Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

Many prosecutors and police (and perhaps too many judges) apparently see criminal defense lawyers as a curious mix of being part of the legal establishment — “one of us”, in the minds of many of them — who also represent “them”/”the other”/the person to be...

Courtesy SunWolf: A criminal defense lawyer’s criminal defense lawyer, showing lawyers the powerful path to humanizing our clients, through storytellng, kindness to all, summoning our inner magic, and a reminder that “reality is no obstacle.” Dr. SunWolf — the great storytelling lawyer who proclaims that...

Challenging Obama’s spying-gate. (Fox News, June 8, 2013). Fox News is a right wing darling. My own agenda when accepting or declining a media interview invitation is whether the interview will further my own agenda of spreading the gospel of justice. With that goal in...

All battles have hurdles. For Virginia drunk driving defense, last December the state’s intermediate appellate court threw a King Kong-sized hurdle for challenging the accuracy of the breathalyzer machines, in the form of Fitzgerald v. Com, 61 Va. App. 279, 734 S.E.2d 708 (2012). Fitzgerald does...

In criminal law, “three strikes and you’re out” refers to severe mandatory minimum jail sentencing, and not baseball, other than that mandatory minimum sentencing, for the defendant, can feel like being slammed on the skull with a baseball bat and smashed in the eye with a high-speed...

I once got a glimpse of how clients feel trusting me to fight for them when I frantically called for help to a former client who became my contractor, to fix what became a temporary burp in an important part of my firm’s administrative/technological operations. I have ended...

Soft is not weak when applied in terms of active relaxation. Collapsed is weak. Brittle is weak. Stiff is weak. Softness enables listening and winning; loudness deafens; hardness makes brittle and weak. Softness puts opponents and others more at ease — and open to the...

A drug dog’s positive alert, by itself, does not justify searching a car’s passengers, where the police have no particularized suspicion to believe that the passenger possesses drugs or is acting criminally together with the others in the car. Whtehead v. Virginia, 278 Va. 300,...

Praised be my clients — amounting to the vast majority of them — who do not rush to plead guilty in an effort to avoid worse sentencing exposure in the event of a trial loss, than from pleading guilty. By the time my clients and...

On April 17, 2013, the Supreme Court issued a splintered opinion in which a 5-4 majority ruled that nonconsensual blood draws ordinarily require a search warrant in driving while intoxicated investigations and arrests. Missouri v. McNeely, ___ U.S. ___ (April 17, 2013). McNeely says that...