Category: Blog

          Sometimes a person will be arrested, yet the case never actually goes to court either because the police do not file the case with the State Attorney’s Office or because the State Attorney’s Office decides not to prosecute the case. When that happens, there is a procedure whereby an individual can request that the […]

The following article appeared in the New York Times earlier this week: In an age of advanced forensic science, the first step toward ending Kenneth Reed’s prolonged series of legal appeals should be simple and quick: a DNA test, for which he has offered to pay, on evidence from the 1991 rape of which he […]

          In May 2004, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer, as a material witness in an investigation of terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Madrid, Spain.  The FBI Laboratory maintained that Mayfield's fingerprint was found on a bag of detonators in Madrid that was connected to the attacks.  Two weeks after […]

          In the case of United States v. Francis, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit stated that the defense of entrapment consists of the following two elements:             1.  Government inducement of the crime; and             2.  A lack of predisposition on the part of the defendant to commit […]

On January 25, 2009, I posted an article on this website entitled "Judge Throws Out More Than 100 Breathalyzer Tests."  The article discussed how two different appellate courts affirmed the rulings of Manatee County Court Judge Doug Henderson that evidence of breath alcohol tests in more than 100 drunk-driving cases could not be presented at […]

          Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Herring v. United States in which the issue presented was whether evidence found during a search incident to arrest must be excluded in a later prosecution when that evidence was seized by the police in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.   […]

          The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that searches conducted by the police without first obtaining a search warrant are unlawful unless those searches fall within certain recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement contained in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  One of those exceptions permits police officers to conduct warrantless searches during or […]

When a person is arrested for a State crime in Florida, he is typically taken before a judge within twenty-four hours of his arrest so that the judge can set the conditions of his release from jail.  That hearing is called a first appearance, and it is governed by Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.130. Sometimes, […]

          In the case of Wiles v. Bagley, Boyce F. Martin, Jr., a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, stated that "[c]apital punishment in this country remains 'arbitrary, biased, and so fundamentally flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair."           In this particular case, Mark Wiles […]

In the case of Jacobson v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Mr. Jacobson after finding that agents of the federal government entrapped him when they overstepped the line between trapping an unwary innocent person and trapping an unwary criminal. In 1984, Mr. Jacobson ordered two magazines and a brochure from […]