Fourth Amendment

Fairfax criminal lawyer celebrates SCOTUS's keeping some teeth in the Fourth Amendment. Privacy rights are critical to criminal defense, including the essential Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and against warrantless searches that require search warrants only issued upon probable cause. As a...

Virginia DUI lawyer obtains DWI victory at the suppression hearing stage. DWI victory and criminal defense victory is preceded by substantial preparation. including keeping updated on the relevant science and law, obtaining and fully analyzing the case evidence, and working as a team with my...

Warrantless police searches are commonplace. As a Fairfax, Virginia criminal lawyer I fully dissect the circumstances of police searches, to challenge any Fourth Amendment search and seizure violations.

Exigent circumstances permit a drug search despite a defective search warrant, says the Virginia Supreme Court. Virginia v. Campbell, __ Va. __ (Dec. 14, 2017). As a Fairfax criminal lawyer, I know about exigent circumstances all too well.

Fortunately, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has this month confirmed that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution bars ordering a male criminal suspect to produce an erection.

A cop needs probable cause to say s/he will search a suspect or the suspect's property. If the suspect responds by consenting to a search, handing over contraband or telling where the contraband will be found, the Defendant may still challenge whether the police officer...

One may consider his or her house to be her castle, but police often use search warrants and alleged exigent circumstances to disturb our privacy and serenity in that castle. One such approach is for police to get an excuse to enter a home (for...

Nearly two generations of Americans, born since 1980, knows of no life other than that under the drug wars spurred during the Reagan administration, complete with metal detectors and other intrusive searches in schools without particularized suspicion; draconian drug sentencing regimes involving lengthy mandatory minimum...

Often when I challenge police searches for lack of a search warrant or for other Constitutional infirmities, the prosecutor argues that the incriminating evidence would inevitably have been lawfully discovered by police if not first discovered in the questionable way with which the evidence in...

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution limits police authority to stop, seize, and search people and their property. Sadly, the United States Supreme Court over the decades has limited the strength of the Fourth Amendment in numerous ways, including the horrendous Terry v....