Category: Blog

Just this last week, still another story appeared in the news about a man who was a victim of mistaken identification.  That mistake resulted in his being wrongfully incarcerated in a Florida prison for almost 14 years.  The story appeared in the Sun-Sentinel on October 29, 2007 and is reprinted here in its entirety: When […]

If you are arrested in Florida, do you have to have a trial in order to resolve your case?  I am sometimes asked this question by clients who are understandably nervous about the prospect of having their case decided by a group of jurors who will be complete strangers to them.  My answer is typically no; a person […]

 I frequently receive telephone calls from people stating that they need to get their Florida criminal record sealed or expunged because it keeps rearing its ugly head whenever they apply for jobs.  I ask them what type of work they do because some jobs require that they disclose their criminal record even though it has been […]

I often get phone calls from people asking me if they can get their criminal record sealed or expunged in Florida because they are having trouble getting a job once their potential employer finds out about their record.  In order for me answer their question, I first have to get some information from them such as whether […]

I sometimes get a frantic phone call from a wife or mother stating that one of her family members has just been arrested and asking whether her loved one will be able to bond out of jail.  I ask what charge the loved one was arrested for.  If the charge is a crime of violence listed […]

In a previous blog posting, I argued for rationality in sentencing given the widespread problem of prisoner overcrowding in the United States generally and in Florida particularly.  After publishing that posting, I came upon an article that appears on the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' website.  That article points out the disparity in sentencing between […]

Time Magazine These days, judges are handing out prison time like it's candy.  I have personal knowledge of one case in which a person was convicted of kidnapping his girlfriend and then sentenced to life in prison even though the victim told the judge that she only wanted her boyfriend to be sentenced to ten years […]

As if confessions and DNA weren't enough evidence in the Dunbar Village rape case, it has now come to light that the police have seized letters from one of the incarcerated suspects and that a  telephone conversation of that same suspect was secretly tape-recorded by the police.  It is because of costly mistakes like this that people who are […]

A few years ago, the Governor of Illinois imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in that state because of his well-founded fear that wrongfully-convicted people might be executed.  Then, just last month, the American Bar Association issued a report in which it identified numerous problems with Ohio's existing death-penalty scheme.  No doubt many of those […]

This is the problem with breath-testing machines in Florida DUI cases: a couple of numbers are spit out of a machine that very few people understand. Those numbers say that the person arrested was driving with a breath-alcohol level that was over the legal limit. Those numbers are, in turn, presented to a jury who […]