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Death penalty: Always unjust Virginia executed John Allen Muhammad before he was to have completed his first round of federal habeas corpus appeals. Concurring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens — joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor — underlined the importance of completing the first round...

The criminal justice system is so overgrown that crime evidence is bound too often to get mixed up, misplaced, and contaminated. For drug prosecutions, the suspected drugs may pass through several hands before being tested by a chemist. Often, the seizing police officers have the...

Where do so many judges and jurors get the false notion that cops always tell the truth? Cops are but humans, so they are as prone to prevaricate as any non-cop. Praised be my fellow criminal defense brother Paul Mack — from neighboring Howard County...

Why do cops repeatedly parrot back similar language in their incident reports, no matter the suspect? If there is a training manual with this standard language, I want it, whether through a freedom of information request or otherwise:   Here is some standard language I see...

Before now, nothing impressed me about Senator Jim Webb other than that he was less worse than George Allen of macaca-gate infamy. On March 26, 2009, Webb introduced the National Criminal Justice Act of 2009. It is good that more people than criminal defense lawyers...

Imagine the dissonance felt by the victim of a serious crime not to be able to identify the perpetrator. If the perpetrator is not found and convicted, the victim may feel that the victim has been let down, the police have been let down, the...

A 5-4 Supreme Court majority is satisfied to give a trial judge carte blanche whether to grant a habeas corpus/post conviction hearing to a death row inmate complaining that his trial lawyer was ineffective for following his instructions not to present mitigating evidence at sentencing....

Image from Virginia Forestry Dept’s website. Virginia’s Supreme Court releases a package of appellate opinions about every seven to eight weeks. Following is an overview of some of the court’s recent key criminal decisions: A passenger’s possession of a bottle of illegal drugs — without...