After a 22-month investigation into whether the Russians interfered with this nation’s 2016 presidential election and whether President Trump’s campaign colluded or coordinated with that foreign interference, the Special Counsel’s Report (“Mueller Report”) was delivered to U.S. Attorney General William…
CRIMINAL JURISDICTION
Criminal Jurisdiction:
A Criminal Law Blog from a Defense Perspective
2019
A defendant seeking to establish that he received ineffective assistance of counsel during a criminal proceeding must demonstrate (1) that his attorney’s performance was so deficient that it fell below “an objective standard of reasonableness” and (2) that “a reasonable…
2019
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) has convoluted history with blood and privacy.
In a 1991 opinion, State v. Comeaux, the CCA dealt with a situation where a defendant involved in a traffic accident was taken to a…
2019
Category: Constitutional Law | Criminal Law
In a 1976 Valparaiso Law Review article, “Historical Developments of the Interrelationship of Unanimous Verdicts and Reasonable Doubt,” Anthony A. Morano noted that in pre-colonial America, English law “required that jurors be kept together incommunicado during deliberations, without food, drink,…
2019
Category: Immigration Crimes
The Trump administration frequently refers to the U.S.-Mexico border as a “crisis” zone that can only be fixed by building a border wall. The cause for the crisis, President Trump says, is illegal immigrants coming to this country to commit…
2019
Category: Fraud | Mortgage Fruad | Tax Evasion
Former President Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort recently received relatively light prison sentences for two federal convictions, far below the federal sentencing guidelines, in two U.S. District Courts—one in the Northern District of Virginia and the other in the District…
2019
Category: Corruption | Criminal Justice Reform
In an excellent October 18, 2018 piece published in the Texas Observer and written for Harper’s Magazine, Melissa del Bosque, a Lanman Reporting Fellow with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, delivered a message of just how powerful the…
2019
Category: Fraud | White Collar Crime | Wire Fraud
Wire fraud involves the use of any form of electronic communication to defraud another party. It is often used by major criminal operations in the commission of offenses such as money laundering. As such, any form of wire fraud is…
2019
Category: Appeals | Corruption | Criminal Law
Open meetings laws are often referred to as “sunshine laws.” These laws require that meetings, decisions and records, with some exceptions, of state and federal agencies and regulatory bodies be open and readily available to the public.
The public…
2019
Category: Bank Fraud | Criminal Justice Reform | Tax Evasion
A Texas African-American woman was sentenced last March to five years in a state prison because she voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. Crystal Mason ran afoul of Texas’s voting laws because she was on federal supervised release from…