginia meeting location: 703-917-6626, Tysons Corner, Fairfax County, Virginia 22102
Thursday, February 23. 2012
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. BBC interviewed me today 1:30pm EDT at its Washington, D.C., television studio, for TV Channel 1's South East Today, about Briton Christopher Tappin's extradition and armaments prosecution, now that he is scheduled to be taken soon to the United States by extradition order. BBC Radio Kent interviews me tonight 11:30pm EDT about the same case, available at .
Wednesday, December 21. 2011
By Fairfax County/Northern Virginia/Maryland/Beltway criminal defense lawyer Jon Katz. Defending DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving, drugs, marijuana/medical marijuana/cultivation, sex cases, felonies and misdemeanors. Fighting tirelessly for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com Earlier this month, the lawyers.com blog emailed me some questions about defending against charges of driving under the influence of marijuana. The resulting article briefly references some of my responses. Here is more from Underdog, briefly, on defending against such an accusation, including the shibboleth claiming a connection between recent marijuana smoking and a green coating under one's tongue.
Monday, September 12. 2011
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Northern Virginia, Rockville, Montgomery County, Prince George's County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible winning results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com On September 9, 2011, the London Telegraph quoted me about former Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz's non-disparagement clause, concerning her public complaints that the Yahoo! board "f---- her over" and about the board as "doofuses". Although the article only covers snippets of my interview, I underlined to the interviewer that even with a non-disparagement clause, Bartz should be able to rely on the First Amendment's free expression protections at least to narrow any ambiguities in the clause. The reporter describes me as a libel lawyer. While I love defending the First Amendment for libel lawsuits and other matters, the vast majority of my work is in criminal defense and drunk driving defense.
Tuesday, May 17. 2011
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com 
Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). Thirty-five years after I started studying and practicing French, I find Spanish much more beneficial to my professional practice. To be sure, speaking any two languages is much better than speaking just one, and I soaked up Spanish all the quicker by having known French first. Speaking a second language opens many doors, including the ability to communicate with more people, and to experience more authors, actors, directors and playwrights in their native language. Among the French writings I have sought out are those writings by authors in former French colonies, including Algeria, West Africa, and the Caribbean. I have also read French-writing authors from Quebec and Louisiana. I have had a greater problem finding French writings from Indochina, but imagine that the Internet will make such writings easier to find. I got all the more accustomed to speaking another language behind the microphone -- and getting behind the microphone period -- during the first two years of being my own boss through 2000, when my former law partner Jay Marks and I hosted a weekend one-hour Spanish radio show with a call-in component entitled: "Legalmente Hablando, donde su causa es nuestra causa" ("Legally speaking, where your cause is our cause.") Through that radio experience, I did not feel like I was speaking to a huge audience, but that I was speaking person-to-person. That approach helps all the more for television interviews, particularly in the studio, where no technology seems yet to exist that does not make the bright studio lights -- apparently there to reduce shadows -- seem just a bit removed from interrogation lamps. Now that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in the klieg lights (here is the charging document against him), the French media is following. Take away Strauss-Kahn's political history and money, and we have a rather common criminal prosecution; but every criminal defendant must be treated as an individual, and not as a mere dehumanized number. I certainly welcome the opportunity for people to understand through his story the warts and redeeming characteristics of the criminal justice system, including the bail system, the accusatory and adversarial approach, the presumption of innocence, the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt bar, and the media circus that often accompanies such high-profile case. Added to the mix here is that -- before Strauss-Kahn's arrest -- there apparently was a huge percentage of French inclined to throw their democratic will behind Strauss-Kahn as a replacement for President Sarkozy. His pretrial no-bond detention certainly slams against the possibility that he might ever achieve such a victory. France 2 Television called me two days ago about Strauss-Kahn's plight, including where his case might go from here. Tomorrow, I am scheduled to be interviewed on tape about the case, as part of a piece to be aired this Thursday. I welcome this opportunity once again to spread the word about what does and does not work about our criminal justice system, and about the need to pursue persuasion at every turn for criminal defendants. My interview will be in French, which I have done a few times before with French-language broadcast media.
