Criminal Defense

Probation officers in Virginia wield tremendous power. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I experience their power in writing presentence reports for Virginia Circuit Court judges, supervising their probationers, notifying judges of alleged violations of probation, and testifying in court about their probationers. Regardless of how...

By sheer happenstance, the night before Alec Baldwin's legal team convinced the trial judge on July 12, 2024, to dismiss Baldwin's involuntary manslaughter prosecution with prejudice -- meaning for the prosecution never to return to court -- my son and I started watching Just Mercy, about criminal...

Cross exam (CE) does not start at the seat of an attorney's pants, but through careful thought, insight and preparation. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I know full well that CE is an art, science and necessity. CE in and of itself will bring no...

Machine guns (MGs) are not created from bump stocks. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer and civil libertarian, I believe in a gun laws, firearms laws, and a Second Amendment with teeth limiting prosecutions and convictions. As with recent Second Amendment protections from the Supreme Court,...

Fairfax plea deals -- and settlement negotiations in all Virginia jurisdictions -- are not worth the paper they are written on if the judge is going to reject the party-agreed sentence or sentencing cap. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I know that if a Virginia...

Favorable judges are not guaranteed for your court case. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I know that judges run from the sufficiently patient to those with short fuses, from those who have high equanimity to those who are cranky and even angry, from those who...

Contraband defense became more of a challenge than ever when the Virginia Supreme Court reversed the commonwealth's Court of Appeals's wise reversal of a drug conviction where the defendant clearly had no x-ray vision to have known that a handgun and cocaine were in the...

LEO seizure (law enforcement officer seizure) of arrestees' assets and information is commonplace. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I know that even innocent property owners can be harmed in the process. Ask yourself soon, not later, what you will do to reduce the harm of...

False prosecutions abound. My work as a Fairfax criminal lawyer includes fighting accusations against innocent defendants. Not only are many jurors (with verdicts), judges (with pretrial release / bond / bail decisions, for instance) and prosecutors (with decisions to proceed with prosecuting) going to take...

Release dates from jail and prisons are critical for a Virginia criminal defendant to understand. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I understand that even the best Virginia criminal defense attorney cannot always avoid a conviction for his client, so minimizing incarceration time is key when...