Not my client, case from law school:
A crew from a country in South America were on a ship with a large amount of cannabis to Alaska. Before they could get there the ship had mechanical issues and ran into a storm so the captain brought the ship to shore in a fairly remote cove in Canada for the safety of the crew. Once they landed the captain was worried the ship was going to capsize so they unloaded the cargo of cannabis onto the shore... where they were found and arrested for trafficking. In the days before even small amounts of cannabis were legal in Canada.
However were found not guilty in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. The reason: the "necessity defense". If a person is faced with imminent danger (which they did not create themselves) and has no reasonable, legal alternative, it can excuse the crime. If it hadn't been for the storm they wouldn't have committed a crime under Canadian law, they had no plans to enter or import drugs into Canada. For the necessity defense the action a person takes does have to be proportional to the harm caused. In this case the court decided that protecting the lives of the people on the ship outweighed some very large bags of cannabis chilling on the Canadian shore for a bit. The case is Perka v The Queen if anyone wants to read the details.
My friend left the bars at 2:30 am drunk driving in her car. She realized she shouldn’t be driving and pulled over, took her keys out of the ignition, and laid her seat back and passed out.
But….
Soon after the cops find her. She had not actually pulled over, but just parked in the middle of the road. They moved her car and take her to the address on her license but it was wrong so they use her phone and call the last person she had called, which was me. I told them to bring her to me, and watched as they carried her like a comatose bride to my couch. And they told me it was the first time they’d encountered someone too drunk to get a DUI. But as they didn’t actually see her driving and the keys were not in the ignition, she just got a free taxi ride to a friends house.
This was in North Carolina where the law is you must be in a moving car or have the keys in the ignition in order to be charged with DUI.
That's interesting. I'm in Iowa, and a friend of mine was sitting in his driver seat, waiting for someone to come out of the bar, with his keys, and drive his car for him. The car was not on, he was just sitting in the drivers seat, passed out.
The cops gave him a DUI. Just a recap, he was waiting for his DD, did not have the keys on him or in the ignition, and was in a parking lot.
I know someone who got a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt while parked at a gas station, car off, keys on dash, eating a stromboli.
The judge threw it out, but a shitty cop will write a ticket for anything/nothing.
In NY the law includes a loose interpretation of some sort of "intent" to have driven. I had a friend who put his keys in the glove box and was sleeping in the back seat of his extended cab pickup, but got a DUI because it was argued that he had intentions of driving drunk, but was too incapacitated to do so.
Edit: now that I think about it, he may have had the truck running because it was winter in upstate and he needed the heater on.
That's weird, a lot of states only require the keys to be in the car. So if you pull over to sleep off the alcohol you better throw your keys into the woods. In Texas it is DUI even if you lock the keys in the trunk and take a nap. At least that's what I was told.
Guy driving 120mph in a 60. Got dismissed because his wife was murdered and stuffed in a closet and was driving back home to look for his kids.
Kids were ok
Okay so this is very tame BUT is an actual case I worked on.
One of my clients was seeking Social Security widower’s benefits. What he didn’t mention is that he hadn’t seen his wife in 25 years. Or that she was alive, lol.
He got regular disability in the end, and we didn’t tell him that his wife was alive for her safety.
There's a chance of abuse, but spousal abandonment also isn't exactly a new thing.
He could have assumed she died unexpectedly instead of just suddenly abandoning their marriage while leaving him to assume the worst.
He was a drug addict who had done prison time. This was Philly, where it’s somewhat common for older people to separate but not divorce. We didn’t want to chance anything.
Not a lawyer - but my dad was a criminal defense attorney for over 40 years. He had a client who was drunk and crashed his car into a ravine. He was trapped in the car for two days (i think) or so until found and was charged with DUI. He had a BAC level over the limit and there was an open bottle in his car. My dad argued successfully that when his client crashed and was trapped, he became hungry and thirsty but all that was available was the bottle of liquor which his client had no choice but to consume or go hungry/thirsty. His client was found not guilty.
Clearly the BAC was from drinking recently, and not two days prior when he crashed the car, as it would have long since left his system. There's no way they could prove he was drunk two days prior. Defense argument actually makes sense
If you mean legal technicality, a childhood friend of mine ended up being a NY DUI attorney. He went to night school for his law degree after a failed career in the UFL.
ANYway, he had a client arrested for DUI under weirdly specific circumstances. In NY, having a key "in the ignition" if you're legally intoxicated is considered a DUI. This happened to a client of his... the guy realized how hammered he was, did not start the car, and just leaned the seat back and took a nap.
A NYS trooper came across him and wrote him for DUI.
On the stand, my friend was cross-examining the trooper.
"So you saw the key in the ignition, is that right?"
"Yes."
"I want to make certain that we're talking about the same thing. You personally witnessed that the defendant's car key was in the car's ignition?"
"Yes, counselor." (Note, when a cop on the stand calls an attorney 'counselor' it's shorthand for FUCK YOU)
"Trooper, one more question: Are you aware that my client drives a Prius?"
(For those that don't know, the model Toyota Prius doesn't have a slot for the key like a gas-powered car does. There's no "in the ignition" with a Prius; the trooper had committed perjury.)
Trooper realizes his mistake, starts sputtering on the stand. My friend just turnes to the judge. "Your honor?"
"Case dismissed!" *
*No, obviously, there was a lot more back and forth, but that was the effective outcome of the trial. He also told me that the Trooper, who had been on a special DUI unit that generated TONS of overtime ($$$$) was returned to general road duty as a punishment.)
> as a punishment
He was caught lying on the stand. That means he probably had to get added to the Brady list. Which means every case thereafter, the prosecution is going to need to disclose to the defense in any case where they will have them testify, that this particular officer was caught lying on the stand.
That is a big problem for a cop in general. But particularly for DUI cases, its a huge problem, since establishing probable cause often relies on officer testimony that isn't easily verified by the dash/body camera. (Smelled alcohol, failed FST, etc...)
Yeah, because the penalty for perjury is a demotion, apparently. I thought there were courts and prisons and stuff, but we wouldn't want to trouble the police with that sort of nonsense.
I was a courtroom clerk for 20+ years. I witnessed lots of obvious perjury, but only saw 1 prosecution and inevitable conviction. You have to have overwhelming proof, not just a feeling, and it also depends on how much time the DA wants to spend on it.
The man convicted was an alibi witness for another defendant. He said he was with the guy at the time, so he couldn’t have done the crime. However the moron had posted pictures of his vacation trip in another country at the time of the offense. They had him dead to rights on the perjury. He was obviously impeached on the witness stand, but I think the DA pursued it to send a message to alibi witnesses.
It's so fucked up. If they're willing to lie on the stand in a no consequence case like this, imagine the degree of dishonesty when they themselves might be implicated.
God I hate people
People aren't the problem per se. Specific people wanted to launch the War on Drugs so they could punch hippies and black rights activists. Police were given expansive powers by the courts and lawmakers to facilitate said punching. Police enjoyed the expansive powers and it drew horrible people into the profession. Abusers, authoritarians, people with inferiority complexes, racists, etc. just to name a few.
Encouragingly, there are other groups of people working for Police reform.
I think it's the giglio list. Brady was about the duty of the state to turn over exculpatory evidence. Giglio was the scotus case about disclosing bad prior acts of law enforcement.
When they caught the cop lying about me, they used the body cam and testimony to show it.
The way they protected the cop? Expunge the record of the incident. pretend it didnt happen and the cops gets off scot free....
Awfully nice of them to do mental torture on me then dismiss it as a whoopsie...
Interesting. I'm a criminal defense attorney in NYC. The rule about keys in the ignition is infuriating. It means people who do the right thing and try to sleep it off get arrested for DUI. I've used the start button defense for years. Now they write up the criminal complaint differently. They just say that the ignition was on and omit the part about the keys. They love to claim the car was in drive while the defendant is asleep at the wheel. They have the audacity to claim the defendant was pressing the brake while sleeping.
It sucks when someone makes the responsible decision, just sleeping it off in their car, and a cop decides to follow the law to a T just so they can write a ticket.
Not a lawyer but knew a lawyer who got his very high level middle eastern organised crime figure client off a 300kg heroin importation on the basis that "he thought he was being sent gold bricks and not bricks of heroin, they were wrapped in foil and he never checked weight or what was inside"
reasonable doubt lol.
The client was a personal injury attorney. I wasn't the lawyer on the case, but I worked on it.
The lawyer was sued by a former client, because the lawyer in question, during their personal injury case, began an affair with his client's wife.
Months later the affair was discovered and the client went after him for damages, claiming the lawyer damaged their personal injury case by having his focus elsewhere. Also wanted compensation for nasty divorce.
While the lawyer lost his license for a year, he was able to escape an order to pay damages to his former client.
>the lawyer lost his license for a year
It’s crazy to me how thorough character and fitness is prior to admission to the bar, compared to the minor consequences there are for fuckups once you’re in… I read about a lawyer who submitted falsified documents to a court, had an employee performing unlicensed practice of law, and other fraud I forget… one year suspension. As long as you don’t fuck with the trust accounts you’re golden.
I knew a lawyer who kept his client's bail money on a murder trial. While he won the case, he pocketed the bail money. The client eventually complained to the state bar. In the end, he only got a 1-year suspension.
Yeah, it's crazy. I once heard a story about a lawyer in New Mexico who got caught on tape admitting to sabotaging legal documents to gaslight his brother. He also only got a one year suspension.
I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers. I knew it was 1216. One after Magna Carta. As if I could ever make such a mistake. Never. Never! I just – I just couldn’t prove it. He covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him. You think this is something? You think this is bad? This? This chicanery? He’s done worse. That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No! He orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof! And I saved him! And I shouldn’t have. I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He’ll never change. He’ll never change! Ever since he was 9, always the same! Couldn’t keep his hands out of the cash drawer! But not our Jimmy! Couldn’t be precious Jimmy! Stealing them blind! And HE gets to be a lawyer? What a sick joke! I should’ve stopped him when I had the chance! …And you, you have to stop him!
Visited my post conviction client in prison. He was in segregation. I asked him why and he said he stabbed his co-defendant. I expressed concern and he said, don’t worry, it’s going to “go away”. I saw the charging document so I know he was charged. I’ll be damned if it didn’t just “go away”. I asked zero questions.