Monday, April 25. 2011
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com Thanks to the Esquire magazine staffer who recently sent me the May 2011 issue that briefly covers the magazine's interview with me about why writers' and others' confessions about crimes involving drugs and other activities do not automatically translate into prosecutions and convictions. I answered that an admission of a crime by itself is not sufficient to convict without at least slight corroboration of the crime, and without prosecuting the crime where it took place. The piece is in the "Answer Fella" column -- an inane title for a column -- on page 50 of the May Esquire magazine.
Friday, February 11. 2011
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com 
Camera image from U.S. Geological Survey website. Today, I appeared around 2:30 p.m. EDT, pre-recorded, on BBC TV Channel 1's South East Today, on the Christopher Tappin extradition case that I have discussed here and here. The interview at BBC's Washington, D.C., bureau was about the recent British court order greenlighting Mr. Tappin's extradition to the United States on charges related to his allegedly having arranged unlawfully to export missile battery components to Iran. Mr. Tappin claims that his profit from the transaction would have been but a few hundred dollars, apparently to show that a man as wealthy as he would not engage in a criminal transaction for such a small profit. The news reports his plans to appeal the extradition order. In the interview, I pointed out that American law enforcement authorities too often arrange for people to engage in criminal activities and then to arrest them. I underlined that in such financially-strapped times as now, governments should be reining in such excessive law enforcement activities.
Thursday, February 3. 2011
To those in the Washington, D.C., television area, watch me tonight around 5:15-5:30 p.m. on Fox 5, Washington DC, about Redskins owner Dan Snyder's libel suit against the City Paper. The First Amendment rules, of course, always. The lawsuit, filed yesterday in New York, is here. I wish I could find an opportunity during the interview to change the team's name from the degrading Redskins name. The City Paper has no clean hands, but has the First Amendment on its side. The paper has never been a model of journalism the entire twenty-four years I have been the Washington, D.C., area. I understand that its article depicts Snyder with horns, which if not an expression of anti-Jewish bigotry would seem to evince ignorance or uncaring about the historical use of horns in reference to Jewish people.
Wednesday, December 22. 2010
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com 
Bill of Rights. (From the public domain.) WTOP Radio 1050 FM's Adam Tuss interviewed me yesterday on my opposition to random bag searches on the DC-area subway system. The points I made include: - The searches are unconstitutional. - Whether or not the courts permit the searches, those who will give up liberty in an effort to get more security risk losing both. - If government wants to encourage people to reduce traffic and pollution by taking the subway, the random searches will have the opposite result. - The searches are not in my name, as a regional taxpayer whose dollars go towards the high-budget subway system. - If the courts permit the searches, they need to draw the line against random searches of cars. - Youths today are not learning good lessons about respecting privacy when they see the rampant daily invasions of privacy. Today's youths seeing invasions of privacy are tomorrow's adults addressing the same issues. - The violations of these random subway searches are made worse when coming on the heels of airport body scans and highly-intrusive grope searches. - If asked to have your bag searched, decline. The only penalty for declining is to be denied access to the subway at that moment. - In addition to the points I made during the interview, see my top ten list for dealing with the police. ADDENDUM: Some of my blurbs from the foregoing interview got aired on WTOP FM-1050 in the afternoon of December 24, including minute 5:20 here.
