Category: Criminal Defense
Every year more than 200,000 people report a rape to police in the United States. They are submitted to a lengthy, invasive and uncomfortable process as a rape kit is collected. What police do not inform victims is that it may take years for their evidence to be submitted to national databases, if at all….
Robert Wayne Harris looks set to be the eighth man to be executed in Texas this year after the Court of Criminal Appeals denied the death row inmate a stay of execution. The judges decided against stopping the execution, despite some disturbing evidence about the adequacy of the original defense case more than a decade…
In a high profile case in Arlington, Texas, the owner of a strip club that ran into trouble with the city, has pleaded guilty to plotting to murder the Mayor and a lawyer working for the city. KVUE.com reported 34-year-old Ryan Walker Grant faces serving 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, after taking…
Convictions based on the evidence of young witnesses or victims in sexual assault cases, can be unreliable in the absence of solid forensic evidence. This proved to be the case in the conviction of David Lee Wiggins, a man from Fort Worth, Texas, who spent more than two decades behind bars before he was released…
More people are being booked for criminal immigration offenses in border states such as Texas, even as the number of people being apprehended as illegal immigrants falls. A report by Fox News said while the number of illegal immigrants being apprehended has reached a 40 year low, more people are being charged due to a…
Concerns about the low IQ of a death row inmate in Texas didn’t stop the state putting him to death this month. Marvin Wilson was executed on August 7, 2012, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the arguments of his lawyers that he shouldn’t have been eligible for the death penalty because of his low…
Plots about wealthy people planning the deaths of love rivals feature heavily in TV crime shows but are rare in real life. Many homicides involve people who know each other and many are spontaneous rather than meticulously planned. However a case in Lubbock, Texas in which a plastic surgeon is accused of paying an alleged…
An intoxicated manslaughter case has been making headlines in Texas because of its tragic nature. Five family members in one car died when their father crashed the vehicle into a bulldozer as he drove home from a Father’s Day party at Medina Lake in San Antonio. The fifth victim died on June 21. Eight-year-old Abram Demers was…
The case of Clint Broden’s client Michael Arena, who walked out of prison on June 1, 2012, almost 13 years into a 20-year prison sentence, was a high profile example in Texas of a wrongful conviction. But according to a new registry of wrongful convictions compiled by the University of Michigan Law School in a…
On Wednesday, June 13, 2012, Raul Rodriguez, a retired firefighter was found guilty of murder for the shooting and killing of Kelly Danaher in 2010. The trials sentencing phase is to begin on Thursday, June 14. The facts, as best as I have been able to ascertain, are that Mr. Rodriguez confronted his neighbors who…