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Virtual Reality Creating Jury Reality
FEATURED
January 7, 2025
Virtual Reality Creating Jury Reality
By: James Trusty
A Florida Judge may have unwittingly ushered in a new age of criminal justice, where slickly made virtual reality (“VR”) presentations turn judges and jurors into witnesses, and VR headsets provide subjective “testimony” in a powerful and difficult to challenge manner. Broward County Judge Andrew Siegel agreed to don a virtual reality headset in a preliminary proceeding[1] where the defendant was accused of aggravated assault. Miguel Albisu, the defendant, was accused of waving a gun at wedding guests and he claims self-defense. The defense hired an artist to create a “defendant’s perspective,” and the result is a historical first—the judge took in a defense expert’s testimony about self-defense that included a guided tour of the reality contained on a VR…
How Thick is the Blanket? – Preemptive Pardons as a Presidential Power
December 6, 2024
How Thick is the Blanket? – Preemptive Pardons as a Presidential Power
By: James Trusty
As the presiding judge scolded Hunter Biden’s attorneys this week, “The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.”[1] But what exactly is that history he claims is being re-written? Judge Scarsi was challenging…
Supremely Improbable
July 30, 2024
Supremely Improbable
By: James Trusty
President Biden’s pronounced objectives for Supreme Court “reform” are improbable, politically lifeless under a particularly lame duck presidency, and motivated by transparently November-driven calculations. But even if the proposed changes are doomed from the start, they push public discourse on a couple of issues that are red meat for the democrats. The stated reforms are superficially simple ones: 1) to “clarify” that “there is no…
Nevada Case Points to Perils of Assertion of 5th Amendment in Civil Cases
March 12, 2012
Nevada Case Points to Perils of Assertion of 5th Amendment in Civil Cases
By: Ifrah Law
One of the hardest decisions on which a lawyer may be called upon to advise a client in civil litigation is the decision whether to assert the Fifth Amendment privilege. On the one hand, the overlap between pending civil and criminal matters may make it dangerous for the client to make statements that could incriminate him or her in the criminal case. On the other…
D.C. Appeals Court Rejects Challenge to Admission of Handwriting Evidence
March 8, 2012
D.C. Appeals Court Rejects Challenge to Admission of Handwriting Evidence
By: Jeffrey Hamlin
If there was ever an open question as to whether forensic handwriting identification is admissible under D.C.’s common law of evidence, the D.C. Court of Appeals has finally put that question to rest. On February 9, 2012, the Court of Appeals held that handwriting comparison and identification, as practiced by FBI examiners, passes the Frye test for admissibility. The issue arose after Robert Pettus’ jury…
DOJ Goes After Smaller Fraudsters, Lets Big Fish Escape
March 5, 2012
DOJ Goes After Smaller Fraudsters, Lets Big Fish Escape
By: Nicole Kardell
Successful criminal prosecutions of mortgage fraud seem to have one thing in common: a fraud figure well below $10 million. One of the recent cases that generated a fair amount of press involved the convictions of co-conspirators in a mortgage scheme carried out by an ex-NFL player. That scheme, which took place during the housing boom in the early 2000’s, resulted in 10 convictions. Former…
Justice Would Be Served by an ‘Open File’ Policy for Prosecutors
March 2, 2012
Justice Would Be Served by an ‘Open File’ Policy for Prosecutors
By: Jeff Ifrah
A couple of years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice made an effort to systematize and improve its discovery obligations under Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 Supreme Court case that requires prosecutors to disclose information in their files that would tend to exculpate criminal defendants. A U.S. attorney, speaking at a conference of defense lawyers, commented at the time that the department takes its Brady…
D.C. Circuit Tackles Ex-Prosecutor’s Allegations of Privacy Violations
February 20, 2012
D.C. Circuit Tackles Ex-Prosecutor’s Allegations of Privacy Violations
By: Ifrah Law
After a nearly decade-long legal battle, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking to dismiss once and for all the privacy suit of Richard Convertino, a former federal prosecutor in Detroit who alleges that the DOJ illegally gave the press details of an internal investigation into his alleged misconduct. In February 2004, Convertino filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of…
