Category: Plea Bargains

7 Criminal Defense Lawyers to Avoid

If you are charged with a crime, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unlike civil lawsuits, which are merely about money, criminal prosecutions are the real deal. You can lose your liberty, rights, reputation, and opportunities down the road. You can lose your life, or a substantial part of it. So...

Are White Collar Sentences Too Harsh Now?

When we started law school back in ’93, we felt that white-collar criminals just weren’t punished that harshly in this country. The Dilbert strip above, from about the same time, shows that we were not alone in thinking this. It seems that this was a common perception going at least...

The Prosecutor’s B.S. Meter

I love reading Scott Greenfield’s blog Simple Justice. He posted a good one the other day called “Another Prosecutor Loses Her Virginity,” about a former prosecutor, Rochelle Berliner, now a defense attorney, who just came to the realization that cops sometimes lie. Her epiphany was published in Saturday’s New York...

Supreme Court: If Prosecution Breaches Plea Deal, OBJECT!

Voting 7-2, the Supreme Court today ruled that a defendant cannot appeal when the prosecution reneged on a plea bargain, unless the issue was preserved before the trial court. In his majority opinion for Puckett v. U.S., Justice Scalia cleared up a split among the circuits. There had been differing...