Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

The powerhouse of John Johnson and Gerry Spence (Aug. 1995, Thunderhead Ranch) Lately, more videos of trial great Gerry Spence — who founded the Trial Lawyers College, which I attended in 1995 — are getting to YouTube. Here are the most notable videos: – Cross examining,...

Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. MI). Imagine pleading guilty when facing a high risk of a three-strikes non-parolable life term in prison. Why enter such a guilty plea unless such an approach is one’s only realistic hope not to die in prison,...

Is criminal defense work about proverbial war and sometimes bloodletting? Hell, yes, whether one wants it that way or not. As I have said before, t’ai chi principles are important to criminal defense, for focusing on harmonizing an imbalanced situation without applying more than a...

Bill of Rights. (From the public domain.) Yesterday I blogged on a recent marijuana bench trial victory in federal magistrates court. In my view, however, it is unconstitutional — absent the clear and informed consent of the criminal defendant on the record in court — to expose...

Bill of Rights. (From the public domain.) Recently, I won a marijuana possession case in federal magistrate’s court. I won the case not through pulling any rabbits out of the hat, but by using procedural rules and procedural strategy to my advantage.  My client was issued...

To my knowledge, when they were lawyers, no current Supreme Court justice prosecuted nor defended criminal cases in trial court, and none of them were police. Probably with few or no exceptions, the sitting justices’ law clerks are chosen not for previous law clerking experience...

Last June, the United States Supreme Court determined that Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004) strictly limits prosecutors’ ability to present to the jury a homicide victim’s testimonial hearsay, even though the victim could have testified at trial had his or her killing not been...

The closest I came to waiting tables was working as a pantry assistant in the kitchen of my old summer camp, making orange juice and bug juice with a garden hose and metal oar, moving food on hand trucks and flat trucks, shoving my hand...

Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). An essential focus at the Trial Lawyers College is to replace verbal legalese droning at trial with painting word images, telling persuasive stories by re-enacting events, and talking from the first-person perspective of non-lawyers involved in...