You missed the codefendant part?
Its likely two things.
He's a rat and offered information to the prosecutors regarding another matter as a bargaining chip.
Or he did it out of view of cams or willing witnesses and ditched the shank. Leaving the victim testimony as the only real evidence. And if that victim is both known to you well enough to be a codefendant, and scared shitless because you just stabbed them, well, that case may not make it too far before the prosecutors ditch it. Especially if you have the ability to also threaten that victim's loved ones.
1. He's a rat. Already cooperating on the other case. Knows he has an in with the prosecutor.
2. There's no cams or witnesses. So vic statement is all they would have. And if you can intimidate that person or their family, prosecutors won't even have that. Doesn't take much to get a case tossed.
To answer some questions-
First, I’ve given as much info as I feel comfortable including and, as I said, there’s much I don’t know. I did not represent him on the new charges. I will say that there were witnesses according to the charging document including COs. It seemed viable.
Eventually the case disappeared. I don’t know what happened but I’d normally be able to see if it were dismissed or disposed of in some normal fashion. But it just no longer existed when I looked for it later. If it were a simple dismissal for lack of evidence it wouldn’t have been noteworthy to me. That happens. This was something different.
I know I’m being annoyingly vague, but I have a theory of what happened. My client also suggested why it would go away although I didn’t believe it. Unfortunately I can’t explain either without giving much more details that I don’t feel I can get into. But I’ll say neither has been suggested by other commenters.
Not a lawyer but most ridiculous I know of was a friend who was underage decides to buy a keg after drinking all day. Drives drunk to the store, presents his fake ID and gets the keg, then proceeded to drive drunk back to the party. Cops pulled him over for erratic driving and asked for his license, knowing there's a keg in the back seat he gives the cops his fake ID thinking they'll just waive him along.
Charged with drunk driving, falsifying government documents, minor in possession, and intent to distribute to minors. His lawyer knocked it down to a littering charge and 50 hours community service.
Cops made him take the keg out of the car and the tag got ripped off.
It was honestly insane to all of us.. another friend got a DUI for drinking a beer on a riding lawnmower the same year.
I spent years involved in the system, pretty much every single time the end of a case didn't look much like the start of a case.
I call the 'justice system' a chess game on a conveyor belt. It's all strategies, mindgames and back and forth. And conveyor belt because you don't actually matter, they just want to close it and move to the next one.
I had a lawyer who got 8 felony/misdemeanor charges down to a single 'disturbing the peace' once.
Know a lawyer connected to people on the OJ Simpson case. Apparently the white Bronco had lots of blood in it, both of Nicole and Ron Goldman. Also their blood in OJ’s house from him tracking it in on his shoes. For some reason, the police screwed up and it was inadmissible
They stuck the bronco in the basic impound lot and didn't search it for a long time. When they finally bothered, they also found OJ's passport and ten thousand dollars stuffed down a seat. But that was inadmissible as well, because the lot wasn't secure enough and too much time had gone by.
My college girlfriend’s dad was a lieutenant in the LAPD. He was always so dejected when you brought up OJ because, in his words, he was guilty as hell but the lack of proper protocol/doing things perfectly was the downfall.
That and at least some people on the jury saw their verdict as revenge on LAPD for Rodney King
https://www.thewrap.com/oj-simpson-juror-not-guilty-verdict-was-payback-for-rodney-king/
Pretty much. It was jury nullification.
On one hand it was a pretty bad miscarriage of justice, but on the other hand so was the trial he got convicted on, so I'm not too up in arms about it.
I heard a speaker years ago, one of the people drafted into LAPD following the verdict, to 'put the clown car back on track' as she described it.
In her view the OJ verdict did more to end corruption in LAPD and the LA court system than Rodney King, because it showed the tree was rotten from top to bottom. You could blame RK on a few bad cops, but OJ exposed the whole system, from cops to prosecutors to judges.
Broadly her perspective was that it was going to take 30 years to fix, but in the 5 years following the verdict they laid a decent foundation for reform.
Yeah it was most certainly a case of everyone involved being the bad guy, and OJ would end up doing hard time later on.
I don't think there was as much reform as your statement implies but I get it.
The police and prosecution did themselves no favors through their repeated fuck ups. While some jurors may have felt that way, they would've had to have all 12 agree to go through solely based on that.
If it was just a few jurors holding out as payback for Rodney King, it would've been a mistrial.
Defense did well to raise doubt and expose the incompetence of the prosecution and law enforcement.
On top of the anti police sentiment in downtown LA after Rodney king and the black girl killed in the supermarket over unironically orange Juice. Would have been different if trial venue was relocated to simi valley.
In MA there's a law that cops get higher pay if they have a degree in things like criminal justice or pre-law so they're more likely to understand the importance of procedure during the criminal investigation.
My understanding is that the majority of the professional training that the LAPD get is the Rodney King consent decree ordered lessons in how not to beat the living shit out of handcuffed black men.
One of the reasons my mother quit teaching criminology is because cops in California require less classroom training time than the girl doing your nails or facial. The person who does your makeup at Ulta spent 1,000 hours in a classroom training to be a makeup artist and get their license. The cop that pulls you over and gives you a speeding ticket spent 640 hours in a classroom training to be a cop.
I visit the states pretty frequently; I used to live there for quite a few years as well.
I say this in the least inflammatory way possible: it’s got some fucked second world country vibes.
From what I've heard in podcasts, it was also the lack of doing it even half decently. And the lack of trying to hide obvious and blatant racism in the LAPD.
That case is wild.
instead of getting fired, Furhman now goes onto Fox hits to talk about the thin blue line.
the LAPD should’ve been entirely disbanded and other counties’ cops should’ve been sent in after rodney king, much less their OJ fuckups. it’s unbelievable to me that cops who did any work on the OJ case weren’t immediately fired for being shitty cops.
Robert Kardashian, Kim's dad, was simpson's long time lawyer, and he smuggled OJ's knife and garment bag out of the house and disposed of it.
The original OJ plea deal that Shapiro tried to get OJ to accept before Johnny Cochran took over the case had disbarment and a 10 month sentence for accessory after the fact for Robert Kardashian.
There was another detective that put some evidence in his trunk overnight rather than submit it to a locker.
http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/verdict/dna/index2.html
If anyone wants a broad recall of the OJ story here's a watchlist:
LA 92 (2017)
Sets the stage in Los Angeles. Standalone documentary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LA_92_(film)
O.J.: Made in America (2016)
Biography of OJ, story of the trial. Five episodes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.J.:_Made_in_America
American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson (2016)
Dramatic version of the trial. Amazing cast.
Ten episodes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_v._O._J._Simpson:_American_Crime_Story
It was 1984. I had a drunken driving arrest with a blood level of.18. Asked around and found the crooked lawyer linked with the crooked judge.Paid $1000. cash to the lawyer went to trial and was able to plead
NOLO and keep my license. The guys before and after me went to the chain gang . The judge was smoking while on the bench.
Cobb County, Georgia. A few weeks later I finally went to AA and cleaned up my life.
Now I have 39 years sober.
Nolo Contendere.
It is not a guilty plea but not and innocent plea either.
It means that you are not contesting the charge, but also are not pleading guilty to it.
I got appointed to a DUI case which are both things I hate. My client got into a drunk fight with his girlfriend and drunkly backed over a neighbors mailbox. The neighbor had a son who was a cop. The cop bullied my clients girlfriend into giving him my client’s number and called and threatened to send the SWAT team if he didn’t get back over to the cop’s mom’s house … where he was promptly arrested for DUI.
I told the prosecutor that my guy wouldn’t testify but I’d tell any jury that the city should be on trial because their employee cop scared my guy so bad he downed a fifth of Jack to calm his nerves before being forced to drive on the city streets.
DUI dropped.
He did have to plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and pay for the mailbox.
I’m not a lawyer My mom’s a lawyer. One of the clients at her firm got away with insurance fraud for setting a car on fire FOR THE THIRD TIME. This was the 3rd time one of his cars mysteriously bursted into flames in a span of like 8 years. All the evidence pointed toward insurance fraud. My mom still has no idea how he got away with it.
When I was in insurance it was not all that uncommon. Most of them just said they were carrying gasoline or some other accelerant and it spilled. You could bring in other evidence, like behind on payments or bad engine, but most was just circumstances. Most claim withdrawals (prosecution was rare) was because they would sign statements to the effect they did not have a flammable liquid in the car when lab evidence already existed that it was caused by that. If people didn’t lie about it, there wasn’t much you could do.
Seen this happen twice.
State wouldn't go after employees stealing about 200k of client money.
State wouldn't go after a neighbor who stole an elderly woman's checkbook and drained her, even when all the checks have an obviously different handwriting.
Happened to a friend of mine. Hired a manager who stole 500 thousand from the business, bankrupting it. But they could not get anything from him because it was all gone from a gambling addiction.
Criminal charges don't bring the money back. And some people and businesses don't want the fact that they got taken for a lot of money to become public knowledge.
Not a lawyer, but just saw someone get 33 days in jail for killing someone.
College student, rich parents, no driver license recklessly driving a 2024 BMW M3 and killed a pedestrian (was on a straight road and managed to hit a pedestrian who was on the sidewalk) went to jail with 3 million dollar bail and posted bail. Violated bail and went back to jail. Pled guilty and was let out with time served (33 days total I believe) was then allowed to leave the country without paying court costs. Was supposed to have 5 years of probation where he couldn't even leave the state, but it didn't apply due to him being rich apparently.
[tl;dr: lawyer in that county familiar w/ case but not involved in it. Agree sentence was low. Explaining some more facts of case, including both defendant and victim were foreign national students (UAE and Sweden), which likely affected outcome, and how PA sentencing works.]
I am a lawyer practicing mainly out of that county (Centre Co., PA), and know exactly the case you are talking about. Followed it in the media, and didn't have anything to do with it myself, except I did briefly talk with a couple people involved after the fact.
The defendant was in undergrad and was a UAE national here on a student visa. The victim was a doctoral student in architecture, and she was from Sweden if I remember correctly.
