It has been a busy year for criminal law development. With the seemingly unending current events surrounding police and citizen relations, the topic of when it is legal to run from police has resurfaced. It is already established by now that Freddie Gray was not doing anything wrong when he…
Recently, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to adopt changes in the guidelines that judges use in sentencing white collar crimes – to be effective this coming November. The decision came in part as a reaction to the overpopulation crisis in the prison population, and increasing costs of incarceration. The current…
On April 12, 2015, a man by the name of Freddie Gray was chased down and arrested for “possession of a switchblade” by Baltimore PD. Eyewitnesses report Gray screaming and asking for medical attention. By April 19, a week later, Gray had slipped into a coma and died while in…
As Baltimore becomes the latest casualty of events transpiring from police brutality, another Justice Department investigation is underway for the multitude of constitutional rights Freddie Gray may have suffered at the hands of police. Most people don’t think of criminal law as being fundamentally intertwined with our basic constitutional rights,…
The State of Washington was the first state in the nation to pass the ‘no-nonsense’ 3 strikes policy to address repeat, criminal offenders in 1993. California enacted its 3 strikes law shortly after Washington in 1994. These “habitual offender laws” are statutes adopted by individual state legislatures to impose harsher…
The Supreme Court once again re-visited the topic of traffic stops (the Court held this past December that evidence obtained from a search at a traffic stop based on a mistake of law was okay). Its most recent ruling issued on April 21 held that that police may not detain…
On Tuesday, April 21, the U.S. Marshals Service announced they would be reviewing a video that shows a deputy U.S. Marshall in South Gate, California charging at a woman who was filming them at a crime scene, grabbing her phone, smashing it onto the curb, and then subsequently kicking her…
As if the recent current events surrounding Eric Garner and Michael Brown were not enough, this month saw two more high profile cases detailing police misconduct and brutality which made national news. In South Carolina, the tasering and shooting of Walter Scott occurred as he was running away from the…
On Friday, April 3rd, 28 year old San Diego man Kevin Bollaert was convicted in the San Diego Superior Court and sentenced to 18 years for 27 counts of identity theft and extortion via California’s newly enacted revenge porn law. Additionally, he was ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution. Although…
Well, the answer is everything. Courts and the public opinion are increasingly viewing the family pet and other companion animals as family members, and the legal trend of covering pets in domestic violence (DV) protective orders are expected to increase. This trend responds to the evidence that 71% of women…