Criminal Defense
Documents and links for my clients
Here in one location are some essential links and documents that my law firm uses to assist our clients: –General information release form. – HIPAA release form. –Sign-in log for attending such self-help groups as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. – Suggestions for taking mouth temperature, for challenging the Intox EC/IR...
Treating criminal defendants as individuals: The military court and immigration consequence examples
Too many criminal court judges and prosecutors see criminal defendants more as numbers than individuals. To treat them as individuals might incline them to allow more time for each case in the face of bursting court dockets, and will make them have to more directly confront...
Va. Supreme Court reverses sentence that eviscerated convict’s Fourth Amendment rights
Praised be Virginia’s top court for reminding the lower courts that even the most heinous crimes do not rob convicts of all rights against government searches while on probation. Last Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court reversed a child rape convict’s probation conviction allowing police and...
Staying connected to why I attended law school in the first place
Law school is not for everyone. I found law school in large part to be a necessary, time-consuming and money-consuming pain in the ass — and sometimes worse — for finding a way to use the law to help make the world a better place....
Michael Brown and the subsequent events in Ferguson, Missouri
I was on vacation and not following the news as much as otherwise when Michael Brown, unarmed, was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9. I posted a handful of Twitter entries about events in Ferguson, and here make a few observations about Mr. Brown’s...
Of empowering storytelling, restorative justice and listening
The cashier who recently sold me a lemonade at a carryout restaurant told me simply to return the cup to the cashier for a free refill. I returned around thirty minutes later requesting a refill to the now-different cashier. She went off into a mantra that the...
Prosecutors must not tell witnesses not to talk with defense lawyers
Prosecutors must NOT tell or even hint at cops and other witnesses not to talk with defense lawyers. Specifically, in a criminal matter, a lawyer "shall not" request "a person other than a client to refrain from voluntarily giving relevant information to another party." Va....
Perverting your tax dollars- Federal prosecutors monitoring attorney-inmate emails
When my criminal defense client is incarcerated pretrial, that makes the attorney-client relationship and case preparation all the more a challenge. When my client is not incarcerated, we may freely talk, email, and meet at any time, unmonitored by anyone, with the exception that I...
8th Circuit follows 6th Circuit in denying 1st Amendment protection to morphing a child’s face onto photo of an adult body in child pornography case
In 2011 and 2012, I blogged about an attorney who — acting as an expert witness — morphed a picture of a child’s head onto a photo of an adult’s body, creating what would have constituted child pornography had the entire photo been an image...
Judges as both fallible and potentially excellent
Judges are not deities. They are humans. They are selected through a combination of some or all of the following: Meritocracy, vetting for ability (with various sorts and quality of vetting), political considerations, and elections by the public. Even some of the most promising-seeming judicial candidates...