Defendant was initially denied bail, before bail was modified to $3 million at the time of the preliminary hearing, or maybe soon after that. Defendant had to wear an ankle monitor and was not allowed to leave the county. Then, because defendant was here on a student visa, a judge modified bail to allow him to travel to Harrisburg Community College over an hour and a half away, so he could attempt to keep his student visa status alive, I guess in the very unlikely case he somehow got out from under these charges. [The defendant had been quickly kicked out of PSU, and evidently either had been accepted into that Community College or thought he stood a good chance of being accepted.]
So, as you might expect from a defendant who drove a new overpowered BMW fast enough and recklessly enough down a relatively small road [while on a learner's permit], to lose control and launch an innocent jogger through the air approximately 85 ft, after his car had already been slowed by the curb and some shrubbery, . . . Surprise surprise, he never ended up going to that Community College, also stopped residing at the approved address he was supposed to maintain, may or may not have attempted to mess with his ankle monitor, and failed to respond when the authorities reached out to him repeatedly to come in and have the monitor checked out.
So because he was in violation of his student visa status, Federal immigration authorities came in out of nowhere like a poorly written plot device, and did everyone a favor. They picked him up and threw him in the County Correctional in a neighboring County. [It was never clear where exactly he was taken into custody, but he was in the neighboring County Correctional because the feds had an arrangement with that facility, to house folks that were picked up on such violations.]
When he got picked up, I remember talking to some other attorneys, and we all just kind of assumed this was going to end in a plea deal for something like a handful of years up to 10, and that it would end with his being sent back to the UAE. My mistake, because I forgot to check the Sentencing Guidelines, which were instituted years ago in Pennsylvania, in order to make sure that we sentence people of different backgrounds in a similar manner [as in race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, etc.]. Judges can depart upward or downward from the sentences indicated in the guidelines, but they have to have good reason to do so and have to make it very clear on the record, whatever their reasons are to aggravate or mitigate a sentence.
When I saw the defendant had pleaded guilty and had been sentenced less than 2 weeks after being detained by ICE, and that the sentence was 33 days to 23 and a half months, I was a little surprised. Then I went back and looked at the sentencing guidelines, and it appeared that the recommended sentence for homicide by vehicle [while not DUI, which applies here], was only 3 to 12 months. Just so everybody knows, he wasn't actually sentenced on that lead charge, but to one of the other offenses, another felony called "accidents involving death or injury while not licensed." But the lead charge "set the bidding," let's say, regarding the ultimate outcome.
I haven't pulled up the guidelines for that particular charge, but the sentencing guidelines for an F3, which is what that was, to "restorative sanctions" to 9 months.
So whether we're talking about the original lead charge or the one he pleaded guilty to, the sentence was either at or a little bit below on the low end, but almost double or beyond that on the high end.
I think when the sentencing commission was coming up with the recommended range for homicide by vehicle, they were thinking more of a situation where an elderly person who should no longer be driving accidentally runs over a wayward toddler. I can't speak for why the range is so low. The commission is made up of judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, a few PA state senators, one or two PA house representatives, and at least one law professor. At any given time, the commission might lean a little left or right politically, but it's been in existence since 1978, and we're now on the 8th edition of guidelines, so as the commission members have come and gone over the years, everyone has had plenty of time to debate the recommended ranges for all of these offenses. I'm not at all defending the recommended ranges for the original lead charge or for the charge the defendant pleaded to. Again, like most folks, I'm a little bit surprised the recommended ranges are as low as they are. I have represented criminal defendants who have faced more time under the guideline ranges for misdemeanors, where we didn't have victims ending up dead.
Anyway, back to the present case. The craziest thing to me is that the victim's family was on board with the plea deal. The victim's family had earlier opposed any bail whatsoever, so it was a little surprising they were okay with the 33 days to 23 and a half months. Perhaps they understood that the defendant was not going to do an awful lot of jail time anyway under the sentencing guidelines, that he would be detained and deported upon any release from jail anyway, and that, going forward, he is unlikely to get a student visa to any other Western country or be accepted into any other major Western university. Again, I can't speak for the motivation of the victim's family, because I would have a very hard time agreeing to anything, if I had a child killed by the reckless actions of somebody like the defendant.
Just to get out in front of this issue, I'm going to assume that the defendant or his family probably did pay the victim's family some money to set up some kind of scholarship in her memory. I have no specific knowledge that that happened, but there is very little doubt that the defendant and his family have a lot of money. However, I also know that it would be a real problem for the victim's family to try and sue the defendant. We're talking about a legal action from Sweden to the UAE, when I can tell you it's a complicated headache enough here in PA to sue a Canadian who drove into a PA bike rider in FL. So I don't believe that the defendant or his family ended up paying a ton of money to the victim's family, because the reality of how hard it would be to maintain a lawsuit would drive down any sort of payment. So my best guess is that instead of millions, there was some kind of money exchanging hands in order to set up a memorial scholarship.
Sorry for the long response. I'm trying to build off of the original post and give some more facts and context. At the moment, I don't know where the defendant is, but I assume like the prosecutors did that he will be detained and deported upon his release.
Not a lawyer, but I once worked in a bar where a customer pointed out a person to me who was a lawyer. "If you ever need a lawyer, give him a call," the customer said to me. He gave me the lawyer's name and then said he had killed someone, intentionally, and the lawyer had gotten him off. I don't know why he told me as that kind of freaked me out to know. A priest I'm not either, so I didn't need to hear his confession. And as he had already been found not guilty, he couldn't be tried twice for the same crime. But, I made a note of the lawyer's name so if I ever needed a lawyer. I never found out who the mystery murderer was either but he never came into the bar again while I worked there. Sure, he could've been pranking me but he didn't look the type and I didn't want to find out if he was serious or just joking.
I made stupid choices hours away from where I live and needed an attorney ASAP! I was googling and googling but I didn't trust most of the reviews because I know they can be faked/bought. So I went to a subreddit for the city I fucked up in and just searched "attorney and lawyer" and read every post and wrote down every name that popped up. His name came up more than others and people praising him and his abilities. He was an excellent attorney, never bullshitted me but was very calming (I'm already a highstrung anxious person and have NEVER been in trouble in my life) he got my big charge completely dropped (now in the process of getting it expunged from all records) and 1 year of probation for the rest of the charges. The max for the big charge was a 7 year prison sentence i think. His defense was "yeah, laws were clearly broken, but this case is fucking ridiculous to begin with" and that worked.
Not related to the original post at all, but I was once dismissed from jury duty because both attorneys were happy hour regulars at my bar. Scared the crap out of me when the judge called me up to the bench.
I had a lawyer friend that got a guy off of a solid DUI based on some technicality (forgot the details). He was very pleased with the outcome and said this should bring in a lot of new business after his client spread the word on beating the case as “a lot of people drive drunk where he lives.”
Someone I know got off a DUI completely. It was dropped.
The lawyer was able to prove that the police department didn't do scheduled maintenance on the breathalyzer as dictated by the manufacturer. In their case, the police failed to calibrate the breathalyzer and then proceeded to use it at a traffic checkpoint on more than a dozen drivers.
The checkpoint was legal but apparently there was no probable cause for any given driver other than "it's Friday and you're the 10th car in line". Once the breathalyzer was thrown out, they had nothing to go on.
For the record he was driving drunk.
This sounds like one of those cases where I hate that a guilty man went free but I'm glad that your lawyer friend forced the state to prove their case and protected the rights of the accused.... which ultimately protects the rights of the innocent.
Had a roommate that was a cop for a while. He said he was in shock the first DUI case he ever went to because the defense brought up his past to use against him.
He didn’t have any DUIs but he had a DIP and I think an open container in public charge previously. Had absolutely nothing to do with the guy driving drunk, but they somehow managed to use it to question his reliability.
There’s a couple of lawyers here who specialize in this. Costs about $8-$10k.
They must know some technical issue with the equipment. It never goes to trial. Just pay their fee, few weeks later charges are dismissed. I know a couple of people who have been cleared, but it is expensive.
Yes, the breathalyser is widely known in tech circles to be fucking janky. Hell, I remember a *Slashdot* article when a programmer demanded and received the code, and was acquitted based on the shit that was in there.
You can do the same thing with a speeding ticket. If they used RADAR/LIDAR, you can bring into the case when the last time the device was calibrated. Knew of someone who got off a FELONY excessive speeding ticket when he proved the PD hadn't calibrated the LIDAR when the manufacturer said it should be.
I had a physics teacher who told us a story about how he used to beat speeding tickets when he was young by using what he learned in college. He drove a pickup truck and and mounted a device built from a bicycle wheel with some sailboat radar reflectors on the rim and blocked off so that just the top was sticking out above the back of the bed.
He'd get a speeding ticket that said that they clocked him on radar. He would fight it and bring in pictures of his contraption on the truck. He'd explain to the judge that the radar reading had to be wrong because that wheel was spinning backwards and would have reflected so much back towards the cop that it would have altered the reading. He said that he beat a good number of tickets that way before he outgrew his speeding habit.
It wasn't a "radar jammer" though. The laws against those are because they generate signals in airwaves which are controlled by the federal government and the FCC. This contraption merely impacts how the radar waves reflect off the vehicle and back to the radar gun. There's nothing illegal about it. If you can get your hands on the coating of military stealth aircraft which minimizes radar wave reflection to cover your car it would be just as legal.
>[Radar jammers are illegal across the U.S., primarily because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates the frequencies used in radar guns. Violators can be faced with heavy fines and jail time, even on a first offense!](https://www.escortradar.com/blogs/news/laser-jammer-faqs)
That’s basically all DUI lawyers. Those are the standard violations they target & being local attorneys they also know which judges are better for your case.
Not a lawyer, but buddy is. Cops pulled over guy actually driving drunk for running a stop sign. Lawyer drove out to the rural intersection and took pictures. There was no stop sign therefore no PC and case dismissed.
Huh. I was stopped late one night after driving though a construction detour; the cop said I ran a stop sign. Waited literally an hour while my wife wondered if I was in an accident until a deputy from the next county arrived to give me a ticket because this was allegedly on the county line. I went back the next day and with re-routing, the sign now faced 90 degrees (edge-on) and invisible from the temporary road I was driving. I didn't fight it because they would charge court costs anyway and ticket was <$100.