Thursday, November 18. 2010
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com Tomorrow, November 19, at 2:00 p.m., I will be on a lawyers' panel at the Baltimore Immigration Summit, discussing identifying, handling, minimizing, and neutralizing immigration minefields from criminal cases and convictions. Many of my criminal defense clients are not United States citizens, which requires me to be mindful of possibly adverse immigration consequences from their criminal cases. Years before Padilla v. Kentucky, 559 U. S. __ (2010), was ever penned, I included full attention to my criminal defense clients' immigration situation. Fortunately, for ten years, my criminal defense clients and I had a great immigration law advisor in the next office to mine, that being my former law partner Jay Marks, who now has an office only three blocks from me, in addition to an office in Arlington, Virginia. The very much quickened my learning curve in working to minimize adverse immigration consequences from my clients' criminal cases. Jay and I will be among several lawyers on this panel. The Summit is closed for registration, having reached capacity. The location of the event sounds like an interesting one: The American Visionary Art Museum, with visionary art being produced by self-taught artists "whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself." The online information about a current installation at the museum called "What Makes Us Smile?" includes an Alfred E. Neumann image. Alfred E. Neumann for years has been the symbol of Mad Magazine which held my attention and obsession for many years. Baltimore's being the land of John Waters, Frank Zappa, and Cafe Hon, it seems a fitting place to have such a museum.
Monday, November 15. 2010
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com This past Friday, Dr. Joy Browne interviewed me on her talk radio show on WOR 710-AM (wor710.com) about Amazon pedophile book-gate. (See my initial blog entry on this interview.) The interview was lengthy and gave me a chance to spread the further word of the importance of protecting the marketplace of ideas under the First Amendment, even ideas that are disgusting and abhorrent and worse. As it turned out, the interview was not live, and broadcast in the late evening on November 12. The full segment is here, and my interview starts at the twelve-minute mark. I would like to know the demographics of the people listening to such radio shows, although I know that two former public defender office colleagues are among the listeners. Plenty of call-in shows clearly are popular, seeing how heavily they populate the airwaves. However, aside from my having listened to G. Gordon Liddy and Rush Limbaugh a few times driving back to the office from court to check out the opposition and to wish that Liddy were not so articulate and often restrained, I tend to stay away from such stations. Radio and television advertisers have a tough nut to crack with me, where my household has for years foregone cable and broadcast television in favor of not leaving a big imprint of our behinds on the couch.
Friday, November 12. 2010
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com I will be on NYC's WOR 710-AM's (wor710.com) Dr. Joy Browne Show around 2:20-2:40 p.m. today about the law applying to Amazon's selling a pedophile guide online, unless the program decides to let the story be in the past now that Amazon has pulled the book. (UPDATE: The archived tape of the interview is here, starting 12 minutes into the tape.) As much as pedophile how-to guides are disgusting, to say the least, the whole story sounds overhyped in the news and broadcast media, perhaps to fill up an otherwise slow news day leading up to and through Veterans Day. However, no news days should be slow; there are always critical news stories to uncover even on federal holiays. I learned after being invited on the show that Amazon yesterday pulled the book, so wonder if WOR will still wish to proceed with the interview. The person who invited me on the show told me I will be asked about the law that applies to Amazon's selling the book. The answer is pretty simple: The First Amendment prevents the government from stopping and penalizing Amazon over selling the book. In any event, if the interview goes forward, I might feel some nostalgia over the hundreds of times that I watched the radio station's former sister television station Channel 9 in my childhood, which station was so low budget when I would watch that there was a time that the station would televise Knicks home games in the 1970's with just one camera. UPDATE: The archived tape of the interview is here, starting 12 minutes into the tape.
Thursday, November 4. 2010
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com
Camera image from U.S. Geological Survey website.
Tonight, I will appear live on the 6:30 p.m. (London Time, 2:30 p.m. EDT) airing of BBC TV Channel 1's South East Today, from the BBC's Washington, D.C. studio.
I will be interviewed further about the Christopher Tappin extradition case that is detailed in my August blog entry.
If you have any opinions about the case for me to consider before I go on-air, my Blackberry address is jon@katzjustice.com . I think my interview will be limited to U.S. extradition law and policy.
