Atlanta Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

Federal sentences for crack cocaine crimes are grossly unfair. For almost two decades, many people have been fighting against a system in which a person with crack cocaine is punished 100 times more severely than a similarly situated offender who happens to have a powder version of this drug. Although there are a series of…

One of the hardest questions lawyers need to answer in a federal criminal case is whether the prosecutor can use “similar act” or “other crime” evidence. Sometimes, the law permits the prosecutor to introduce evidence that on a time OTHER than the one charged in the indictment, the defendant did something similar to what he…

Trials of Federal criminal cases are difficult enough to defend, but helping the client figure out whether to testify in his or her defense might be the single hardest job for the lawyer. In an earlier post, I described some rules by which the courts say that the defendant’s testimony can “fix” the holes in…

A person facing a federal criminal trial often asks his or her lawyer for advice about whether to take the witness stand. A recent decision in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit now provides some help to criminal defense lawyers in Florida, Georgia and Alabama, the states covered by the Eleventh…

We do a lot of federal criminal appeals, so I was very interested to read about yesterday’s reversal of an Alabama federal conviction for environmental crimes. This case is one more example about how important it is to get a federal criminal defense attorney who not only knows the law, but keeps up with the…

Drug crimes in federal court involving young people are unfortunately too common. However, most young people, and many of their parents, do not realize how the harsh sentencing schemes in federal court can have a severe impact on what appears on the surface to be merely a youthful indiscretion. I have several current clients who…

Criminal defense attorneys in Atlanta, like lawyers all around the United States, all know how important it is to try and get a bond for their clients, and get the defendant out of jail early in a criminal prosecution. The recent criminal prosecution of the rap artist T.I here in Atlanta on firearms charges is…

Here in Atlanta, Georgia we convinced a federal judge to impose probation as a sentence for a client in a white collar fraud case, but we now are fighting against an appeal by the government. This is happening more and more, judges ruling that sentences are just too long for some minimally involved white collar…