Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

If one or more people want to be foolhardy enough to use or share methamphetamine, why do we need to waste limited police resources and government money on finding and nabbing them, rather than letting them suffer their own consequences of using the drug, until...

It always is all the more an honor when a NORML chapter invites me to speak at one of their gatherings. My most recent such speaking engagement was at the Northern Virginia NORML's August 9 meeting in Arlington, Virginia. There, my talk on marijuana reform...

Clearly, VASAP should be abolished, and should be replaced by private drug and alcohol programs. Until such abolition, VASAP should be reformed to more routinely give credit for participation in private state-licensed alcohol and drug education programs.

In the taijiquan martial art that I practice, we have the concepts of sparring inside a circle, disrupting the opponent's circle, and preventing the opponent from disrupting our own circle. Similarly, it is ideal for me to speak and negotiate with prosecutors in a proverbial...

Today, the Virginia Court of Appeals adopted the police collective knowledge doctrine that already applies in federal courts. Edmond v. Virginia, ___ Va. App. ___ (Aug. 2, 2016). Under the collective knowledge, "an officer is justified in acting upon an instruction from another officer if...

"The duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict." American Bar Association's standards for prosecutors, Standard 3-1.2(c). Some prosecutors apply that principle so well that when they later switch to private law practice, their criminal defense lawyer colleagues welcome them into the...

Yes, the world is filled with too many people too often acting like heartlessly dangerous people. Part of my job is to defuse, shrink, disintegrate, disinfect, and deflect the unseemly and dangerous actions of others, and to extract the gold that can even be found...

Drug detection is about chemistry, and even prosecutors' chemists -- with a never-ending stream and often backlog of alleged drugs to test while still testifying in court -- can get drug testing wrong, particularly with being challenged by mental and physical exhaustion with their heavy...

If a court case were cut and dried, then fewer unexpected turns of events would occur, and the cost of the defense could be better contained. However, if a criminal defendant wishes to maximize his or her chances of obtaining as much success as possible,...

When police find suspected illegal drugs on or near a suspect, they field test the substance as part of the determination of whether to arrest the suspect(s), to search further, or to seek a search warrant.