Articles Posted in Drug Crimes

“It’s a rainy night in Georgia” crooned Brook Benton in the 1970 R&B classic, which is fitting on this rainy Monday during this rainiest time of the year here in soggy Atlanta, Georgia.  Although it’s very wet and ugly outside, here in my office I am pondering possibilities for resolving a certain federal criminal case…

I have several federal criminal cases in Atlanta and other parts of Georgia involving allegations that my clients dealt in marijuana.  Some folks in other parts of the country also have contacted me recently about federal criminal prosecutions in states where the local laws permit personal use and state-sponsored sale of marijuana.  In virtually all…

Ever since I was a young federal criminal defense attorney, our country has been locking up people at an unprecedented pace.  The United States holds the title as the country that has locked up the highest number of people.  On a per capita basis, we are number 2, only behind the tiny Seychelles Islands.  Ever…

We handle lots of federal criminal cases. We also occasionally represent people accused of federal drug crimes, both here in Atlanta and around Georgia, Alabama and Florida. Over the past decade there has been a slow recognition that sentences for drug crimes are simply too long. This week, the United States Sentencing Commission votes on…

Finally, with Monday’s announcement by Eric Holder, we have a public acknowledgment by our country’s top law enforcement official that the War on Drugs and its policies, implemented since the 1970’s, have failed. Holder went further than to offer an empty statistic. He basically stated that the U.S. has not only utterly failed at its…

Sitting here in Atlanta, I really like when I find out about bright, energetic lawyers handling federal criminal cases all around the country. One such case is Burrage v. United States, where this past Tuesday the United States Supreme Court agreed to review important questions as to what it means when “death results” from drug…

In a earlier posts, I wrote about the Supreme Court’s “dog sniff” cases, the former in which the Defendant was stopped while driving his truck and a drug dog eventually alerted to the presence of dogs, the latter case where (based on a “tip”) the police walked a drug detector dog on the Defendant’s porch,…

The Supreme Court today issued one of the two dog cases on its docket, Florida v. Harris. Recall that we blogged on this case when it was accepted for review. In today’s unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court held that just because there are no performance records for how a dog does in the field, this…

I am looking down from my office here in Atlanta at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the federal appellate court that handles cases from Georgia, Florida and Alabama. Yesterday, that court issued a huge decision in which they decided that Congress violated the Constitution by enacting a law that allows for…

While most of our federal white collar criminal cases do not involve drug detection dogs, I noted last week in this post that the Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a case to decide whether an “alert” on a motor vehicle by a drug-detecting dog is enough to let the police then search the…