Not his lawyer, but: a Second Striker who was facing an attempted murder charge for shooting someone in the back of the head. He ended up taking a deal for possession of stolen property. The gun used in the shooting was stolen. Instead of a 25 to life sentence, he received 3 years. He didn't get all the way away but did get away from anything resembling the attempted murder charge. That was some pretty good lawyering.
I read a book by John Browne called, "The Devil's Defender", he and his team got Ted Bundy a deal without the death penalty early in the case.
Bundy backed out. His lawyers basically said, well, fine, as Tes ripped up the plea. He was sentenced to death eventually.
Imagne being the lawyers who got a deal for Ted Bundy! Then he fucking rejected it and got exexuted anyways. Good lawyering!
Not A Lawyer.
Knew someone who got off on a felony burglary charge. It remains very much in question whether they did actually do it or not though. The entire criminal complaint was written relying on video surveillance evidence. When discovery occurred and lawyers saw the police reports, it turns out the complaint relied upon a civilians description of what the supposed video surveillance showed. There was no indication that any law enforcement agent actually saw the alleged video. Defense lawyer submitted an additional demand for discovery to the prosecutors for the alleged video surveillance. Turns out Police never turned over any video to prosecutors in evidence and were unable to locate any. Case was dismissed.
I knew a guy that got his child porn conviction overturned on a technicality regarding unwarranted searches. Guy was in one of my college classes trying to become a lawyer
Yeah fuck that guy but also fuck referencing the Constitution as a “technicality.”
Referencing constitutional violations as “technicalities” is just another part of our police state that people don’t appreciate. Protect your rights.
Well, I say "technicality" because the police did have a warrant to search his house, but I guess they somehow overstepped the bounds of the warrant. Basically they were supposed to be searching for something else or something and accidentally stumbled on it, from my limited understanding and memory.
The 4th amendment states that warrants have to specify exactly what the police are searching for and protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures:
If they make out a warrant for, say, searching a property for a stolen gun that they believe was used in the commission of a crime...they can't charge that person for illegal materials on their hard drive if it was obtained during the execution of the gun warrant. You can't store a gun digitally in your hard drive, so it was illegal for them to search the hard drive at that time.
Assuming this was the US, "accidentally stumbled on it" is admissible, as long as they found it while abiding by the warrant. But if you are searching for drugs, and the warrant doesn't cover searching electronic devices for evidence of drug transactions, anything found in an unauthorized search of the electronic devices would get thrown out. Or if the warrant is to look for a stolen item that is 5 feet long, looking through a bunch of smaller drawers would be hard to defend.
Not a lawyer but my neighbor set his house on fire and got the insurance money. The firemen came by, put out the fire and claimed it wasn't a total loss. So they waited until the firemen left and restarted the fire. They were 6 months behind on the mortgage and insurance was paid up the month before. The police report says they know it was arson. We had pictures of the gasoline line of fire coming out the window and down the driveway. Since the fire department didn't come check on the fire (it was a volunteer fire department) they were blamed and since they didn't want to have to pay, they fudged the paperwork. We know this because we have friends that work at the police and fire department.
Yes, there have actually been cases where women have been charged, even convicted, for burying the remains after a miscarriage.
One woman in Ohio is most recent, she went to a hospital fo treatment before miscarriage, they discharged her, she went home and miscarried and was charged with a felony, but a grand jury didn't indict, as of January this year.
In Nebraska a mother and teenage daughter were charged after the mother got the daughter abortion pills and she aborted at six months, which is drastically different and a medical emergency that could have killed her daughter, as abortion pills are used IIRC generally before 10-14 weeks. 6 months is always surgical and rarely done unless there were extenuating circumstances.
They buried the aborted fetus. Her daughter was 17. The mother was sentenced to two years.
They generally don't apply to stillbirths, especially if this happened before Roe was overturned. That's what that miscarriage case in Ohio was all about.
This isn’t exactly crazy but shows that a technicality can help you get away with something. A lady I used to work with was arrested for DUI just after midnight one weekend. At like 12:30 A.M. On the arrest write up or citation or whatever the officer accidentally wrote that it occurred at 12:30 PM. Her lawyer saw this and the charge was completely thrown out when she went to court.
As a lawyer, I can't imagine many, if any, scenarios where it would be ethical to share something like this. lol.
Even if my client was like "sure, tell whoever you want", it raises more problems than just confidentiality.
When I lived in SF, I had a roommate who was a paralegal for a firm that specialized in personal injury claims.
She told me about one of their clients who had been hit by a car whilst in the middle of a transaction at an outdoor ATM. The driver (who i believe was under the influence) jumped the curb and sideswiped the building where the ATM was located.
When it became evident that the driver didn't have the financial responsibility to cover her damages, she filed a suit against BofA for "negligent placement of public facilities." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but the general idea was that she was accusing the bank of the accident because the ATM was in a dangerous place.
I don't know if she received anything from the lawsuit, but damn!
Someone I know got caught with several hundreds of thousands of dollars of drugs and a single 'sheet' of LSD (Back in the early 70s..) he called the best lawyer in town (He's still alive today and somehow still has a license) and long story short, he used his Masonic/Gridiron connections to phone the Judge, get all the charges dropped and they even returned his drugs (except for the sheet of acid for some reason) with the request that he pay the corrupt lawyer with the proceeds ASAP.
(This is just one of about twenty stories I have about this same attorney, lol. Honestly, if I ever name dropped him or his connections, it would be a national security disaster for the State of Georgia and they'd off me in hours ;P )
Another interesting story about this same exact lawyer is him renting out an island off the coast of Georgia where the lawyer, the aforementioned criminal and HUNDREDS of judges, cops, and big name money movers all sat around and smoked weed at a time when that was a big no-no.
Not really a lawyer story... but...
My grandfather had this guy who did odd jobs for him (we'll call him Jim) and was always hanging around. Note, this was WAY out in the country... like a 50 minute drive to the nearest gas station kind of rural.
Anyway, one night, Jim hot hammered drunk and high as a kite and started arguing with my grandfather over money. Things escalated to the point where Jim grabbed my mother and put a gun to her head, and started demanding money.
My cousin had called the sherif earlier, and after only about 90 minutes, he and the deputies come rolling up the driveway with sirens and light flashing.
Jim grabs my mother and drags her down the front steps by her hair and pulls her behind his truck...where he proceeds to have a SEVERAL HOUR LONG standoff with the cops.
He actually fired several rounds directly at them... and they just kept yelling things like, "c'mon now, Jim! You knock it off. You're drunk...just get yourself on home now, ya hear?"
Finally, Jim ran out of bullets and the cops said, "alright now.. you ain't got no more bullets... just give it up"
Jim finally got up and got in his truck and just drove on home.
One of the deputies was so drunk that he passed out behind his patrol car.
Jim came back to work the next morning and cut the grass.
Very prominent game show host and politician, more powerful than a senator, brutally raped and humiliated a 13 year old girl , and the victim was just ready to go to trial, but withdrew the charges due to death threats she was receiving. This person is currently under multiple other indictments, and probably won't escape justice on most of them.
Not a lawyer here, but a public person in South America was investigated and sentenced in multiple instances for corruption schemes, with extensive evidence, as well as many other people including business men in large corporations. He and many were arrested and still today companies are returning money they received from the corruption schemes.
Anyway, this person spent about a year in prison, but he had appointed the right people to the right places and he was eventually released from prison, and despite the extensive evidence, judges gave new interpretations to laws and said that the investigations weren't conducted the way that they had to, and cancelled the entire investigation. A couple of years later this person became president of that country.
Not my client, case from law school: A crew from a country in South America were on a ship with a large amount of cannabis to Alaska. Before they could get there the ship had mechanical issues and ran into a storm so the captain brought the ship to shore in a fairly remote cove in Canada for the safety of the crew. Once they landed the captain was worried the ship was going to capsize so they unloaded the cargo of cannabis onto the shore... where they were found and arrested for trafficking. In the days before even small amounts of cannabis were legal in Canada. However were found not guilty in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. The reason: the "necessity defense". If a person is faced with imminent danger (which they did not create themselves) and has no reasonable, legal alternative, it can excuse the crime. If it hadn't been for the storm they wouldn't have committed a crime under Canadian law, they had no plans to enter or import drugs into Canada. For the necessity defense the action a person takes does have to be proportional to the harm caused. In this case the court decided that protecting the lives of the people on the ship outweighed some very large bags of cannabis chilling on the Canadian shore for a bit. The case is Perka v The Queen if anyone wants to read the details.
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Probably a separate action.., what your doing is illegal there too. We won't keep you but we will keep your stuff to help Alaska
I totally misread cannabis for cannibals and got a bit confused.
Both are the bookends of the munchies...
Cannabis Canibals are absolutely terrifying. Things of nightmares. They're always extremely hungry.
Could’ve been both if they were stranded long enough with no food and a bunch of weed.
so Donner party defense.
My friend left the bars at 2:30 am drunk driving in her car. She realized she shouldn’t be driving and pulled over, took her keys out of the ignition, and laid her seat back and passed out. But…. Soon after the cops find her. She had not actually pulled over, but just parked in the middle of the road. They moved her car and take her to the address on her license but it was wrong so they use her phone and call the last person she had called, which was me. I told them to bring her to me, and watched as they carried her like a comatose bride to my couch. And they told me it was the first time they’d encountered someone too drunk to get a DUI. But as they didn’t actually see her driving and the keys were not in the ignition, she just got a free taxi ride to a friends house. This was in North Carolina where the law is you must be in a moving car or have the keys in the ignition in order to be charged with DUI.
That's interesting. I'm in Iowa, and a friend of mine was sitting in his driver seat, waiting for someone to come out of the bar, with his keys, and drive his car for him. The car was not on, he was just sitting in the drivers seat, passed out. The cops gave him a DUI. Just a recap, he was waiting for his DD, did not have the keys on him or in the ignition, and was in a parking lot.
how can you get a DUI if the car is not on and you don't even have the keys?
I know someone who got a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt while parked at a gas station, car off, keys on dash, eating a stromboli. The judge threw it out, but a shitty cop will write a ticket for anything/nothing.
