Colorado: Are You Too High to Drive? To the delight of many, marijuana is legal in Colorado. Anybody who has driven down I-25 has seen and smelled the clouds of pot smoke billowing out of driver’s windows in standstill traffic. Nonetheless, driving after smoking, vaping, or eating edibles is a highly punishable offense and carries […]
Category Archives: Criminal Defense
Unemployment fraud is a booming sector of crime in Colorado. Responding last year to the wave of springtime unemployment claims due to COVID, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment instituted policies to help people get payments with minimal inconvenience. This left the benefits system much more vulnerable to fraud than before, and along with […]
Probation is an alternative sentence in the United States criminal justice system. Many offenders are exposed to the possibility of jail or prison as penalties for their criminal cases, but probation is a way for an offender to remain in the community and go about their life without being jailed as long as they follow […]
Digital Identity Theft After some abatement in 2018, identity theft is on the rise again, in part because of how much of our business we now conduct online. In 2019, 3.2 million reports of identity theft were filed, and losses claimed as a result of the crime, according to the Federal Trade Commission, came to […]
Scary Stuff If there’s one thing you and I and everyone else hates, it’s admitting mistakes. Not that I’ve ever made any. But I presume that if I did, I would hate admitting them. After all, to admit a mistake is to drop your shield, to give up control over your own fate: when you […]
Long Live the You OK, here’s the scenario: you have overthrown the government of a nation and made yourself its dictator. Now it’s time to dictate. Will you be an anarchy-adjacent figure of dread, laughing insanely from the balcony of the palace as citizens below scurry about obeying your cruel whims? No, you won’t. It […]
The Fantasy We’ve all come across the idea of acting as your own lawyer in a legal proceeding. It lends itself to seductive fantasies: there you are, like Anthony Hopkins in Fracture, laying out your defense before the bench, the prosecutor dumbstruck at the erudition all those Google searches have given you. The jury nods along […]
A Trial Is Over The trial of Harvey Weinstein for multiple sex crimes has ended. Weinstein was acquitted of the most serious charges he faced, first-degree rape and predatory sexual assault, but convicted of rape in the third degree and of criminal sexual act in the first. These convictions entail a prison sentence—to be handed […]
The Stage Is Set Across the U.S., change in the law is underway concerning the right of people convicted of felonies to vote in government elections. Because each state deliberates this issue independently, the results vary between states, and sometimes even within states over time, as newly-elected governors modify or rescind outright the orders of […]
On any given day in a criminal defense firm, any variety of innumerable hapless victims of the criminal justice system walk could through the door. My use of the word “victim” to describe criminal defendants will likely send prosecutors everywhere through the proverbial roof. In criminal justice parlance, “Victim” is generally capitalized and has its […]