Atlanta Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

A seemingly overzealous prosecution team went after a medical doctor in a federal criminal prosecution regarding supposed excessive prescriptions for pain medicines. My law partner Carl recently wrote on this same topic. The defense team uncovered the possibly improper prosecution tactics. The jury found the doctor innocent, after which the trial judge ordered that the…

The Eleventh Circuit issued an opinion today on a fraud case out of Florida involving issues related to restitution. The appellate court reversed the restitution order, ruling that the government had not adequately proved the amount of restitution, nor had the district judge calculated restitution based on specific factual findings. The case is United States…

We practice quite a bit in the federal appeals courts. The federal courts are often where injustices are fixed when a wrongly convicted person gets post-conviction relief by the granting of a writ of habeas corpus. However, a recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit shows that on occasion…

When we handle federal criminal cases here in Atlanta, Georgia and in other parts of the country, our clients often face criminal penalties along with possible forfeiture of their property. Lawyers often forget how important these financial penalties can be. A recent case from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (located…

Our local Federal Court of Appeals, sitting just down the street from our offices here in Atlanta, yesterday reversed a federal criminal conviction for obstruction of justice. The prosecutors contended that the defendant tried to obstruct a forfeiture matter. The Eleventh Circuit joined other courts and relied on some earlier Supreme Court cases by holding…

Just a few hours ago the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sitting here in Atlanta affirmed most, but not all, of the convictions in the long-running saga of US v. Don Siegelman and Richard Scrushy. Don Siegelman was the Governor of Alabama. Richard Scrushy was the founder and Chief Executive Officer of HealthSouth. The case…

In criminal trials throughout the United States, whether here in Atlanta or elsewhere, the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause protects defendants from being convicted based on out-of-court statements by people who never show up to testify. The Confrontation Clause means what it says, our clients can “confront” the evidence against them and prosecutors should not be…

We represent a lot of criminal defendants in federal courts, many here in Atlanta but also throughout Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and other states. Since 2005, such criminal defendants have had good luck in the United States Supreme Court when challenging various aspects of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. One more such success took place on…

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which sits several blocks from our offices here in Atlanta, reversed some of the convictions in a federal fraud prosecution that were brought against a defendant in Alabama. The reversal of some of the charges was because the indictment failed to allege the necessary facts…

Ed. Note: On November 1, the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s 2010 Amendments to the federal Sentencing Guidelines went into effect, along with a temporary, emergency amendment to implement Section 8 of the Fair Sentencing Act. On the whole, the amendments reflect a reduction in federal criminal sentences and provide the sentencing judge with additional discretion. We…