Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney

Often prosecutors are fond of proclaiming that defense counsel "opened the door." Which door is the prosecutor talking of, seeing that hundreds of thousands of doors exist within as little as a  mile radius of many courthouses. Paying homage to Lucy van Pelt, prosecutors of...

Why do cops repeatedly parrot back similar language in their incident reports, no matter the suspect? If there is a training manual with this standard language, I want it, whether through a freedom of information request or otherwise:   Here is some standard language I see...

In the days before Al Gore discovered the Internet, my law school legal research and writing instructor introduced us to the tomes — called Shepard’s Citations — through which we painstakingly checked whether court cases being cited by us had been overturned, reversed, or affirmed, or...

In the Fourth Circuit, "[t]he reopening of a criminal case after the close of evidence is within the discretion of the trial judge. See United States v. Walker, 772 F.2d 1172, 1177 (5th Cir. 1985); United States v. Molinares, 700 F.2d 647, 652 (11th Cir....

Where I usually practice law in Maryland, a drunk driving defendant with a good driving record and nothing unusual in his or her case is a good candidate for a probation before judgment after any guilty verdict. A PBJ prevents one from losing points and...

Courthouses and courthouse procedures expose parties and their lawyers to being seen and heard by the juries doing things they do not intend to be seen and heard doing, including conversation in restrooms, criminal defendants in chains before being brought to the courtroom, and parties...

  The Chinese script for the character "mu," which means nothing. Recently, a prosecutor — not too many years out of law school, for whatever that is worth — kept talking and talking and repeating and repeating to the judge during a bench trial. The...

When police operate in the shadows, the risk increases that they will abuse suspects’ rights. After all, power corrupts, including when a cop has a handgun, taser, blackjack, billyclub, handcuffs, a badge, and the power of arrest, and the suspect has none of those. Praised...

Bill of Rights. (From the public domain.) Why do good deeds so often go punished? Eliazer Madrigal-Valdez probably thought he was doing a soldier a favor by dropping him off at his military base in Fort Lee, Virginia. Instead, when Mr. Madrigal was unable to produce a...

After practicing criminal defense for many years, a lawyer can get jaded by some of the more cockamamie-sounding urgings from clients, including the absence of fingerprints when ten witnesses and five videocameras caught the double-killing, and the shooting defendant was then tackled and held until...