Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney
Fairfax Criminal Lawyer / Virginia DUI Attorney- Highly-Rated
Pursuing Your Best Defense Since 1991
Something about Valentine’s Day, courts, and sexual devices
Molly Ivins on the stupidity of Texas’s ban on the sale of sexual devices. She did not live to see the Fifth Circuit’s ban on this ban. Happy Valentine’s day. When we set aside the commercial hype around the holiday, it is a day and...
Why Don’t You Ask Your Client?
In Virginia District Court, mandatory criminal discovery is practically non-existent, and is limited to defendants’ statements to law enforcement that the prosecutor intends to introduce into evidence, the defendant’s criminal record, and Brady/exculpatory evidence (except that the prosecutor ordinarily is the sole person to decide what evidence...
Cops can’t play fast and loose with Miranda
Miranda warnings are required when "a reasonable man in the suspect’s position would have understood his situation" to be one of custody. Berkemer v. McCarty, 468 U.S. 420, 422 (1984). To determine whether a reasonable person would have understood the situation to have been one...
International Extraditions: To be Fought Tooth and Nail
International extradition defense seems to be an area that most criminal defense lawyers have either not handled at all, or very little. I learned this after being hired for such a case a few months ago, and learning that one of my favorite and most experienced...
What Justifies a Prosecutor Telling a Witness to Withhold Documents from a Defense Lawyer?
Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). One day while waiting for court to start, I approached the chemist in my client’s drug possession case. He said he would talk to me only if the prosecutor was present. Once I got the three...
You want a trial? I’ll go to trial / Plus, beating the Intoxylizer 5000
When I became a public defender lawyer in the early 1990’s all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to fight the good fight, it turned out that my survival instincts — developed all the more since early childhood by growing up among plenty of peers who were more...
Blood Alcohol Content Test Results can be Higher than the BAC at the Time of Driving
When it comes to drunk driving prosecutions, blood alcohol content test results are subject to attack from all sides, including attacks on the accuracy of the test results in the first place. Moreover, judges and juries need to be educated that it is not a...
Too many innocent people get convicted
Too many innocent people get convicted, whether through wrongful convictions by judges or juries, or by pleading guilty when the likelihood is high of a wrongful conviction (with an attendant harsher conviction from pleading not guilty) (North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25 (1970) allows innocent...
Will I win or lose?
Fellow criminal defense blogger Shawn Matlock recently blogged about handling potential clients’ and actual clients’ inquiries about whether they will win. Here is my comment on the matter: My short answer it to be honest with the potential client, and the actual client, about your ability and...
If humans input data into a machine, the Confrontation Clause is implicated
This month, a two-judge majority of the Fourth Circuit decided that an expert witness may testify in criminal court about the machine-generated results of raw data about drugs in a defendant’s blood, without necessitating the presence of the technician who operated the machine. The case...