Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney
Fairfax Criminal Lawyer / Virginia DUI Attorney- Highly-Rated
Pursuing Your Best Defense Since 1991
The risk of federal financial aid loss from a drug conviction
My 2007 blogposting on the above-referenced topic merits updating, as follows: The financial aid analysis must include a review of the federal financial aid statute, at 20 U.S.C. § 1091(r), which says in relevant part: A student who is convicted of any offense under any Federal or State law...
Staying connected to why I attended law school in the first place
Law school is not for everyone. I found law school in large part to be a necessary, time-consuming and money-consuming pain in the ass — and sometimes worse — for finding a way to use the law to help make the world a better place....
Michael Brown and the subsequent events in Ferguson, Missouri
I was on vacation and not following the news as much as otherwise when Michael Brown, unarmed, was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9. I posted a handful of Twitter entries about events in Ferguson, and here make a few observations about Mr. Brown’s...
Of empowering storytelling, restorative justice and listening
The cashier who recently sold me a lemonade at a carryout restaurant told me simply to return the cup to the cashier for a free refill. I returned around thirty minutes later requesting a refill to the now-different cashier. She went off into a mantra that the...
Prosecutors must not tell witnesses not to talk with defense lawyers
Prosecutors must NOT tell or even hint at cops and other witnesses not to talk with defense lawyers. Specifically, in a criminal matter, a lawyer "shall not" request "a person other than a client to refrain from voluntarily giving relevant information to another party." Va....
Perverting your tax dollars- Federal prosecutors monitoring attorney-inmate emails
When my criminal defense client is incarcerated pretrial, that makes the attorney-client relationship and case preparation all the more a challenge. When my client is not incarcerated, we may freely talk, email, and meet at any time, unmonitored by anyone, with the exception that I...
8th Circuit follows 6th Circuit in denying 1st Amendment protection to morphing a child’s face onto photo of an adult body in child pornography case
In 2011 and 2012, I blogged about an attorney who — acting as an expert witness — morphed a picture of a child’s head onto a photo of an adult’s body, creating what would have constituted child pornography had the entire photo been an image...
Judges as both fallible and potentially excellent
Judges are not deities. They are humans. They are selected through a combination of some or all of the following: Meritocracy, vetting for ability (with various sorts and quality of vetting), political considerations, and elections by the public. Even some of the most promising-seeming judicial candidates...
Convincing Prosecution Witnesses To Talk, Through A Third Approach
Criminal complainants can be valuable sources of information to a criminal defense lawyer both for preparing the defense and for seeking to settle the case. Watch out, though, for the risks that criminal complainants will clam up, whether out of fear or uncertainty, out of...
Law enforcement is off-kilter for seeking to induce and photograph an erection in a sexting case
UPDATE (Late July 10, 2014): Manassas City, Virginia, police have done the right thing by deciding to let the magistrate-issued search warrant expire, ordering the inducing and photographing of a 17-year-old man’s erection. ORIGINAL BLOG ENTRY (JULY 10, 2014): Yesterday morning, July 9, a colleague asked whether I had read...