Justice Antonin Scalia is dead. He died on February 13 at a West Texas ranch resort. By all accounts it was a peaceful passing. He was devoted to his family and a dedicated friend to those whom he loved. While…
Category: Criminal Law
2016
Category: Appeals | Criminal Law
New criminal laws are enacted by the legislative branch of government. Some create new offenses with proscribed penalties. Others are remedial in nature, creating new rules or changing existing rules of procedure. Many of these laws will be challenged in…
2016
Category: Corporate Fraud | Criminal Law | Federal Criminal Law
Americans over the past five or six decades have been lulled into believing white collar crime—crimes committed by the affluent or large companies (fraud, embezzlement, defective products, etc.)—is more socially acceptable than “blue collar” crime—crimes more often tied to street…
2016
Category: Criminal Law | Prosecutorial Misconduct | Sex Crimes
Four detectives (Joe Ryan Hartley, Ryan Wolff, Mike Duffy, and Heather Mykes) and one investigator (Michael Dickson) conducted an investigation into a 2009 burglary and sexual assault of an eight-year-old girl in Douglas County, Colorado.
40 Years Old, 190…
2016
Category: Appeals | Criminal Law | Federal Criminal Law
Ivan Garcia-Lopez probably wishes he had taken his meal somewhere else on the evening February 5, 2014. He was living in a single-wide trailer home in Wharton County, Texas, with Jaime Garcia and his brother, Yonari.
Felony Arrest Warrant…
2016
Category: Criminal Law | Illegal Pornography
Political scandals tend to always have a sordid beginning. That is the nature of the “porngate” scandal currently rocking Pennsylvania’s judicial and political systems at their core.
Sandusky Surfaces Again
Ironically enough porngate has its origins in the…
2016
Category: Criminal Law | Drug Trafficking | Federal Criminal Law
Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson is recognized as probably the nation’s best authority on police misconduct. Over a ten-year period, beginning in 2005, Stinson compiled a database of 11,000 cases of misconduct involving nearly 9,000 officers.
…
2016
Category: Appeals | Criminal Law | Drug Crime
In May 2013, Marguita Wills lived Charleston, West Virginia. She had a male companion named Kenneth Rush living with her in her apartment. He had been there for two nights.
For some reason, Wills came to suspect that Rush…
2016
Category: Criminal Law | Prosecutorial Misconduct
William Allen Schultz, a Denton County prosecutor, has been banned from appearing in a state district court after the court found he purposefully withheld favorable evidence from a defendant regarding a questionable identification. The grievance that followed has forced the…
2015
Category: Criminal Law | Prosecutorial Misconduct
There is an ever growing “hazy border” between excessive and acceptable use of deadly force by law enforcement. This reality is demonstrated by the continual release of video documenting unreasonable and inhumane executions by police, acts that in a “pre-video”…