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Is criminal defense work about proverbial war and sometimes bloodletting? Hell, yes, whether one wants it that way or not. As I have said before, t’ai chi principles are important to criminal defense, for focusing on harmonizing an imbalanced situation without applying more than a...

To my knowledge, when they were lawyers, no current Supreme Court justice prosecuted nor defended criminal cases in trial court, and none of them were police. Probably with few or no exceptions, the sitting justices’ law clerks are chosen not for previous law clerking experience...

Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). When I started law school in 1986. my legal research class included researching weighty tomes with such titles as Supreme Court Digest, F.2d Digest, and A.2d Digest, which used key numbers to find various categories and...

Image from Virginia Forestry Dept’s website. Halloween treats came before sundown today with the following favorable criminal rulings from Virginia’s Supreme Court, which issues opinions around every six weeks: – Virginia’s Supreme Court reversed a rape conviction where not more than a scintilla of evidence...

Until George Bush I was voted out of office, the federal government spiritedly prosecuted obscenity, often leading to long prison terms. The Clinton administration did an about face and barely initiated any new obscenity cases, preferring to focus on child pornography and adults seeking sex with minors....

The only way to know if a defendant will win is to go to trial. This month yielded another example of why it is critical to go to trial when the outcome from an innocent plea is not likely to be any worse than the...

Child pornography prosecutions have been rampant for many years, both for possession and distribution of child pornography, and for alleged violations of 18 U.S.C. § 2257 record keeping provisions. The United States Supreme Court generally limits child pornography prosecutions to images of actual minors, rather...