Underdog Blog – Fairfax Criminal Defense Lawyer | Virginia DUI Attorney
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Pursuing Your Best Defense Since 1991
Justice Alito surprises by strengthening Batson
Bill of Rights (Image from the public domain.) Once a person becomes a Supreme Court justice, no concern should exist about being pleasing enough to senators and the president to get onto a higher court (and getting elevated to a higher court or retained on the existing...
Yow! I AM having fun, on the road to a win
Zippy the Pinhead is my favorite comic strip. Zippy spews non sequiturs, repeatedly proclaims "Yow!", and asks "Are we having fun yet?" in this overcommercialized society that tells people they won’t be glad til they use Dial. Every four years, he runs for president. Trials...
4 of 7 Virginia Supreme Court judges uphold First-Amendment-violative criminal spam law
Computer hard drive. (Image from Pacific Northwest Laboratory’s website). All spammers’ eyes should be on Virginia — where a high percentage of computer crime cases are prosecuted, due to Virginia’s housing such major computer servers as America Online’s —  after its Supreme Court wrongfully upheld the state’s criminal...
Something about Valentine’s Day, courts, and sexual devices
Molly Ivins on the stupidity of Texas’s ban on the sale of sexual devices. She did not live to see the Fifth Circuit’s ban on this ban. Happy Valentine’s day. When we set aside the commercial hype around the holiday, it is a day and...
Why Don’t You Ask Your Client?
In Virginia District Court, mandatory criminal discovery is practically non-existent, and is limited to defendants’ statements to law enforcement that the prosecutor intends to introduce into evidence, the defendant’s criminal record, and Brady/exculpatory evidence (except that the prosecutor ordinarily is the sole person to decide what evidence...
Cops can’t play fast and loose with Miranda
Miranda warnings are required when "a reasonable man in the suspect’s position would have understood his situation" to be one of custody. Berkemer v. McCarty, 468 U.S. 420, 422 (1984). To determine whether a reasonable person would have understood the situation to have been one...
International Extraditions: To be Fought Tooth and Nail
International extradition defense seems to be an area that most criminal defense lawyers have either not handled at all, or very little. I learned this after being hired for such a case a few months ago, and learning that one of my favorite and most experienced...
What Justifies a Prosecutor Telling a Witness to Withhold Documents from a Defense Lawyer?
Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). One day while waiting for court to start, I approached the chemist in my client’s drug possession case. He said he would talk to me only if the prosecutor was present. Once I got the three...
You want a trial? I’ll go to trial / Plus, beating the Intoxylizer 5000
When I became a public defender lawyer in the early 1990’s all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to fight the good fight, it turned out that my survival instincts — developed all the more since early childhood by growing up among plenty of peers who were more...
Blood Alcohol Content Test Results can be Higher than the BAC at the Time of Driving
When it comes to drunk driving prosecutions, blood alcohol content test results are subject to attack from all sides, including attacks on the accuracy of the test results in the first place. Moreover, judges and juries need to be educated that it is not a...