Criminal Defense

Nearly two generations of Americans, born since 1980, knows of no life other than that under the drug wars spurred during the Reagan administration, complete with metal detectors and other intrusive searches in schools without particularized suspicion; draconian drug sentencing regimes involving lengthy mandatory minimum...

Plenty of probation agents and sentencing judges may have a penchant for barring access to the Internet for certain convicted sex offenders, in such cases as sexual assault and child pornography. However, doing so in a knee-jerk fashion and without narrow tailoring violates a convicted...

Often when I challenge police searches for lack of a search warrant or for other Constitutional infirmities, the prosecutor argues that the incriminating evidence would inevitably have been lawfully discovered by police if not first discovered in the questionable way with which the evidence in...

When a client urges the necessity of my destroying an opposing witness on cross examination, I respond that the backlash from destroying the opposing witness can be much more harmful than my telling the defense story through cross examination, bringing out important evidentiary points, and...

Alexander Michael Edwards in 2016 was convicted in Campbell County, Virginia, Circuit Court for malicious wounding for the non-consensual tattooing of two minors, and for conspiring to murder them to avoid their testimony against him at trial. The elements of malicious wounding under the Virginia...

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution limits police authority to stop, seize, and search people and their property. Sadly, the United States Supreme Court over the decades has limited the strength of the Fourth Amendment in numerous ways, including the horrendous Terry v....

Being a judge is a privilege with awesome responsibility and power. Once a judge stops seeing judging as a privilege, it is time for the judge to hang up the judicial robes. Judging can be exhausting work. The criminal and civil lawsuits do not stop...

Virginia is far behind the medical marijuana states that have made marijuana possession and use lawful for numerous medical ailments. Virginia law limits legal marijuana medicinal use (only in the form of cannabidiol oil ("CBD oil") and THC-A oil) to epilepsy, and pursuant to a...

Using police drug sniffing dogs is fraught with unreliability. as further addressed here, here, and here. Despite this unreliability, Virginia law poses substantial hurdles to a criminal defendant's obtaining by a records subpoena data about the training and performance of the case's drug dog. Fortunately...

What should a person do when a police officer orders the suspect to hand the cop an item (other than ordering a driver to hand over one's driver's license and registration) or to empty one's pockets? If complied with, that order amounts to a search...