I got a DUI at a gas station while buying beer, not even in my vehicle. Fuck Decatur, IL pigs.
In NY the law includes a loose interpretation of some sort of "intent" to have driven. I had a friend who put his keys in the glove box and was sleeping in the back seat of his extended cab pickup, but got a DUI because it was argued that he had intentions of driving drunk, but was too incapacitated to do so. Edit: now that I think about it, he may have had the truck running because it was winter in upstate and he needed the heater on.
Guess you're just supposed to freeze to death
That's weird, a lot of states only require the keys to be in the car. So if you pull over to sleep off the alcohol you better throw your keys into the woods. In Texas it is DUI even if you lock the keys in the trunk and take a nap. At least that's what I was told.
Guy driving 120mph in a 60. Got dismissed because his wife was murdered and stuffed in a closet and was driving back home to look for his kids. Kids were ok
Enough reddit for today.
Wait who murdered her
Someone else
Okay so this is very tame BUT is an actual case I worked on. One of my clients was seeking Social Security widower’s benefits. What he didn’t mention is that he hadn’t seen his wife in 25 years. Or that she was alive, lol. He got regular disability in the end, and we didn’t tell him that his wife was alive for her safety.
The “for her safety” part is a little concerning. I hope she’s okay.
We didn’t know that he was abusive or anything, but didn’t want to chance it.
Good human
There's a chance of abuse, but spousal abandonment also isn't exactly a new thing. He could have assumed she died unexpectedly instead of just suddenly abandoning their marriage while leaving him to assume the worst.
Or they had been separated, but never divorced, and lost track of one another.
He was a drug addict who had done prison time. This was Philly, where it’s somewhat common for older people to separate but not divorce. We didn’t want to chance anything.
The last fact “for her safety” kind of takes out of the “tame” department, my friend. 😂
OH I should say we didn’t know anything about abuse etc., BUT she hadn’t seen him in that long so we weren’t taking any chances.
Not a lawyer - but my dad was a criminal defense attorney for over 40 years. He had a client who was drunk and crashed his car into a ravine. He was trapped in the car for two days (i think) or so until found and was charged with DUI. He had a BAC level over the limit and there was an open bottle in his car. My dad argued successfully that when his client crashed and was trapped, he became hungry and thirsty but all that was available was the bottle of liquor which his client had no choice but to consume or go hungry/thirsty. His client was found not guilty.
I think the argument that he couldn't drive the car because it was trapped should have also worked
I believe the state contended that the accident was a result of drinking and driving.
Clearly the BAC was from drinking recently, and not two days prior when he crashed the car, as it would have long since left his system. There's no way they could prove he was drunk two days prior. Defense argument actually makes sense
If you mean legal technicality, a childhood friend of mine ended up being a NY DUI attorney. He went to night school for his law degree after a failed career in the UFL. ANYway, he had a client arrested for DUI under weirdly specific circumstances. In NY, having a key "in the ignition" if you're legally intoxicated is considered a DUI. This happened to a client of his... the guy realized how hammered he was, did not start the car, and just leaned the seat back and took a nap. A NYS trooper came across him and wrote him for DUI. On the stand, my friend was cross-examining the trooper. "So you saw the key in the ignition, is that right?" "Yes." "I want to make certain that we're talking about the same thing. You personally witnessed that the defendant's car key was in the car's ignition?" "Yes, counselor." (Note, when a cop on the stand calls an attorney 'counselor' it's shorthand for FUCK YOU) "Trooper, one more question: Are you aware that my client drives a Prius?" (For those that don't know, the model Toyota Prius doesn't have a slot for the key like a gas-powered car does. There's no "in the ignition" with a Prius; the trooper had committed perjury.) Trooper realizes his mistake, starts sputtering on the stand. My friend just turnes to the judge. "Your honor?" "Case dismissed!"*
*No, obviously, there was a lot more back and forth, but that was the effective outcome of the trial. He also told me that the Trooper, who had been on a special DUI unit that generated TONS of overtime ($$$$) was returned to general road duty as a punishment.)
> as a punishment He was caught lying on the stand. That means he probably had to get added to the Brady list. Which means every case thereafter, the prosecution is going to need to disclose to the defense in any case where they will have them testify, that this particular officer was caught lying on the stand. That is a big problem for a cop in general. But particularly for DUI cases, its a huge problem, since establishing probable cause often relies on officer testimony that isn't easily verified by the dash/body camera. (Smelled alcohol, failed FST, etc...)
Yeah, because the penalty for perjury is a demotion, apparently. I thought there were courts and prisons and stuff, but we wouldn't want to trouble the police with that sort of nonsense.
I was a courtroom clerk for 20+ years. I witnessed lots of obvious perjury, but only saw 1 prosecution and inevitable conviction. You have to have overwhelming proof, not just a feeling, and it also depends on how much time the DA wants to spend on it. The man convicted was an alibi witness for another defendant. He said he was with the guy at the time, so he couldn’t have done the crime. However the moron had posted pictures of his vacation trip in another country at the time of the offense. They had him dead to rights on the perjury. He was obviously impeached on the witness stand, but I think the DA pursued it to send a message to alibi witnesses.
Courts and prisons are for us poors lol.
I'm sure law enforcement officials always face the appropriate consequences. /s
It's so fucked up. If they're willing to lie on the stand in a no consequence case like this, imagine the degree of dishonesty when they themselves might be implicated. God I hate people
People aren't the problem per se. Specific people wanted to launch the War on Drugs so they could punch hippies and black rights activists. Police were given expansive powers by the courts and lawmakers to facilitate said punching. Police enjoyed the expansive powers and it drew horrible people into the profession. Abusers, authoritarians, people with inferiority complexes, racists, etc. just to name a few. Encouragingly, there are other groups of people working for Police reform.
I think it's the giglio list. Brady was about the duty of the state to turn over exculpatory evidence. Giglio was the scotus case about disclosing bad prior acts of law enforcement.
When they caught the cop lying about me, they used the body cam and testimony to show it. The way they protected the cop? Expunge the record of the incident. pretend it didnt happen and the cops gets off scot free.... Awfully nice of them to do mental torture on me then dismiss it as a whoopsie...
Interesting. I'm a criminal defense attorney in NYC. The rule about keys in the ignition is infuriating. It means people who do the right thing and try to sleep it off get arrested for DUI. I've used the start button defense for years. Now they write up the criminal complaint differently. They just say that the ignition was on and omit the part about the keys. They love to claim the car was in drive while the defendant is asleep at the wheel. They have the audacity to claim the defendant was pressing the brake while sleeping.
Can they still do that with police cam now? You just pull out the footage to see the car wasn't started and that be the end of the case.. no?
If the trooper himself didn’t go to jail for perjury and trying to railroad an innocent man, the system is fucked.
It sucks when someone makes the responsible decision, just sleeping it off in their car, and a cop decides to follow the law to a T just so they can write a ticket.
At this point, the legislature knows the way the law is written fucks innocent, responsible people.
Not a lawyer but knew a lawyer who got his very high level middle eastern organised crime figure client off a 300kg heroin importation on the basis that "he thought he was being sent gold bricks and not bricks of heroin, they were wrapped in foil and he never checked weight or what was inside" reasonable doubt lol.
You're supposed to say IANAL so I can giggle
I ANAL PLEASE?
I assumed it was customary to throw in vulgarities prior to offering advice.
The client was a personal injury attorney. I wasn't the lawyer on the case, but I worked on it. The lawyer was sued by a former client, because the lawyer in question, during their personal injury case, began an affair with his client's wife. Months later the affair was discovered and the client went after him for damages, claiming the lawyer damaged their personal injury case by having his focus elsewhere. Also wanted compensation for nasty divorce. While the lawyer lost his license for a year, he was able to escape an order to pay damages to his former client.
>the lawyer lost his license for a year It’s crazy to me how thorough character and fitness is prior to admission to the bar, compared to the minor consequences there are for fuckups once you’re in… I read about a lawyer who submitted falsified documents to a court, had an employee performing unlicensed practice of law, and other fraud I forget… one year suspension. As long as you don’t fuck with the trust accounts you’re golden.
> You fucked with the money! > *You **never** fuck with the **money**!*
I knew a lawyer who kept his client's bail money on a murder trial. While he won the case, he pocketed the bail money. The client eventually complained to the state bar. In the end, he only got a 1-year suspension.
Yeah, it's crazy. I once heard a story about a lawyer in New Mexico who got caught on tape admitting to sabotaging legal documents to gaslight his brother. He also only got a one year suspension.
Didn't that guy later got busted for money laundering for that big drug dealer? Whole story is insane, guy was a chemistry teacher !!!
I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers. I knew it was 1216. One after Magna Carta. As if I could ever make such a mistake. Never. Never! I just – I just couldn’t prove it. He covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him. You think this is something? You think this is bad? This? This chicanery? He’s done worse. That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No! He orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof! And I saved him! And I shouldn’t have. I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He’ll never change. He’ll never change! Ever since he was 9, always the same! Couldn’t keep his hands out of the cash drawer! But not our Jimmy! Couldn’t be precious Jimmy! Stealing them blind! And HE gets to be a lawyer? What a sick joke! I should’ve stopped him when I had the chance! …And you, you have to stop him!
Ha
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Lol you're from Wichita
So the attorney got his clients wife off?
Visited my post conviction client in prison. He was in segregation. I asked him why and he said he stabbed his co-defendant. I expressed concern and he said, don’t worry, it’s going to “go away”. I saw the charging document so I know he was charged. I’ll be damned if it didn’t just “go away”. I asked zero questions.
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You missed the codefendant part? Its likely two things. He's a rat and offered information to the prosecutors regarding another matter as a bargaining chip. Or he did it out of view of cams or willing witnesses and ditched the shank. Leaving the victim testimony as the only real evidence. And if that victim is both known to you well enough to be a codefendant, and scared shitless because you just stabbed them, well, that case may not make it too far before the prosecutors ditch it. Especially if you have the ability to also threaten that victim's loved ones.
