Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

Praised be the three Virginia Supreme Court justices who on September 17, 2015, dissented from the four-justice majority that affirmed a warrantless apartment search purportedly conducted pursuant to exigent circumstances. Evans v. Virginia, , ___ Va. ___ (Sept. 17, 2015). The search found a substantial...

Sentenced to two years in prison for public corruption, former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has by now spent substantially more funds than any financial benefit he obtained from his convicted corruption, on top of great angst and likely losing any chance of becoming president or...

My blog entries on trial practice boil down to relaxing and practicing, just as amazing taijiquan teacher Ben Lo reminds his students that the key foundation of excelling in taijiquan is “relax and practice”. For relaxation, I mean active relaxation, not collapsing. Certainly, brittleness is...

The United States is at a critical crossroads for overhauling the police state, supporting good policing and speaking out over wrong policing, in the face of widespread police abuse, with some of the starker recent examples being the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner,...

Sticking a thumb in the eye of open and transparent government, democracy, and First Amendment protection, a majority of the Portsmouth, Virginia, city council took it upon itself, in haste all the worse, to add the following abomination to the city council rules of order...

People misidentify others all the time. We think we see our best friend in the grocery store and realize it is a stranger. We meet a group of people and mistake two from the crowd for each other. We pay a store clerk at one moment...

Interview of Jon Katz about the murder rate in the United States.

Today, the United States Court of Appeals confirmed that said court has “never held that counsel can be relinquished by means short of waiver.” Consequently, the trial court’s finding of forfeiture of counsel by felony defendant Phillip Ductan’s uncooperative pretrial behavior during his criminal trial was...

Recently, I asked a police officer a few very direct questions about his actions with my client. Had I asked the questions more gently, I may have gotten no less a beneficial result, but I asked them as I did. The officer got irritated. He...

George Lee Hawkins was stopped for a moving violation. Once stopped, the police saw a bulge in his shirt, and asked him if he could raise his “‘shirt up a little bit so [the police officer could] see how it sits.’” Hawkins then “extended his arms completely out to his sides...