There are many ways that effective criminal defense counsel can help you. Obviously, there’s your criminal trial. However, even afterward, there are ways of seeking to ensure you get justice. Sometimes, you may even be able to obtain relief more than a decade after your case ended. In some situations,…
Sometimes, even cases going on out-of-state can shed some important light on the way Maryland criminal defense law works. A recent ruling from Alaska that threw out a man’s murder conviction due to a prosecutor’s closing argument is particularly interesting for Marylanders as, among the cases the Alaska court took…
One of the techniques that the state can use in prosecuting you in a criminal matter is layering multiple charges based off one single incident. That way, they hope, even if the prosecutor can’t convict you for murder, the state may still land a conviction for, say, weapons charges. One…
In TV courtroom dramas, the critical moment in the case – the one that dramatically turns the case to expose the guilty party and ensure justice for all – almost always happens at or near the end of the actual trial. In real life, the “key” moment in your case…
When you are facing criminal charges in Maryland, you have several essential decisions you have to make. One of the most important of these is deciding whether your guilt or innocence will be decided by a jury or by a judge. (The former is called a jury trial and the…
Once your criminal trial is over and you’ve been found guilty of a crime or crimes, that doesn’t mean that you’re out of options. To the contrary, there are potentially many different avenues available to you to better your circumstances. Even if you have no reasonable expectation of getting a…
Immigration, and particularly the issue of undocumented individuals, is very much a “hot button” issue these days. That is even true in civil and criminal trials, where a party in the case may seek to make an issue of a witness’s immigration status in order to diminish the witness in…
You probably are familiar with the concept of plea bargains in criminal cases. What you may (or may not) know is that when the prosecution and defense reach a plea agreement, the judge isn’t obliged to follow the deal’s terms. So, even once you have worked out a plea deal…
In science, there exists something called the “butterfly effect.” The butterfly effect involves circumstances in which a small change in an initial state can result in massive difference in a later state. The concept got its name from scientists who asked the question: can a massive storm in one part…
In any criminal case, there are varying forms of success. Obviously, the primary target the defendant seeks is an acquittal. However, even if the result of a trial is a conviction, there are still battles to be won, such as ensuring that your case does not result in you receiving…