Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

Courthouses and courthouse procedures expose parties and their lawyers to being seen and heard by the juries doing things they do not intend to be seen and heard doing, including conversation in restrooms, criminal defendants in chains before being brought to the courtroom, and parties...

  The Chinese script for the character "mu," which means nothing. Recently, a prosecutor — not too many years out of law school, for whatever that is worth — kept talking and talking and repeating and repeating to the judge during a bench trial. The...

When police operate in the shadows, the risk increases that they will abuse suspects’ rights. After all, power corrupts, including when a cop has a handgun, taser, blackjack, billyclub, handcuffs, a badge, and the power of arrest, and the suspect has none of those. Praised...

Bill of Rights. (From the public domain.) Why do good deeds so often go punished? Eliazer Madrigal-Valdez probably thought he was doing a soldier a favor by dropping him off at his military base in Fort Lee, Virginia. Instead, when Mr. Madrigal was unable to produce a...

After practicing criminal defense for many years, a lawyer can get jaded by some of the more cockamamie-sounding urgings from clients, including the absence of fingerprints when ten witnesses and five videocameras caught the double-killing, and the shooting defendant was then tackled and held until...

Before now, nothing impressed me about Senator Jim Webb other than that he was less worse than George Allen of macaca-gate infamy. On March 26, 2009, Webb introduced the National Criminal Justice Act of 2009. It is good that more people than criminal defense lawyers...

In what way is our payment of taxes for the salaries of uncaring and unjust prosecutors any different from Kevin Bacon’s imploring "Please sir, may I have another [whack on the butt]" in Animal House? Too often, prosecutors refuse to hear from my witnesses to help...

My law practice keeps me away from the outdoors too often, except when I drive to and from courthouses, jails, and incident scenes. On this glorious day, my three-year-old boy and I visited Potomac Overlook Park for the first time. The park is just four...

War breeds atrocities. We saw it with Abu Ghraib, My Lai, mini-My Lais and the list continues pathetically and endlessly. Consequently, great care must be taken by the government in deciding when and how to wage armed war and war in the criminal justice system...

As liars go, Lucy van Pelt was a pro. How else did she repeatedly convince Charlie Brown to try to kick a football that she always pulled away a split second before his foot touched the ball? Being human, prosecutors, judges, criminal defense lawyers, and...