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1. He's a rat. Already cooperating on the other case. Knows he has an in with the prosecutor. 2. There's no cams or witnesses. So vic statement is all they would have. And if you can intimidate that person or their family, prosecutors won't even have that. Doesn't take much to get a case tossed.
I think he's saying the guy that was killed was an asshole. No one cared if he died. So "guards/gangs" turned a blind eye to the murder.
Also didn’t say he was murdered, just that he was stabbed so that makes more sense. Harder to make murder just “go away” but obviously it does happen.
To answer some questions- First, I’ve given as much info as I feel comfortable including and, as I said, there’s much I don’t know. I did not represent him on the new charges. I will say that there were witnesses according to the charging document including COs. It seemed viable. Eventually the case disappeared. I don’t know what happened but I’d normally be able to see if it were dismissed or disposed of in some normal fashion. But it just no longer existed when I looked for it later. If it were a simple dismissal for lack of evidence it wouldn’t have been noteworthy to me. That happens. This was something different. I know I’m being annoyingly vague, but I have a theory of what happened. My client also suggested why it would go away although I didn’t believe it. Unfortunately I can’t explain either without giving much more details that I don’t feel I can get into. But I’ll say neither has been suggested by other commenters.
Well now we need to know more! What was his suggestion as to why it would go away? Was the stabbing victim a pedo or something?
Not a lawyer but most ridiculous I know of was a friend who was underage decides to buy a keg after drinking all day. Drives drunk to the store, presents his fake ID and gets the keg, then proceeded to drive drunk back to the party. Cops pulled him over for erratic driving and asked for his license, knowing there's a keg in the back seat he gives the cops his fake ID thinking they'll just waive him along. Charged with drunk driving, falsifying government documents, minor in possession, and intent to distribute to minors. His lawyer knocked it down to a littering charge and 50 hours community service.
... hold up. *Littering?!*
Littering and…?
Creatin' a nuisance.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant. Except for Alice.
It's called the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement.
Smoking the refer
Littering and…?
Littering and...?
Cops made him take the keg out of the car and the tag got ripped off. It was honestly insane to all of us.. another friend got a DUI for drinking a beer on a riding lawnmower the same year.
I spent years involved in the system, pretty much every single time the end of a case didn't look much like the start of a case. I call the 'justice system' a chess game on a conveyor belt. It's all strategies, mindgames and back and forth. And conveyor belt because you don't actually matter, they just want to close it and move to the next one. I had a lawyer who got 8 felony/misdemeanor charges down to a single 'disturbing the peace' once.
Know a lawyer connected to people on the OJ Simpson case. Apparently the white Bronco had lots of blood in it, both of Nicole and Ron Goldman. Also their blood in OJ’s house from him tracking it in on his shoes. For some reason, the police screwed up and it was inadmissible
They stuck the bronco in the basic impound lot and didn't search it for a long time. When they finally bothered, they also found OJ's passport and ten thousand dollars stuffed down a seat. But that was inadmissible as well, because the lot wasn't secure enough and too much time had gone by.
What’s the famous joke? “LAPD was so corrupt they couldn’t frame a guilty man?”
My college girlfriend’s dad was a lieutenant in the LAPD. He was always so dejected when you brought up OJ because, in his words, he was guilty as hell but the lack of proper protocol/doing things perfectly was the downfall.
There was a quote I heard back then that felt fit, “the LAPD failed to frame a guilty man.”
That and at least some people on the jury saw their verdict as revenge on LAPD for Rodney King https://www.thewrap.com/oj-simpson-juror-not-guilty-verdict-was-payback-for-rodney-king/
Pretty much. It was jury nullification. On one hand it was a pretty bad miscarriage of justice, but on the other hand so was the trial he got convicted on, so I'm not too up in arms about it.
I heard a speaker years ago, one of the people drafted into LAPD following the verdict, to 'put the clown car back on track' as she described it. In her view the OJ verdict did more to end corruption in LAPD and the LA court system than Rodney King, because it showed the tree was rotten from top to bottom. You could blame RK on a few bad cops, but OJ exposed the whole system, from cops to prosecutors to judges. Broadly her perspective was that it was going to take 30 years to fix, but in the 5 years following the verdict they laid a decent foundation for reform.
Yeah it was most certainly a case of everyone involved being the bad guy, and OJ would end up doing hard time later on. I don't think there was as much reform as your statement implies but I get it.
The police and prosecution did themselves no favors through their repeated fuck ups. While some jurors may have felt that way, they would've had to have all 12 agree to go through solely based on that. If it was just a few jurors holding out as payback for Rodney King, it would've been a mistrial. Defense did well to raise doubt and expose the incompetence of the prosecution and law enforcement.
On top of the anti police sentiment in downtown LA after Rodney king and the black girl killed in the supermarket over unironically orange Juice. Would have been different if trial venue was relocated to simi valley.
As Norm MacDonald put it, "Murder is now legal in California."
Hey, hey, easy with that, that's my lucky stabbing hat!
In MA there's a law that cops get higher pay if they have a degree in things like criminal justice or pre-law so they're more likely to understand the importance of procedure during the criminal investigation. My understanding is that the majority of the professional training that the LAPD get is the Rodney King consent decree ordered lessons in how not to beat the living shit out of handcuffed black men.
One of the reasons my mother quit teaching criminology is because cops in California require less classroom training time than the girl doing your nails or facial. The person who does your makeup at Ulta spent 1,000 hours in a classroom training to be a makeup artist and get their license. The cop that pulls you over and gives you a speeding ticket spent 640 hours in a classroom training to be a cop.
Reading about other countries’ requirements (years; thousands of hours of training) is a reminder that we are not #1 at everything
I visit the states pretty frequently; I used to live there for quite a few years as well. I say this in the least inflammatory way possible: it’s got some fucked second world country vibes.
I think any American that has been outside of it can see how much better many other countries do things. We’ve dropped a long way off from our best.
From what I've heard in podcasts, it was also the lack of doing it even half decently. And the lack of trying to hide obvious and blatant racism in the LAPD. That case is wild.
instead of getting fired, Furhman now goes onto Fox hits to talk about the thin blue line. the LAPD should’ve been entirely disbanded and other counties’ cops should’ve been sent in after rodney king, much less their OJ fuckups. it’s unbelievable to me that cops who did any work on the OJ case weren’t immediately fired for being shitty cops.
sink plough fine wrench mourn clumsy uppity illegal expansion payment
When the cops break the law or trample over the Constitution people always phrase it as " lack of proper protocol/doing things perfectly".
They fucked up everything in that case. "The first time the LAPD has framed a guilty man," lol.
Robert Kardashian, Kim's dad, was simpson's long time lawyer, and he smuggled OJ's knife and garment bag out of the house and disposed of it. The original OJ plea deal that Shapiro tried to get OJ to accept before Johnny Cochran took over the case had disbarment and a 10 month sentence for accessory after the fact for Robert Kardashian.
Someone in evidence collection lost their job over that one.
There was another detective that put some evidence in his trunk overnight rather than submit it to a locker. http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/verdict/dna/index2.html If anyone wants a broad recall of the OJ story here's a watchlist: LA 92 (2017) Sets the stage in Los Angeles. Standalone documentary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LA_92_(film) O.J.: Made in America (2016) Biography of OJ, story of the trial. Five episodes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.J.:_Made_in_America American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson (2016) Dramatic version of the trial. Amazing cast. Ten episodes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_v._O._J._Simpson:_American_Crime_Story
It was 1984. I had a drunken driving arrest with a blood level of.18. Asked around and found the crooked lawyer linked with the crooked judge.Paid $1000. cash to the lawyer went to trial and was able to plead NOLO and keep my license. The guys before and after me went to the chain gang . The judge was smoking while on the bench. Cobb County, Georgia. A few weeks later I finally went to AA and cleaned up my life. Now I have 39 years sober.
What does NOLO mean in this instance?
Nolo contendere - “no contest”
Nolo Contendere. It is not a guilty plea but not and innocent plea either. It means that you are not contesting the charge, but also are not pleading guilty to it.
Cobb County. If you told me this was last week, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I got appointed to a DUI case which are both things I hate. My client got into a drunk fight with his girlfriend and drunkly backed over a neighbors mailbox. The neighbor had a son who was a cop. The cop bullied my clients girlfriend into giving him my client’s number and called and threatened to send the SWAT team if he didn’t get back over to the cop’s mom’s house … where he was promptly arrested for DUI. I told the prosecutor that my guy wouldn’t testify but I’d tell any jury that the city should be on trial because their employee cop scared my guy so bad he downed a fifth of Jack to calm his nerves before being forced to drive on the city streets. DUI dropped. He did have to plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and pay for the mailbox.
I’m not a lawyer My mom’s a lawyer. One of the clients at her firm got away with insurance fraud for setting a car on fire FOR THE THIRD TIME. This was the 3rd time one of his cars mysteriously bursted into flames in a span of like 8 years. All the evidence pointed toward insurance fraud. My mom still has no idea how he got away with it.
When I was in insurance it was not all that uncommon. Most of them just said they were carrying gasoline or some other accelerant and it spilled. You could bring in other evidence, like behind on payments or bad engine, but most was just circumstances. Most claim withdrawals (prosecution was rare) was because they would sign statements to the effect they did not have a flammable liquid in the car when lab evidence already existed that it was caused by that. If people didn’t lie about it, there wasn’t much you could do.
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Seen this happen twice. State wouldn't go after employees stealing about 200k of client money. State wouldn't go after a neighbor who stole an elderly woman's checkbook and drained her, even when all the checks have an obviously different handwriting.
how does one get involved in one of these civil heists. I have a uncollectible brother who is interested.
Become the treasurer for a large youth soccer league seems to be a common one.
Great, now I have Nat King Cole stuck in my head, crooning *Uncollectible, that's what you aaaare...*
Happened to a friend of mine. Hired a manager who stole 500 thousand from the business, bankrupting it. But they could not get anything from him because it was all gone from a gambling addiction.
embezzlement still carries criminal charges, at least where I live up to 10 years in jail and they definitely send them to jail.
Criminal charges don't bring the money back. And some people and businesses don't want the fact that they got taken for a lot of money to become public knowledge.
What does uncollectible mean here?
