Regularly we talk to people charged with crimes of violence, and some of them wonder whether they can claim self-defense to avoid conviction. Perhaps the oldest and most intuitive legal concept there is, self-defense is the right of a person to exercise such force as would normally be criminal to prevent harm to his or her body by someone else.
As criminal defense attorneys we think so much about the front end of the justice system—the settlement of cases in court—that we might sometimes neglect to consider what comes after a conviction.
The investigation into U.S. President Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia has controversial beginnings: a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) authorizing the secret observation of people close to Trump.
According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD),up to 75 percent of individuals convicted of DUI continue to drive with a suspended license. If you are injured as a result of a DUI-related accident, you may have to file a claim against the drunk driver in a civil court.
According to The Innocence Project, a nationwide organization working to exonerate, win compensation for, and rehabilitate people wrongfully convicted of crimes, around seventy percent of the hundreds of convictions the organization has overturned so far using DNA evidence have resulted from eyewitness misidentification.
With the passage of The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, legislators have officially distinguished hemp from marijuana, making hemp an agricultural product instead of a controlled substance. From this will come a multitude of changes.
For decades, experts in law enforcement, many of them active or former police officers, have pointed out the deficiencies of police strategy as it has come to be across the country. Bound up in a vicious cycle, most of these deficiencies both result from and exacerbate distrust between law enforcement agencies and the public.
As the landscape of marijuana legalization changes, the many related laws evolve accordingly. An Oregon court recently ruled that the smell of marijuana smoke cannot be considered inherently offensive.
A pattern has emerged: the use of statistics showing low ratios of criminal convictions to criminal reports to support criticism of the U.S. legal system. How, the implication goes, can we trust the law we live under when Department of Justice surveys indicate that only 22 out of 619 robbery reports end in felony convictions, and only 7 out of 310 sexual assault reports?
We realize there is a chance you were buried in a mudslide several weeks ago and have only now tunneled out into the light of day. First of all, if so, welcome back!
