Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...