Criminal Defense

Cesar Chavez: A champion for the empowerment of workers and immigrants. Your immigration status is your own business. Whether or not law enforcement personnel have the authority to ask you your immigration status, you have no obligation to answer. Certainly, people in the United States...

Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). Prosecutors ordinarily are prohibited from mentioning to the jury that a defendant did not take the witness stand or remained silent prior to the trial date. Underlining the importance for criminal defendants to argue both under...

When Barack Obama ran for president, I predicted that despite his overgeneralized talk of change that I would be no more satisfied with him than with Bill Clinton, with whom I was only moderately satisfied.  On the obscenity prosecution front, it turns out that Barack...

I often hear people, including criminal defense colleagues, rallying around candidates for judges and chief prosecutors. Rarely do I hear talk in such promotions, and during confirmation hearings, about the extent to which the judge will be overly harsh with setting bonds and setting sentences. ...

Kudos to Virginia’s intermediate appellate court for reversing a second degree murder conviction, due to the trial court’s refusal to allow the defendant to present a self defense theory surrounding the alleged gang membership of the decedent and one of his star witnesses, to try to...

Bill of Rights (From public domain.) Early on, trial lawyers are taught to “know your judge” and your jury. As a consequence, decisions whether to proceed to trial or settle a criminal or civil case require considering the potential judges and jurors who will sit at...

Bill of Rights. (From the public domain.) Search warrants of people’s homes often are issued as a result of alleged criminal activity that takes place far from the suspect’s home. When is alleged offsite criminal activity sufficient to permit a warrant to search one’s home? In such...

Following up on my earlier post today on Padilla, I sent the following to a few local criminal defense listservs: Yesterday’s Padilla decision is destined to change the landscape for the better of how criminal defense lawyers and judges address immigration issues. Here are a...

Prosecutors commonly obtain National Crime Information Center (“NCIC”) reports of defendants’ criminal records. A colleague recently pointed out the unfairness of judges rejecting attacks on NCIC reports, because he asserts that the FBI, which runs the NCIC, disclaims responsibility for accuracy in NCIC reports. Certainly,...

Read enough search warrant applications, and "CI" (confidential informant) will rear its head again and again. Praised be Virginia’s Court of Appeals (albeit by only 2-1) for reversing a conviction that resulted from a so-called reliable confidential informant’s tip that the defendant was about to...