Criminal Defense

To those who have expended substantial energy and frustration finding, hiring, training and retaining good employees, imagine how much tougher it is for criminal enterprises to find good help, considering that they cannot exactly advertise job openings on CraigsList. Enter Malcolm Dawson, who plead guilty to a...

In 1995, Howard County, Maryland, prosecutors dismissal a shameful sting prosecution against some workers at a massage parlor who some undercover police permitted not only to masturbate them, but apparently to do it to completion, which means such police truly were mixing business with misplaced pleasure (for...

Praised be Virginia’s Court of Appeals for last week further distinguishing the factors separating a mere hunch — which does not justify a police frisk or search — from a Terry  frisk based on reasonable articulable suspicion to believe the suspect is armed and dangerous....

Death penalty: Always unjust Virginia executed John Allen Muhammad before he was to have completed his first round of federal habeas corpus appeals. Concurring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens — joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor — underlined the importance of completing the first round...

Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). On the one hand, I believe strongly in providing an aggressive defense to everyone suspected of a crime. On the other hand, rogue cops who commit crimes shielded by their badges certainly would present a challenge to...

Bill of Rights. (From the public domain.) When may a court order a criminal defendant drugged to be competent to stand trial? In the Fourth Circuit, the prosecution must justify such an order by clear and convincing evidence. U.S. v. Barbara Michelle Bush, ___ F.3d ___...

Bill of Rights. (From the public domain.)  Do you have a burning desire to talk to the police, even though doing so with real cops might get you arrested and prosecuted? If so, go watch Cops and talk to the television screen instead. For a decade,...

Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). Maryland follows the Frye/Reed test for admitting expert testimony into evidence: “[B]efore a scientific opinion will be received as evidence at trial, the basis of that opinion must be shown to be generally accepted as reliable...

What is the meaning of the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel — and the Fifth and Fourtheenth Amendment right to due process — if prosecutors communicate directly with unrepresented criminal defendants soon after their arrests, to start the clock on short court...

In Virginia, the jury decides guilt-innocence, and recommends a sentence in the event of a conviction. Jerome Rawls was sentenced to 25 years in prison on the jury’s recommendation, for second degree murder. At the time of sentencing, Rawls’s lawyer, the prosecutor, and the trial judge...