Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

During the year between college and law school, I was a financial auditor at one of the nation’s then-thirty largest banks. We reviewed the bank’s financial activities to assure the bank was adhering to safe and sound financial practices. This was the closest I ever came...

If you have not before decided that the United States’ criminal "justice" system is overcriminalized, look no further than the recent San Diego vandalism prosecution against chalk protestor Jeff Olson. How can chalking be a crime, when it just washes away with the rain? How...

Yesterday, a jury acquitted my client of possessing with intent to distribute eight pounds of marijuana found in the backseat of his car, after we had lost our suppression hearing and were without a successful way to create doubt that this was anything other than...

Our tax dollars pay extraordinary amounts of money for law enforcement officers and prosecutors to spend countless hours each year to the tune of millions of dollars (if not billions of dollars) to further pursue the drug war that is a failure and an excessive incursion...

Many prosecutors and police (and perhaps too many judges) apparently see criminal defense lawyers as a curious mix of being part of the legal establishment — “one of us”, in the minds of many of them — who also represent “them”/”the other”/the person to be...

Courtesy SunWolf: A criminal defense lawyer’s criminal defense lawyer, showing lawyers the powerful path to humanizing our clients, through storytellng, kindness to all, summoning our inner magic, and a reminder that “reality is no obstacle.” Dr. SunWolf — the great storytelling lawyer who proclaims that...

Challenging Obama’s spying-gate. (Fox News, June 8, 2013). Fox News is a right wing darling. My own agenda when accepting or declining a media interview invitation is whether the interview will further my own agenda of spreading the gospel of justice. With that goal in...

All battles have hurdles. For Virginia drunk driving defense, last December the state’s intermediate appellate court threw a King Kong-sized hurdle for challenging the accuracy of the breathalyzer machines, in the form of Fitzgerald v. Com, 61 Va. App. 279, 734 S.E.2d 708 (2012). Fitzgerald does...

In criminal law, “three strikes and you’re out” refers to severe mandatory minimum jail sentencing, and not baseball, other than that mandatory minimum sentencing, for the defendant, can feel like being slammed on the skull with a baseball bat and smashed in the eye with a high-speed...

I once got a glimpse of how clients feel trusting me to fight for them when I frantically called for help to a former client who became my contractor, to fix what became a temporary burp in an important part of my firm’s administrative/technological operations. I have ended...