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As of October 2019, genetic genealogy had been used to solve roughly 50 rapes and homicides across 29 states, including the infamous Golden State Killer. Family Tree DNA defines genetic genealogy as “the use of DNA testing to determine relationships…
Category: Criminal Law | DWI
As we have noted before, criminal trials and sentencing are governed by strict rules of evidence and procedures. Objections to admission of impermissible evidence during the trial and to procedures utilized in the sentencing process that results in an illegal…
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Criminal Law
The release of thousands of unjustly jailed citizens, an end to solitary confinement, a ban on private prisons, and raising the bar on prosecutorial accountability are all important criminal justice reforms gaining traction on the 2020 campaign trail.
However,…
Category: Constitutional Law | Criminal Law
Every criminal defense attorney has had a client whose crime repulsed the attorney.
Every criminal suspect is entitled under both our state and federal constitutions to have the assistance of counsel and to have an attorney appointed to them…
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Criminal Law
The criminal justice system in America is often blind to injustice and, more often than not, cruel and unusual.
As of 2017, the Sentencing Project reported that there were nearly 162,000 people in the U.S. prison system serving life…
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Criminal Law
As of this writing, there have been 2,481 exonerations in the United States since 1989—nearly 400 of them through DNA exoneration. Roughly 35 percent of the total exonerations and 69 percent of the DNA exonerations involved misidentification issues.
Many…
Category: Criminal Law | Forfeiture
Texas law enforcement can seize, and keep, an individual’s private property—cash, cars, houses, or ranch/farm equipment, for example—when they suspect the property is connected to criminal activity.
According to the Institute for Justice, the federal government and all 50…
Category: Appeals | Criminal Law
Article 37.07 § 3(a) of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure has long been considered one of the guiding principles concerning the admissibility of evidence during the penalty phase in a felony case. This article allows the state to offer…
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…
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,…
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