Category Archives: Criminal Defense
Irresponsible Behavior While Children Are in the Car
The hardest thing about parenting is that you never get a break. Even while you are asleep, you are responsible for your children’s wellbeing. In fact, there are even cases where parents have gotten into legal trouble because they dozed off on the couch in the daytime, and their young children wandered outside until… Read More »
Traffic Cop Encounters Gone Wrong
Getting pulled over by police is always unpleasant, but it is usually not disastrous. A traffic citation is the last thing anyone needs in these times of tight budgets, but getting a traffic ticket is far from the worst-case scenario. The trouble is that, when a police officer is outside your car window as… Read More »
Charged With A Crime While Driving A School Bus?
Driving a school bus is not for the faint of heart. Yes, the pay is decent, and the work schedule leaves you enough time to work a second job, but transporting a bus full of children is no one’s idea of a good time. Driving a school bus carries hazards beyond ordinary driving. Seatbelt… Read More »
Work and Incarceration in Florida
If you ask people who have served time in prison how they got through it, many of them will tell you that the key was to stay busy. The cliché that you see in cartoons where prisoners draw tick marks on the walls of their prison cells to mark how much time of their… Read More »
Package Theft Edition
These days, almost everyone has packages delivered. In a time when apps and AI are replacing most of our social interactions, jobs involving the packaging and delivery of merchandise are among the few remaining growth industries. We have all heard stories about people removing packages from neighbors’ doorsteps if the recipients are not home… Read More »
What To Know About How Credit for Time Served Is Determined
People accused of crimes have the right to meet privately with a criminal defense lawyer before police question them; during these meetings they can discuss their strategy for the case. Sometimes the defendant’s main goal is to prove his or her innocence; in these cases, the case usually goes to trial, unless the defense… Read More »
Should You Plead the Fifth Amendment?
Unless you are a civics nerd whose top three college choices are all in Washington, D.C., or a naturalized U.S. citizen whose citizenship interview was so recent that you still remember the civics questions you studied, you probably do not know how many amendments the United States Constitution has. Only a few of them… Read More »
The Cascading Effects of a Criminal Conviction
80s nostalgia is nothing new. Radio stations in South Florida began playing feel good pop songs from the 80s in their capacity as oldies before the sun had even set on 1997. Times marches on, though, and now, instead of being an innocent era of the audience’s childhood, it is a legendary past that… Read More »
Probationers and the Fourth Amendment
Jurors can only convict a defendant if they are sure, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant’s actions fit all the elements of the definition of the crime and if they are sure that the state obtained the evidence legally. Several Constitutional rights pertain to people accused of crimes, and if the state violates… Read More »
Making False Reports to Law Enforcement
Making a false report to a law enforcement officer is a first-degree misdemeanor. The maximum penalty is one year in jail, plus a criminal fine. Charges of making a false report apply if you reported a crime to law enforcement, but you knew that the crime did not happen, and you also knew that… Read More »
Sheriffs’ Deputies Face Criminal Charges for Official Misconduct
Misconduct by law enforcement affects the outcome of many criminal cases. It is hard to know exactly how many people have been wrongfully convicted because police officers or people involved in the criminal investigation withheld exculpatory evidence or even flat out lied on the witness stand. You can get the court to reject pieces… Read More »
Is House Bill 495 Coming for Your Rights?
If you are at a loss for interesting conversation topics at a social gathering, you could do worse than discussing all the ways that Florida is unique among its fellow United States. Florida is the only state with a native population of crocodiles. It is the first place on what would become the United… Read More »
Proposed Changes to Nitrous Oxide Laws
Let’s face it. By now, “smoke shop” is a misnomer. The name applied to those stores in the mall, with scary wooden statues out front and a heavy, sweet smell that permeated into the main thoroughfare, following you until you got close to the Orange Julius stand, where the smell of Florida citrus once… Read More »
Criminal Sentences Are Clear Cut, Except When They Are Not
The moment at a criminal trial where a judge declares that the jury has found the defendant not guilty is such an intense feeling of relief that, if it happens to you, everything except the fact that you do not have to go to prison and do not have to have a criminal conviction… Read More »
Chronically Online in Furtherance of a Crime
Let us count the ways that social media can get you into trouble. Content creators and algorithm designers have learned to target everyone’s worst nature, to make you feel angry, insecure, lonely, paranoid, and utterly convinced of your poorly thought-out ideas. Two friends whose ostensibly harmless clicks led them down rabbit holes of differing… Read More »
False Personation Charges
If you want evidence that people no longer see the world in terms of clearly defined good guys and bad guys, look at popular culture marketed toward young people. Antiheroes rule the day, everywhere from superhero movies to pro wrestling. Batman, even in his gravelly voiced permutation in the Lego Batman Movie, has always… Read More »
Crimes Against Crocodilians
In many parts of the country, the only thing you have to fear if you swim in a river or lake, or if your canoe capsizes, is a brain-eating amoeba, and while primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) infections are rare, only a few people have ever survived them. If you enter unchlorinated freshwater in Florida,… Read More »
Do Anonymous Web Communications Make for Compelling Evidence?
For every techno-optimist out there, there is someone else who is pondering how much simpler forensic science used to be before the Internet became a ubiquitous presence in the devices that almost every man, woman, and child in developed countries possesses. Remember when you could solve murder cases by testing DNA found at the… Read More »
Casting Doubt on Informant Testimony
It is easy to say, from your current position, that you would never act as a police informant, but it is less easy to know what you would do if the prosecutors had an informant lined up to testify at your trial about what you said to him about illegal drugs, plus a recording… Read More »
Criminal Cases Involving Hit and Run
Now that generative AI chatbots are having their 15 minutes of fame these days, people are asking them questions and getting neat, grammatically correct responses, perhaps a little bit too neat. If you ask Chat GPT or another one of the leading bots what happens after a hit and run accident, it will probably… Read More »
