Nearly two generations of Americans, born since 1980, knows of no life other than that under the drug wars spurred during the Reagan administration, complete with metal detectors and other intrusive searches in schools without particularized suspicion; draconian drug sentencing regimes involving lengthy mandatory minimum...
Plenty of probation agents and sentencing judges may have a penchant for barring access to the Internet for certain convicted sex offenders, in such cases as sexual assault and child pornography. However, doing so in a knee-jerk fashion and without narrow tailoring violates a convicted...
For decades, Virginia has been a leader in sending people to death row and in executing them rather than delaying doing so, as is common in California. On April 21, 2017, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe took at least one action in the opposite direction, commuting...
Often when I challenge police searches for lack of a search warrant or for other Constitutional infirmities, the prosecutor argues that the incriminating evidence would inevitably have been lawfully discovered by police if not first discovered in the questionable way with which the evidence in...
Bill O'Reilly is gone from Fox, likely with a golden parachute. The sexual harassment complaints and settlements rolled in, regardless of how true those accusations were or not. He would cut off the microphones of numerous guests with whom he vehemently disagreed. He blasted Sami...
Each year, the relevant dialogue about marijuana legalization moves even further as a serious dialogue rather than anything susceptible to being portrayed as stoners' folly. Worldwide each year, marijuana becomes more accepted for medicinal purposes and more widely legalized and decriminalized for recreational purposes. April...
When a client urges the necessity of my destroying an opposing witness on cross examination, I respond that the backlash from destroying the opposing witness can be much more harmful than my telling the defense story through cross examination, bringing out important evidentiary points, and...
It is a pain enough to receive a federal DWI conviction than also having to come to state court to seek restricted Virginia driving privileges. Unfortunately, Virginia statutory law requires a revocation of Virginia driving privileges (or revocation of all driving privileges for Virginia licensees)...
Alexander Michael Edwards in 2016 was convicted in Campbell County, Virginia, Circuit Court for malicious wounding for the non-consensual tattooing of two minors, and for conspiring to murder them to avoid their testimony against him at trial. The elements of malicious wounding under the Virginia...
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution limits police authority to stop, seize, and search people and their property. Sadly, the United States Supreme Court over the decades has limited the strength of the Fourth Amendment in numerous ways, including the horrendous Terry v....
A Virginia DWI arrestee has a tough decision between agreeing to submit to a breath or blood alcohol test, thereby making the police officer's and prosecutor's job easier to obtain a DWI conviction for a proven breath or blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.08 or...
Being a judge is a privilege with awesome responsibility and power. Once a judge stops seeing judging as a privilege, it is time for the judge to hang up the judicial robes. Judging can be exhausting work. The criminal and civil lawsuits do not stop...
Virginia is far behind the medical marijuana states that have made marijuana possession and use lawful for numerous medical ailments. Virginia law limits legal marijuana medicinal use (only in the form of cannabidiol oil ("CBD oil") and THC-A oil) to epilepsy, and pursuant to a...
Using police drug sniffing dogs is fraught with unreliability. as further addressed here, here, and here. Despite this unreliability, Virginia law poses substantial hurdles to a criminal defendant's obtaining by a records subpoena data about the training and performance of the case's drug dog. Fortunately...
What should a person do when a police officer orders the suspect to hand the cop an item (other than ordering a driver to hand over one's driver's license and registration) or to empty one's pockets? If complied with, that order amounts to a search...
Any president would have felt in a bind after the recent chemical weapons attack in Syria on its own civilians -- apparently at Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's own order -- between seeming indecisive at not launching a quick and decisive military response, and having that...
In 2004, the United States Supreme Court bitterly divided 5-4 (with a plurality of three justices and a concurrence of two more justices) in declining to apply the Exclusionary Rule to evidence obtained by police through voluntary but un-Mirandized admissions about the location of contraband....
Yesterday, the Virginia Court of Appeals confirmed that a parent transporting a child while under the influence of alcohol is not automatically in violation of the felony child endangerment statute, Va. Code § 18.2-371.1(B)(1). Instead: "Policing the line between the ever present 'possibility' of serious...
Virginia District Court criminal defendant's appeal deadline is within ten calendar days of his October 25 sentencing, and an appeal is not precluded by a guilty nor no contest plea. Va. Code §§ 16.1-132 and 16.1-296. In Virginia, misdemeanors (offenses jailable for no more...
The horizontal gaze nystagmus test ("HGN") is routinely included among the field sobriety tests. Even if the test's name sounds scientific, in reality the test involve's the police officer having the DWI suspect follow a pen or other stimulus with the suspects' eyes, while the...
