Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

Being a prosecutor or police officers does not automatically mean that person is credible nor reliable. Judges, jurors, and everyone else must remember that. Criminal defendants' lives and liberty too often unjustly are crushed by an unwritten presumption that too many people give to police...

Rather than waiting for a president Donald Trump to wreak further havoc on immigration law and practice, I am now seeing some of my own DWI clients get their non-immigrant F-1 student and H-1B professional visas yanked BEFORE their cases are adjudicated in court.

In Bravo-Fernandez v. U.S., ___ U.S. ___ (Nov. 29, 2016), the jury returned inconsistent verdicts of conviction and acquittal under separate counts of the same statute. Bravo-Fernandez got his conviction overturned on appeal due to erroneous jury instructions, therefor enabling a retrial.

In law school, we learn legal rules, legal tests, legal analysis, legal counter-analysis, legal theory, legalese, and legal jargon. As criminal trial lawyers, we often spend so much time dealing with evidence, investigation, discovery and persuasion that we need to remember at each step to...

My public elementary school teachers taught us about "Honest Abe" Lincoln. None of my teachers ever taught me about Lincoln's approval for a mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota Indians in 1862. Arising from the Dakota War, United States military commission trials of 392 American Indians...

Essential to a successful criminal defense is a strong attorney-client relationship. This maxim is at once basic and essential to repeat again and again. Great criminal defense lawyers live this maxim as naturally and essentially as the air they breathe. Sadly, I have had some...

Many prosecutors talk tough in the courtroom hallway or on the phone, but deliver seemingly lackluster, cookbook, tepid or even timid performance at trial or at hearings. The strength or weakness of an opponent' performance is a distraction

Our days are filled with opportunities to react negatively or less than positively, when cars cut us off, restaurant servers disappear after delivering the wrong pricey order, people spout bigotry. some police officers act suitably for a fascist regime, some prosecutors take delight in their...

In Virginia, as but a for instance, it is common for many police officers to hesitate to talk with defense lawyers about the evidence rather than referring them to the designated prosecutor to obtain information.

Police do not only focus on identifying and stopping criminal activity, but also on encouraging people to commit criminal activity and then arresting them. We see the latter activity happen with undercover police who ask people to arrange drug deals, rob non-existent drug stash houses,...