Drugs

Appellate opinions on search and seizure repeatedly uphold warrantless police searches of nearly innumerable varieties. Fortunately, today Virginia's Court of Appeals underlined the continued sanctity of the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, by requiring the exclusion of illegal drugs found in Lashant...

By now, with medical marijuana legalized in so many states and legalized in four states for recreational use, we know that marijuana appeals far beyond stereotypical stoners. Its medicinal uses for pain, anxiety, depression, and attention deficit disorder come without many of the undesirable side...

The articles are many about the United States Drug Enforcement Administration's plans to decide in the first half of 2016 whether to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule II drug. Unfortunately, too many mass media and even special interest websites do not link...

Most criminal defense lawyers have a high number of clients who actually committed a criminal act. That reality does not automatically preclude an outright acquittal or dismissal.

Let us not have high federal conviction statistics become self-fulfilling prophesies. Criminal defense lawyers can reassure their federal prosecution clients, and all clients, that each case needs to be reviewed and prepared individually for the chances possibly to obtain the same excellent results that Daniel...

The criminal justice system at best masquerades as more just than it is. In the American criminal justice system, countless presumed-innocent people are caged on no bond or excessive bond pretrial; too many acts that should not be criminalized are criminalized (for instance marijuana, prostitution,...

Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed a federal controlled substance analogue conviction, because the trial judge watered down the necessary jury instruction for obtaining such a conviction, in this instance involving so-called ‘bath salts’. Far from a liberal for criminal defendants nor foranyone...

Police and prosecutors routinely have a knee-jerk claim that a few ounces of marijuana coupled with a few thousand dollars amounts to intent to distribute the marijuana. Let us say that police lawfully stop a suspect’s car, lawfully find two ounces of marijuana and a...

The District of Columbia and Maryland have decriminalized marijuana. The two jurisdictions have also moved forward in their own peculiar ways in giving limited protection to medical marijuana use. Neighboring Virginia lags far behind. For marijuana consumers working in and near Washington, D.C., Virginia’s disadvantageous...

Plenty of people sell imitation items that they claim to be such real illegal drugs as cocaine. The top motivations for doing so likely are seeking a higher profit margin, not having the real product available to sell, not knowing that the product is fake...