June 18th, 2009
Once upon a time, in the land that would one day become the United States of America, law enforcement officers of the King of England were allowed by the King to stop and search citizens of the land without the need for specific warrants.
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Tags: automobile search, automobile searches, fourth amendment, privacy, probable cause, reasonable suspicion, Right to Privacy, search, Search & Seizure, search and seizure, security, vehicle search, vehicular search, warrant, warrantless search, warrantless searches
Posted in Search & Seizure | 11 Comments »
June 10th, 2009
By the time you finish reading this, you will know everything you need to know in order to testify, in court, as a gang cop.
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Tags: gang cops, gang experts, Gangs, scamming juries
Posted in Gangs | 3 Comments »
May 26th, 2009
I have had a difficult time trying to decide what title to give this post. This is not one of my “normal” posts. Not by a long shot.
A fellow criminal defense attorney, a woman I consider to be a very close and dear friend, lost her three youngest daughters this weekend.
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Tags: assistance, brenda hook, daughters, dead, funeral, help, plane crash, sisters, three cloviss girls
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
May 22nd, 2009
Officially, the basic rule in the United States of America is still that “searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment — subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.” (Arizona v. Gant, 129 S.Ct. 1710, 1716, 2009 Daily Journal D.A.R. 5611 (2009).)
In 1968, the United States Supreme Court said,
This inestimable right of personal security belongs as much to the citizen on the streets of our cities as to the homeowner closeted in his study to dispose of his secret affairs. For, as this Court has always recognized,
No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded, by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law.
(Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 8-9, 88 S.Ct. 1868 (1968), quoting Union Pac. R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251, 11 S.Ct. 1000, 1001, 35 L.Ed. 734 (1891).)
But as Bill O’Reilly would say, “That’s what the people who are paid for hating America want you to think.”
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Tags: african-american, black, caucasian, crime, criminals, fourth amendment, guantanamo, Police State, stop and frisk, white
Posted in Police State | No Comments »
May 14th, 2009
Over on my other blog — I maintain FresnoCriminalDefense.com as my website and blog relating to more regional issues specific to my Fresno criminal defense office — I had the chance to respond to one of my readers who complained, among other things, that I was not being fair to law enforcement officers because I made allusions to the similarities between them and the enforcers of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany.
The timing could not have been more perfect.
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Tags: anti-terrorism, aryan, boy scout explorers, boy scouts, brown shirts, explorers, fascism, fourth reich, goose-step, goose-stepping, inculcation, militarism, militarizing the police, nazi, naziism, nazis, police militarization, Police State, police states, storm troopers, totalitarianism, true-blooded
Posted in Police State | 7 Comments »
May 10th, 2009
A large number — no doubt many people — arrested by the police are guilty. Often enough, they’re even actually guilty of the crime for which they have been arrested. No matter how much of a true believer one might be as a criminal defense attorney, this much has to be admitted.
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Tags: accused, accused persons, defending innocent people, guilt, guilty, innocence, innocent unless proven guilty, innocent until proven guilty, judgment, juries, jury, trial, trial by jury
Posted in Law & Social Issues | 7 Comments »
May 5th, 2009
I thought I’d mentioned the town of Tenaha, Texas before, so this story looked familiar to me. A link sent by Bunny Chafowitz, however, makes the story look fresh so maybe it’s just my imagination.
Police in Tenaha are accused of committing — quite literally — highway robbery.
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Tags: abuse of power, bad cops, bad police officers, crimes by police, criminal police, injustice, law and order, law enforcement, Police Misconduct, police officers, robbery, Rule of Law, uniformed criminals
Posted in Police Misconduct | 1 Comment »
April 16th, 2009
Nearly fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that all people — even poor people — are entitled to be defended by competent counsel. Anyone who watches television knows that “if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to represent you.”
What they don’t tell you on television is that, increasingly, the attorney appointed to represent you will also be representing possibly as many as 200 other people at the same time.
Meanwhile, Fresno County continues to decrease the number of Public Defenders and necessarily therefore increases the caseload of those poor souls remaining.
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Tags: competent counsel, constitution, criminal defense, fair trial, injustice, justice, legal representation, right to competent counsel, right to fair trial, Sixth Amendment, United States Constitution
Posted in Law & Social Issues | 2 Comments »
April 2nd, 2009
Albert Einstein once said:
A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.
Experiments help us find the answers to problems. Experiments help us find the Truth, or the closest thing to it. Without experiments, the world so many of us take for granted today would not exist.
But what does this mean? What is an experiment? And why am I, an attorney, writing about it on a legal blog?
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Tags: adversarial system, criminal defense attorney, criminal trial, crucicible of adversarial testing, defense attorney, Evidence, finding the truth, history of science, hypothesis, investigation, police investigation, prosecutor, theory, Truth
Posted in Philosophy of Law | 5 Comments »
March 9th, 2009
The first and most obvious way to avoid a drunk driving arrest is not to drive after drinking. (Notice I didn’t say, “don’t drive drunk.” It stands to reason that you shouldn’t drive drunk, but if you want to avoid a DUI arrest, you also should not drive after drinking even if you are not drunk.)
The reality is that a number of people are going to feel that they are unimpaired and will get behind the wheel after having imbibed.
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Tags: alcohol consumption and driving, driving under the influence, drunk driving, drunk driving arrest, DUI, DUI arrest
Posted in DUI Offenses | 9 Comments »