Category Archives: Criminal Law
What Is Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel?
What does it mean to have a fair trial? The Bill of Rights sheds some light on the matter, and case law has further interpreted it. For example, a fair trial should take place soon enough after the original accusations that the defendant does not have to spend years in suspense about his or… Read More »
Lottery Winner Arrested For Assaulting Police Officer During Trip To Florida
If you win the lottery jackpot, the lessons you will learn will be more valuable than anything you buy. Money can’t buy happiness. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Be careful what you wish for. No one is above the law. News stories about lottery winners fall into two categories. Either… Read More »
Florida’s Sentencing Guidelines For Youthful Offenders
People in their late teens and early 20s are legally adults. They can engage in adult activities such as marriage and getting tattoos, but the current version of you probably resembles your 25-year-old self more closely than it resembles your 20-year-old self. The criminal justice system acknowledges that the defendant’s age makes a difference;… Read More »
Does Hearsay Count As Evidence Or Gossip?
Talk is cheap, even when it is big business. These days, it seems like everyone aspires to make a living by running their mouth on social media, giving their reactions to other people’s reactions to videos depicting events that, in the grand scheme of things, are inconsequential. It is to everyone’s benefit that these… Read More »
Criminal Charges For Leaving Children Unattended
Florida law does not indicate a specific age at which children can stay home alone or for how long parents can leave children home alone before their behavior counts as neglect. Disagreements over when and for how long it is appropriate to leave children home alone are a frequent source of co-parenting disputes among… Read More »
Problem-Solving Courts Are All Around You
For years, lawmakers introduced more and more punitive responses to repeated minor offenses until people were serving life sentences for minor crimes. For example, Leandro Andrade is serving a life sentence in California for stealing VHS tapes from K-Mart because of three strikes laws that were on the books at the time of his… Read More »
Copper Theft Is A Felony In Florida
It makes sense why people would want to steal gold. If this were not the case, then screenwriters would have to come up with new movie plots, and filmmakers would have to set the climactic sequences of action films somewhere besides a bank vault, even if it meant building new film sets. Likewise, it… Read More »
Supreme Court Ruling Offers A Second Chance For Defendants Convicted Before The First Step Act
A popular setup for fish out of water stories is that the protagonist returns home after spending a long time isolated from the outside world and finds out how much everything has changed; in some such stories, the protagonist has been in prison for a decade or more. In a documentary about a man… Read More »
The Trouble With Tianeptine
You know not to mess with heroin. Ever since your grandparents were old enough to read the newspaper, people have been dying of heroin overdoses or of apparently minor ailments at the bottom of a downward spiral caused by heroin addiction; heroin is also a Schedule I controlled substance, meaning that it is always… Read More »
Emojis As Evidence In Criminal Cases
People who are old enough to remember face to face communication and real time phone conversations can tell you how frustrating it is to communicate by text message. The same words can have multiple meanings depending on context, and when someone is texting you, you cannot rely on the person’s tone of voice or… Read More »
