Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

Ronald Bert Smith, Jr.'s Alabama execution -- discussed separately by me today -- is an example of the fallacy that lethal injection can be assured to be painless. Alabama news reporter Kent Faulk witnessed the execution, and describes the following

For defending criminal and DWI prosecutions, the defense early on needs to move to preserve and obtain video, audio and photographic evidence of and related to the incident. At first blush, the criminal defense lawyer might ask whether it is better to try to make...

In court and beyond, we are offered many opportunities to react angrily to others' seeming trespasses and lack of consideration. Some police and prosecutors try to talk uncalled-for trash about my clients. Other cars cut us off on the road. Others at restaurants and elsewhere...

Human nature leads jurors to look to the trial judge for reassurance, comfort and guidance, in the midst of warring lawyers, legalese, and witnesses running from the dull to interesting to incomprehensible and everything in between.

Criminal defendants and everyone else are not in for a pretty time during Donald Trump's presidency. Trump is no friend of the Bill of Rights and civil liberties and is likely to nominate plenty of candidates for the Supreme Court and lower federal courts who...

Being a prosecutor or police officers does not automatically mean that person is credible nor reliable. Judges, jurors, and everyone else must remember that. Criminal defendants' lives and liberty too often unjustly are crushed by an unwritten presumption that too many people give to police...

Rather than waiting for a president Donald Trump to wreak further havoc on immigration law and practice, I am now seeing some of my own DWI clients get their non-immigrant F-1 student and H-1B professional visas yanked BEFORE their cases are adjudicated in court.

In Bravo-Fernandez v. U.S., ___ U.S. ___ (Nov. 29, 2016), the jury returned inconsistent verdicts of conviction and acquittal under separate counts of the same statute. Bravo-Fernandez got his conviction overturned on appeal due to erroneous jury instructions, therefor enabling a retrial.

In law school, we learn legal rules, legal tests, legal analysis, legal counter-analysis, legal theory, legalese, and legal jargon. As criminal trial lawyers, we often spend so much time dealing with evidence, investigation, discovery and persuasion that we need to remember at each step to...

My public elementary school teachers taught us about "Honest Abe" Lincoln. None of my teachers ever taught me about Lincoln's approval for a mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota Indians in 1862. Arising from the Dakota War, United States military commission trials of 392 American Indians...