The US Justice Department knows that potentially innocent people can be victims of wrongful convictions based on flawed forensic work. But what happens to the prosecutors who allow this horrible practice to continue? Nothing. A few years ago, we learned through some investigative reporting that federal prosecutors they failed to notify defendants, or their attorneys, […]
Sentencing Abuse Alleged by Judge A federal judge said that the Justice Department routinely abuses its power to bully defendants into giving up their constitutional right to a trial. By Devlin Barrett Oct 18, 2013 – Wall Street Journal – News A federal judge said that the Justice Department routinely abuses its power to bully defendants […]
A federal criminal law case starts with an investigation, triggered in one of a number of ways: unlike a bank robbery where the event itself triggers the investigation, in most white collar criminal cases a federal regulatory (the SEC, one or another Medicare program safeguard contractor, the IRS, etc.) gets wind of improper conduct, or […]
Remote Digital Searches: Your Computer is Totally Not Private if Federal Criminal Law changes for the worst. This news was brought to light by the Gizmodo Federal Criminal Law Blog, describing the Justice Department’s continuing attack on the Fourh Amendment – the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures: A new proposed rule […]
There are literally thousands of federal criminal laws on the books today, and learning them all would take more than a few law school courses. But we at Burdick Law want everyone who is interested in understanding how the federal system works, or who is facing charges in that system, to have a solid understanding […]
Want to know why the death penalty should NEVER be allowed in criminal law? Here’s a perfectly terrifying reason: Yet another death row inmate was just added to the growing innocence list compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), after he was cleared in the murder of an elderly woman and her daughter – but he’s […]
Finally, after years of federal criminal law (and state) defense lawyers’ complaints that the FBI hair analysis “experts” used in state and federal prosecutions for decades, were making it up as they went along, the truth is out: they were making it up as they went along. Now they have admitted it, though very reluctantly. Turns out […]
More on FBI misdeeds in the realm of junk science in federal criminal law. These so-called experts claimed at trial after trial that the hair comparisons were near-certain “matches” to defendants charged in the cases. To make matters worse, to butress their phony testimony, they described misleading statistics culled from their own work. In other […]
The federal criminal law is sometimes a very dangerous, and absurd beast. In the federal criminal code, Title 18, Sections 1956 and 1957, the goverment has convinced Congress over the years to make it very easy to convict someone of “laundering” proceeds of what used to be certain criminal offenses, but which has expanded to […]
In all of Federal Criminal Law, one of the toughest statutes is the one referred to as Racketeering(Title 18 §1962) is one of the most burdensome of all federal criminal laws, in that it operates more than anything to dramatically increase sentencing guidelines. Clearly, the use of RICO can earn an individual a sentence of 20 […]