Wednesday, October 13. 2010
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer fighting for the best possible results in the courts of Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond. http://katzjustice.com Thanks again to the Students for Sensible Drug Policy Mid-Atlantic conference organizers for having invited me to speak this past Saturday on a panel about the effects of the drug laws. Attendees came to this Richmond gathering from as far away as Georgia. I underlined that the drug war was not always as rampant as now. When I was in college in the first half of the 1980’s, colleges did not pillory marijuana as much as today. When I was in public school, interscholastic athletes were not drug tested. Before Nancy Reagan started urging “Just Say No” to drugs, it was unusual for people to be required to urinate in a cup merely to start a retail store job. I pointed out that the criminal justice system will be much less expensive and higher quality once marijuana is legalized and all other drugs heavily decriminalized, seeing that drug cases drain such a huge amount of resources of courts, police, prosecutors, public defender offices, and court-appointed lawyer programs for indigent criminal defendants. I encouraged the attendees to make an effort to change public opinion on the drug war one person at a time, starting with talking with at least one fellow guest at next month’s Thanksgiving gathering, even if only to provide a URL to an article on reforming drug policy, and proceeding to discussing the issue on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and to get links from their blog and Twitter articles onto comments sections on other people’s blogs. I admitted that I have felt deep depths of bleakness in the past when fighting for social justice, but have reached the point where I am optimistic about influencing people’s opinions at least one person at a time. As the old proverb goes, “Accumulated feathers sink the boat.” Beyond that, despite all the pushing I do for justice insider the judicial system, we need people pushing for justice from outside the judicial system, as well, and I do some of the pushing from the outside through this Underdog blog. Some great questions came my way from the audience, including about jury nullification (jurors may not be advised of a right to jury nullification, but lawyers can still humanize the defendant in ways that might lead to nullification); persuading judges off the bench (I tried giving Justice Scalia an anti-death penalty petition during law school), legislators and executive branch folks; and resources that activists might refer to in understanding the applicable law (the Busted video and my Underdog blog are good starters). Two days later, on October 11, I appeared again on the University of Maryland campus on a campus SSDP-sponsored Know Your Rights panel, along with Flex Your Rights' Scott Morgan, and the Students Rights and Responsibilities Office’s Bond -- James Bond (he carries a James Bond ID with Sean Connery’s picture). I give James Bond credit for coming to this room where likely everyone but him wants the University of Maryland to implement the student referendum from a few years ago for marijuana to be treated the same as alcohol in the student disciplinary process.
I encouraged the audience to spread the following items far and wide to reduce the number of people who get the stunned “aw sh*t” look when I inform them that they would have been wiser to have kept their traps shut with investigating police, and to have refused any and all searches: - My Know Your Rights video. - My Top Ten list for dealing with the police. - The timeless Busted video by Flex Your Rights.
Monday, October 11. 2010
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer fighting for the best possible results in the courts of Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond. http://katzjustice.com If you are convenient to the University of Maryland’s main campus in College Park, I encourage you to come to tonight’s SSDP Terps' “Know Your Rights” event. The event will be at 7:00 p.m. tonight, October 11, 2010, Stamp Student Union, Benjamin Banneker B room, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. The panelists are myself, Scott Morgan from Flex Your Rights, and James Bond from the University's Rights and Responsibilities office. If you are unable to be there, please spread the following links far and wide to reduce the number of my potential clients who get the stunned or awakened “aw sh*t” look when I inform them that they would have been wiser to have kept their traps shut with investigating police, and to have refused any and all searches: - My Know Your Rights video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G2qr44XTAI - My Top Ten list http://katzjustice.com/TOP10.pdf for dealing with the police. - The timeless Busted video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqMjMPlXzdA by Flex Your Rights. As to student disciplinary matters -– which I have been defending for years –- adverse consequences may arise for student disciplinary and campus housing disciplinary purposes when refusing searches by and conversations with campus housing officials. That is a reason to consider living off campus in the first place.
Wednesday, October 6. 2010
By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer fighting for the best possible results in the courts of Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond. http://katzjustice.com Thanks to the Students for Sensible Drug Policy regional conference organizers who invited me to speak in Richmond this Saturday, October 9, 2:30 p.m. on a panel about the detrimental effects of the drug war on people's freedoms and the life around them. This Mid-Atlantic SSDP conference will be at the Virginia Commonwealth University. See you there.
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