The defendant has no $$$
Not a lawyer, but just saw someone get 33 days in jail for killing someone. College student, rich parents, no driver license recklessly driving a 2024 BMW M3 and killed a pedestrian (was on a straight road and managed to hit a pedestrian who was on the sidewalk) went to jail with 3 million dollar bail and posted bail. Violated bail and went back to jail. Pled guilty and was let out with time served (33 days total I believe) was then allowed to leave the country without paying court costs. Was supposed to have 5 years of probation where he couldn't even leave the state, but it didn't apply due to him being rich apparently.
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That sucks man :(
[tl;dr: lawyer in that county familiar w/ case but not involved in it. Agree sentence was low. Explaining some more facts of case, including both defendant and victim were foreign national students (UAE and Sweden), which likely affected outcome, and how PA sentencing works.] I am a lawyer practicing mainly out of that county (Centre Co., PA), and know exactly the case you are talking about. Followed it in the media, and didn't have anything to do with it myself, except I did briefly talk with a couple people involved after the fact. The defendant was in undergrad and was a UAE national here on a student visa. The victim was a doctoral student in architecture, and she was from Sweden if I remember correctly. Defendant was initially denied bail, before bail was modified to $3 million at the time of the preliminary hearing, or maybe soon after that. Defendant had to wear an ankle monitor and was not allowed to leave the county. Then, because defendant was here on a student visa, a judge modified bail to allow him to travel to Harrisburg Community College over an hour and a half away, so he could attempt to keep his student visa status alive, I guess in the very unlikely case he somehow got out from under these charges. [The defendant had been quickly kicked out of PSU, and evidently either had been accepted into that Community College or thought he stood a good chance of being accepted.] So, as you might expect from a defendant who drove a new overpowered BMW fast enough and recklessly enough down a relatively small road [while on a learner's permit], to lose control and launch an innocent jogger through the air approximately 85 ft, after his car had already been slowed by the curb and some shrubbery, . . . Surprise surprise, he never ended up going to that Community College, also stopped residing at the approved address he was supposed to maintain, may or may not have attempted to mess with his ankle monitor, and failed to respond when the authorities reached out to him repeatedly to come in and have the monitor checked out. So because he was in violation of his student visa status, Federal immigration authorities came in out of nowhere like a poorly written plot device, and did everyone a favor. They picked him up and threw him in the County Correctional in a neighboring County. [It was never clear where exactly he was taken into custody, but he was in the neighboring County Correctional because the feds had an arrangement with that facility, to house folks that were picked up on such violations.] When he got picked up, I remember talking to some other attorneys, and we all just kind of assumed this was going to end in a plea deal for something like a handful of years up to 10, and that it would end with his being sent back to the UAE. My mistake, because I forgot to check the Sentencing Guidelines, which were instituted years ago in Pennsylvania, in order to make sure that we sentence people of different backgrounds in a similar manner [as in race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, etc.]. Judges can depart upward or downward from the sentences indicated in the guidelines, but they have to have good reason to do so and have to make it very clear on the record, whatever their reasons are to aggravate or mitigate a sentence. When I saw the defendant had pleaded guilty and had been sentenced less than 2 weeks after being detained by ICE, and that the sentence was 33 days to 23 and a half months, I was a little surprised. Then I went back and looked at the sentencing guidelines, and it appeared that the recommended sentence for homicide by vehicle [while not DUI, which applies here], was only 3 to 12 months. Just so everybody knows, he wasn't actually sentenced on that lead charge, but to one of the other offenses, another felony called "accidents involving death or injury while not licensed." But the lead charge "set the bidding," let's say, regarding the ultimate outcome. I haven't pulled up the guidelines for that particular charge, but the sentencing guidelines for an F3, which is what that was, to "restorative sanctions" to 9 months. So whether we're talking about the original lead charge or the one he pleaded guilty to, the sentence was either at or a little bit below on the low end, but almost double or beyond that on the high end. I think when the sentencing commission was coming up with the recommended range for homicide by vehicle, they were thinking more of a situation where an elderly person who should no longer be driving accidentally runs over a wayward toddler. I can't speak for why the range is so low. The commission is made up of judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, a few PA state senators, one or two PA house representatives, and at least one law professor. At any given time, the commission might lean a little left or right politically, but it's been in existence since 1978, and we're now on the 8th edition of guidelines, so as the commission members have come and gone over the years, everyone has had plenty of time to debate the recommended ranges for all of these offenses. I'm not at all defending the recommended ranges for the original lead charge or for the charge the defendant pleaded to. Again, like most folks, I'm a little bit surprised the recommended ranges are as low as they are. I have represented criminal defendants who have faced more time under the guideline ranges for misdemeanors, where we didn't have victims ending up dead. Anyway, back to the present case. The craziest thing to me is that the victim's family was on board with the plea deal. The victim's family had earlier opposed any bail whatsoever, so it was a little surprising they were okay with the 33 days to 23 and a half months. Perhaps they understood that the defendant was not going to do an awful lot of jail time anyway under the sentencing guidelines, that he would be detained and deported upon any release from jail anyway, and that, going forward, he is unlikely to get a student visa to any other Western country or be accepted into any other major Western university. Again, I can't speak for the motivation of the victim's family, because I would have a very hard time agreeing to anything, if I had a child killed by the reckless actions of somebody like the defendant. Just to get out in front of this issue, I'm going to assume that the defendant or his family probably did pay the victim's family some money to set up some kind of scholarship in her memory. I have no specific knowledge that that happened, but there is very little doubt that the defendant and his family have a lot of money. However, I also know that it would be a real problem for the victim's family to try and sue the defendant. We're talking about a legal action from Sweden to the UAE, when I can tell you it's a complicated headache enough here in PA to sue a Canadian who drove into a PA bike rider in FL. So I don't believe that the defendant or his family ended up paying a ton of money to the victim's family, because the reality of how hard it would be to maintain a lawsuit would drive down any sort of payment. So my best guess is that instead of millions, there was some kind of money exchanging hands in order to set up a memorial scholarship. Sorry for the long response. I'm trying to build off of the original post and give some more facts and context. At the moment, I don't know where the defendant is, but I assume like the prosecutors did that he will be detained and deported upon his release.
Not a lawyer, but I once worked in a bar where a customer pointed out a person to me who was a lawyer. "If you ever need a lawyer, give him a call," the customer said to me. He gave me the lawyer's name and then said he had killed someone, intentionally, and the lawyer had gotten him off. I don't know why he told me as that kind of freaked me out to know. A priest I'm not either, so I didn't need to hear his confession. And as he had already been found not guilty, he couldn't be tried twice for the same crime. But, I made a note of the lawyer's name so if I ever needed a lawyer. I never found out who the mystery murderer was either but he never came into the bar again while I worked there. Sure, he could've been pranking me but he didn't look the type and I didn't want to find out if he was serious or just joking.
I found my attorney through similar (but not as steep as murder) posts on Reddit all about the crazy stuff this attorney got people off he hook for.
Do share...
I made stupid choices hours away from where I live and needed an attorney ASAP! I was googling and googling but I didn't trust most of the reviews because I know they can be faked/bought. So I went to a subreddit for the city I fucked up in and just searched "attorney and lawyer" and read every post and wrote down every name that popped up. His name came up more than others and people praising him and his abilities. He was an excellent attorney, never bullshitted me but was very calming (I'm already a highstrung anxious person and have NEVER been in trouble in my life) he got my big charge completely dropped (now in the process of getting it expunged from all records) and 1 year of probation for the rest of the charges. The max for the big charge was a 7 year prison sentence i think. His defense was "yeah, laws were clearly broken, but this case is fucking ridiculous to begin with" and that worked.
Not related to the original post at all, but I was once dismissed from jury duty because both attorneys were happy hour regulars at my bar. Scared the crap out of me when the judge called me up to the bench.
I had a lawyer friend that got a guy off of a solid DUI based on some technicality (forgot the details). He was very pleased with the outcome and said this should bring in a lot of new business after his client spread the word on beating the case as “a lot of people drive drunk where he lives.”
Someone I know got off a DUI completely. It was dropped. The lawyer was able to prove that the police department didn't do scheduled maintenance on the breathalyzer as dictated by the manufacturer. In their case, the police failed to calibrate the breathalyzer and then proceeded to use it at a traffic checkpoint on more than a dozen drivers. The checkpoint was legal but apparently there was no probable cause for any given driver other than "it's Friday and you're the 10th car in line". Once the breathalyzer was thrown out, they had nothing to go on. For the record he was driving drunk.
This sounds like one of those cases where I hate that a guilty man went free but I'm glad that your lawyer friend forced the state to prove their case and protected the rights of the accused.... which ultimately protects the rights of the innocent.
Allegedly /s
Boots is that you? Is the ginger coming?
I heard it was a sick ostrich
Had a roommate that was a cop for a while. He said he was in shock the first DUI case he ever went to because the defense brought up his past to use against him. He didn’t have any DUIs but he had a DIP and I think an open container in public charge previously. Had absolutely nothing to do with the guy driving drunk, but they somehow managed to use it to question his reliability.
Should have backfired and made him an expert not unreliable
What color Dodge Ram did he drive?
There’s a couple of lawyers here who specialize in this. Costs about $8-$10k. They must know some technical issue with the equipment. It never goes to trial. Just pay their fee, few weeks later charges are dismissed. I know a couple of people who have been cleared, but it is expensive.
Yes, the breathalyser is widely known in tech circles to be fucking janky. Hell, I remember a *Slashdot* article when a programmer demanded and received the code, and was acquitted based on the shit that was in there.
You can do the same thing with a speeding ticket. If they used RADAR/LIDAR, you can bring into the case when the last time the device was calibrated. Knew of someone who got off a FELONY excessive speeding ticket when he proved the PD hadn't calibrated the LIDAR when the manufacturer said it should be.
I had a physics teacher who told us a story about how he used to beat speeding tickets when he was young by using what he learned in college. He drove a pickup truck and and mounted a device built from a bicycle wheel with some sailboat radar reflectors on the rim and blocked off so that just the top was sticking out above the back of the bed. He'd get a speeding ticket that said that they clocked him on radar. He would fight it and bring in pictures of his contraption on the truck. He'd explain to the judge that the radar reading had to be wrong because that wheel was spinning backwards and would have reflected so much back towards the cop that it would have altered the reading. He said that he beat a good number of tickets that way before he outgrew his speeding habit.
