A conviction cannot be obtained without a charging document that sufficiently puts the defendant on notice of the crime with which s/he is being accused. Raja v. Virginia, 40 Va.App. 710 (2003). The Virginia charging document for misdemeanors in District Court will be a warrant...
Praised be the judges who speak out against the drug war. Senior federal trial Judge Mark W. Bennett (N.D. Ia.) publicly admits feeling "greatly conflicted about my role in the 'war on drugs.'" (See also here.) Fourth Circuit senior Judge Andre Davis Jon Katz,...
Ermias Samson stands convicted of felonious possession with intent to sell marijuana under Virginia Code§ 18.2-248.1(a)(2), after his trial lawyer unsuccessfully sought to introduce into evidence the certificate of analysis from Virginia's Department of Forensic Science showing that it was not Samson's fingerprints on...
In 2014, I though I had died and gone to heaven, when the Virginia Supreme Court seemed clearly enough to authorize trial courts -- after a finding of guilt but before conviction -- to amend the guilty count to a lesser offense or even to...
Praised be the Virginia Court of Appeals's May 2, 2017, decision reversing a robbery conviction that rose or fell on DNA found on items that a masked knife-armed robber discarded near the scene of a gas station robbery. It turned out that others also left...
Today is World Press Freedom Day. Caring little if at all for the First Amendment's prohibition against "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" Donald Trump bears utter contempt for the press. Only four days before World Press Freedom Day, Trump lumped all...
One 2014 day when I entered a nearby courthouse, a sheriff's deputy lamented the backlash of public opinion against police after police shot dead Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The unjustified police killings continued, including Eric Garner's death on Staten Island following a police chokehold,...
Richard "Racehorse" Haynes -- nicknamed for his athletic skills and dubbed "Race" for short -- was at the Trial Lawyers College for a day or two during the first week of the program. What immediately struck me about Race was that this trial lawyer who...
Praised be Justice Stephen Breyer, apparently the United States Supreme Court's strongest skeptic on the death penalty's Constiutionality, who emphasized on April 24, 2017: "What legitimate purpose does it serve to hold any human being in solitary confinement for 40 years awaiting execution? What does...
Some books stand very much apart from the rest. Three such books that have particularly influenced me are Jack Kerouc's On the Road; which reminds me that adventure and intrigue exist everywhere -- starting within ourselves (which is a fitting lesson from a writer so...
The European Union does not have the death penalty, and the sky has not fallen. The United States, though, continues in the wild, wild west tradition of executions of those convicted of murder. In the wild west, populations were thin; law enforcement agents were few;...
Most crimes cannot be proven merely by committing the act -- known as actus reus -- but also require proof of criminal intent, known as mens rea. Generally, one of four levels of mens rea is required before a conviction may be obtained, namely purposeful,...
In 1991, I was still yearning to re-direct my career from the 25-lawyer corporate law firm that I had joined two years later, to something more meaningful. Ever since finishing law school, I went out of my way to meet birds of a professional and...
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...
