Criminal Defense

Prosecutors and police are here to serve the public, and not the other way around. Too many of them forget that. Power corrupts too many people. Criminal defendants are members of the public, as are their lawyers. Prosecutors and police should tread carefully to ever...

example along with the constant execution machines of China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. In all likelihood, Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will help allow the nation's death penalty machine to proceed virtually full speed ahead. This week, the Supreme Court denied relief to a...

Virginia is not the most hospitable of places for criminal defendants, with its crabbed criminal discovery rules that lead to trial by fire, its harsh presumptions of no pretrial bail for too many felonies, and its absence of an automatic appeal from a felony trial...

Criminal arrestees should not expect Fourth Amendment protection of their conversations in police vehicles. Police sometimes will put more than one co-defendant-arrestee in the same police vehicle, to transport to the jail or police station. It may be tempting for the arrested co-defendants then to begin...

In Virginia, possession of recently stolen property risks a conviction for stealing that property: “[P]roof of possession of recently stolen goods establishes a prima facie case that the defendant received [the stolen goods] with guilty knowledge, [and] the burden is cast upon him to go...

Criminal defendants have many questions about expunging their court and police criminal case records, including the meaning of expungement, the best timing and approach to filing for expungement, and eligibility for expungement. Today's blog entry is limited to availability of expungement. Virginia's " key statutory...

Virginia has long been backwards with crabbed criminal discovery rules and a decades-long $200 threshold to convict for felony theft. In this year's Virginia legislative session, the Commonwealth remains backwards in the above respects, as follows: The Virginia House of Delegates tabled the criminal...

As much as I relish my role as a criminal defense lawyer, that does not deny that we have people in the world who can scare the crap out of others, to say the least. Ironically on Valentine's Day, the Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed...

When a criminal defendant is charged with multiple criminal counts, s/he might want to try to limit sentencing exposure by presenting a defense that guilt is not possible for more than one continuing offense. Sheng Jie Jin unsuccessfully tried the one continuing offense approach at...

On this Valentine's Day, I recall that the 1995 Trial Lawyers College soon became one big hug fest at times. I did not embrace the idea right away, but have benefited tremendously in life from focusing on the path of love, compassion, generosity, service and...