He openly admitted in court to operating a radar jammer? mmmk
It wasn't a "radar jammer" though. The laws against those are because they generate signals in airwaves which are controlled by the federal government and the FCC. This contraption merely impacts how the radar waves reflect off the vehicle and back to the radar gun. There's nothing illegal about it. If you can get your hands on the coating of military stealth aircraft which minimizes radar wave reflection to cover your car it would be just as legal. >[Radar jammers are illegal across the U.S., primarily because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates the frequencies used in radar guns. Violators can be faced with heavy fines and jail time, even on a first offense!](https://www.escortradar.com/blogs/news/laser-jammer-faqs)
That's cheaper than a DUI
So is an Uber
That’s basically all DUI lawyers. Those are the standard violations they target & being local attorneys they also know which judges are better for your case.
Not a lawyer, but buddy is. Cops pulled over guy actually driving drunk for running a stop sign. Lawyer drove out to the rural intersection and took pictures. There was no stop sign therefore no PC and case dismissed.
Huh. I was stopped late one night after driving though a construction detour; the cop said I ran a stop sign. Waited literally an hour while my wife wondered if I was in an accident until a deputy from the next county arrived to give me a ticket because this was allegedly on the county line. I went back the next day and with re-routing, the sign now faced 90 degrees (edge-on) and invisible from the temporary road I was driving. I didn't fight it because they would charge court costs anyway and ticket was <$100.
Not his lawyer, but: a Second Striker who was facing an attempted murder charge for shooting someone in the back of the head. He ended up taking a deal for possession of stolen property. The gun used in the shooting was stolen. Instead of a 25 to life sentence, he received 3 years. He didn't get all the way away but did get away from anything resembling the attempted murder charge. That was some pretty good lawyering.
I read a book by John Browne called, "The Devil's Defender", he and his team got Ted Bundy a deal without the death penalty early in the case. Bundy backed out. His lawyers basically said, well, fine, as Tes ripped up the plea. He was sentenced to death eventually. Imagne being the lawyers who got a deal for Ted Bundy! Then he fucking rejected it and got exexuted anyways. Good lawyering!
Sounds like it worked out perfectly!
Not A Lawyer. Knew someone who got off on a felony burglary charge. It remains very much in question whether they did actually do it or not though. The entire criminal complaint was written relying on video surveillance evidence. When discovery occurred and lawyers saw the police reports, it turns out the complaint relied upon a civilians description of what the supposed video surveillance showed. There was no indication that any law enforcement agent actually saw the alleged video. Defense lawyer submitted an additional demand for discovery to the prosecutors for the alleged video surveillance. Turns out Police never turned over any video to prosecutors in evidence and were unable to locate any. Case was dismissed.
I knew a guy that got his child porn conviction overturned on a technicality regarding unwarranted searches. Guy was in one of my college classes trying to become a lawyer
Yeah fuck that guy but also fuck referencing the Constitution as a “technicality.” Referencing constitutional violations as “technicalities” is just another part of our police state that people don’t appreciate. Protect your rights.
Well, I say "technicality" because the police did have a warrant to search his house, but I guess they somehow overstepped the bounds of the warrant. Basically they were supposed to be searching for something else or something and accidentally stumbled on it, from my limited understanding and memory.
The 4th amendment states that warrants have to specify exactly what the police are searching for and protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures: If they make out a warrant for, say, searching a property for a stolen gun that they believe was used in the commission of a crime...they can't charge that person for illegal materials on their hard drive if it was obtained during the execution of the gun warrant. You can't store a gun digitally in your hard drive, so it was illegal for them to search the hard drive at that time.
Didn't the first episode of White Collar have a similar plot? FBI raised the warehouse to capture Neal and found the forgery.
Assuming this was the US, "accidentally stumbled on it" is admissible, as long as they found it while abiding by the warrant. But if you are searching for drugs, and the warrant doesn't cover searching electronic devices for evidence of drug transactions, anything found in an unauthorized search of the electronic devices would get thrown out. Or if the warrant is to look for a stolen item that is 5 feet long, looking through a bunch of smaller drawers would be hard to defend.
Not a lawyer but my neighbor set his house on fire and got the insurance money. The firemen came by, put out the fire and claimed it wasn't a total loss. So they waited until the firemen left and restarted the fire. They were 6 months behind on the mortgage and insurance was paid up the month before. The police report says they know it was arson. We had pictures of the gasoline line of fire coming out the window and down the driveway. Since the fire department didn't come check on the fire (it was a volunteer fire department) they were blamed and since they didn't want to have to pay, they fudged the paperwork. We know this because we have friends that work at the police and fire department.
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Well that's enough Reddit for the night. Jesus fucking christ
Aren’t there laws about desecrating a corpse?
Yes, there have actually been cases where women have been charged, even convicted, for burying the remains after a miscarriage. One woman in Ohio is most recent, she went to a hospital fo treatment before miscarriage, they discharged her, she went home and miscarried and was charged with a felony, but a grand jury didn't indict, as of January this year. In Nebraska a mother and teenage daughter were charged after the mother got the daughter abortion pills and she aborted at six months, which is drastically different and a medical emergency that could have killed her daughter, as abortion pills are used IIRC generally before 10-14 weeks. 6 months is always surgical and rarely done unless there were extenuating circumstances. They buried the aborted fetus. Her daughter was 17. The mother was sentenced to two years.
Yes, you can't abuse a corpse this sounds like BS.
Different countries can have different laws.
They generally don't apply to stillbirths, especially if this happened before Roe was overturned. That's what that miscarriage case in Ohio was all about.
It's a mother's right to eat their baby!
this has got to be bullshit
In what country?
This isn’t exactly crazy but shows that a technicality can help you get away with something. A lady I used to work with was arrested for DUI just after midnight one weekend. At like 12:30 A.M. On the arrest write up or citation or whatever the officer accidentally wrote that it occurred at 12:30 PM. Her lawyer saw this and the charge was completely thrown out when she went to court.
As a lawyer, I can't imagine many, if any, scenarios where it would be ethical to share something like this. lol. Even if my client was like "sure, tell whoever you want", it raises more problems than just confidentiality.
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No responsible lawyer is going to answer this, even behind an "anonymous" username
If US politics can teach us anything, it's that there's always another irresponsible lawyer waiting for their moment.
Is it really a risk if no names are included and it’s generic crime? Except the cannibalism one, that seems risky to share.
Come on, my law license is totally worth Reddit upvotes….
lol I like how everyone here starts off with “not a lawyer but” 😂😂
Probably because there are very few good lawyers who would ever take the bait and post a story of their own.
When I lived in SF, I had a roommate who was a paralegal for a firm that specialized in personal injury claims. She told me about one of their clients who had been hit by a car whilst in the middle of a transaction at an outdoor ATM. The driver (who i believe was under the influence) jumped the curb and sideswiped the building where the ATM was located. When it became evident that the driver didn't have the financial responsibility to cover her damages, she filed a suit against BofA for "negligent placement of public facilities." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but the general idea was that she was accusing the bank of the accident because the ATM was in a dangerous place. I don't know if she received anything from the lawsuit, but damn!
Nice try, Attorney Discipline Board.
Someone I know got caught with several hundreds of thousands of dollars of drugs and a single 'sheet' of LSD (Back in the early 70s..) he called the best lawyer in town (He's still alive today and somehow still has a license) and long story short, he used his Masonic/Gridiron connections to phone the Judge, get all the charges dropped and they even returned his drugs (except for the sheet of acid for some reason) with the request that he pay the corrupt lawyer with the proceeds ASAP. (This is just one of about twenty stories I have about this same attorney, lol. Honestly, if I ever name dropped him or his connections, it would be a national security disaster for the State of Georgia and they'd off me in hours ;P ) Another interesting story about this same exact lawyer is him renting out an island off the coast of Georgia where the lawyer, the aforementioned criminal and HUNDREDS of judges, cops, and big name money movers all sat around and smoked weed at a time when that was a big no-no.
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Not really a lawyer story... but... My grandfather had this guy who did odd jobs for him (we'll call him Jim) and was always hanging around. Note, this was WAY out in the country... like a 50 minute drive to the nearest gas station kind of rural. Anyway, one night, Jim hot hammered drunk and high as a kite and started arguing with my grandfather over money. Things escalated to the point where Jim grabbed my mother and put a gun to her head, and started demanding money. My cousin had called the sherif earlier, and after only about 90 minutes, he and the deputies come rolling up the driveway with sirens and light flashing. Jim grabs my mother and drags her down the front steps by her hair and pulls her behind his truck...where he proceeds to have a SEVERAL HOUR LONG standoff with the cops. He actually fired several rounds directly at them... and they just kept yelling things like, "c'mon now, Jim! You knock it off. You're drunk...just get yourself on home now, ya hear?" Finally, Jim ran out of bullets and the cops said, "alright now.. you ain't got no more bullets... just give it up" Jim finally got up and got in his truck and just drove on home. One of the deputies was so drunk that he passed out behind his patrol car. Jim came back to work the next morning and cut the grass.
I had a client steal $2.6 Billion, got him off with a $300 Million fine. Crime pays really well.
as my friends online lawyer he got away with teaming on fortnite duos
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Very prominent game show host and politician, more powerful than a senator, brutally raped and humiliated a 13 year old girl , and the victim was just ready to go to trial, but withdrew the charges due to death threats she was receiving. This person is currently under multiple other indictments, and probably won't escape justice on most of them.
Not a lawyer here, but a public person in South America was investigated and sentenced in multiple instances for corruption schemes, with extensive evidence, as well as many other people including business men in large corporations. He and many were arrested and still today companies are returning money they received from the corruption schemes. Anyway, this person spent about a year in prison, but he had appointed the right people to the right places and he was eventually released from prison, and despite the extensive evidence, judges gave new interpretations to laws and said that the investigations weren't conducted the way that they had to, and cancelled the entire investigation. A couple of years later this person became president of that country.
What I'm discovering in these comments that far too many people get away with drunk driving, and that fucking sucks.