capital punishment

Executing people is wrong. As a Fairfax criminal defense lawyer, I know that even many former and current Virginia prosecutors now support the abolition of capital punishment. However, the machinery of state-sponsored death continues in many of the United States. Executing people convicted for being accomplices...

Split 5-4 capital punishment decisions will keep arising with the Supreme Court's hardcore death penalty greenlighters (Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch), the usual remaining members of that five (Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh) and the four more "liberal" justices who at least question the...

Rushing justice in criminal and civil court cases can be tempting to many trial judges, often facing crushing court dockets that keep getting piled with more and more cases. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I believe that the solution to the challenge of overloaded court...

Capital punishment in the United States has proceeded somewhat away from an arbitrary and capricious system that previously allowed judges rather than juries to decide a death sentence, and for people to be executed for crimes other than murder. As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I...

Why allow inmate snitch testimony to cause an inmate's execution? Testimony from inmates serving substantial prison terms can too often be expected to be manufactured for seeking to improve their lot, with little concern about the truth. 

One 2014 day when I entered a nearby courthouse, a sheriff's deputy lamented the backlash of public opinion against police after police shot dead Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The unjustified police killings continued, including Eric Garner's death on Staten Island following a police chokehold,...

Praised be Justice Stephen Breyer, apparently the United States Supreme Court's strongest skeptic on the death penalty's Constiutionality, who emphasized on April 24, 2017: "What legitimate purpose does it serve to hold any human being in solitary confinement for 40 years awaiting execution? What does...

In 1991, I was still yearning to re-direct my career from the 25-lawyer corporate law firm that I had joined two years later, to something more meaningful. Ever since finishing law school, I went out of my way to meet birds of a professional and...

For decades, Virginia has been a leader in sending people to death row and in executing them rather than delaying doing so, as is common in California. On April 21, 2017, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe took at least one action in the opposite direction, commuting...

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...