Pennsylvania Criminal Defense

In our last post, we discussed the exclusionary rule – the legal doctrine that courts have fashioned over the years to penalize police when they violate a suspect’s constitutional rights. What we only briefly...

Many of the amendments to the U.S. Constitution protect the rights of people who are suspected or who have been formally accused of committing a crime. However, none of those amendments state exactly how that protection works....

Subpoenas are powerful legal tools that courts and lawyers in Pennsylvania use to force people to testify or provide evidence in a pending case. Getting subpoenaed is a serious legal event, though, as you could face penalties if...

When police suspect that a driver is under the influence of alcohol or drugs, they will pull them over and initiate a traffic stop. One of the things that the cop is almost guaranteed to do is ask the driver to take a breath...

In a recent blog post, we summarized the types of collateral consequences of a criminal conviction in Pennsylvania. One of them is the possibility that a defendant who is not a U.S. citizen can get deported if they get...

The Fourth Amendment is one of the most important protections that Americans have against police overreach. A bulwark of the Fourth Amendments is its requirement that police get a warrant before searching for evidence of...

A charge of driving under the influence (DUI) is serious for anyone. For commercial drivers, though, it can be a threat to their very livelihood. Worse, people with a commercial driver’s license (CDL) are held...

In our last blog post, we discussed the Fair Chance Act and how it could help people with a criminal history get a job with the U.S. government. The Fair Chance Act, though, is just a reaction to a serious problem in the...

The costs of a criminal conviction last well past the defendant’s release from prison. It even extends past the last day of their probation. People who have been convicted for a crime in the past can struggle to get a job....

Nearly all criminal laws in Pennsylvania can only be broken if the actor has the necessary level of intent. Each criminal statute is supposed to include what that level of intent is, though there are only four levels of criminal...

Grand juries are perhaps the least understood aspect of the criminal justice system, both in Pennsylvania and across the country. Of course, some of that confusion comes from the fact that different states and the federal...

In Pennsylvania, a crime only becomes a “crime of domestic violence” if two conditions are met: It is a certain, eligible type of offense under the state’s domestic violence statute It is committed against a certain...

In our last blog post, we discussed the difference between blood alcohol content (BAC) and breath alcohol content (BrAC). While police often insist that they are the same, BrAC is far easier to measure. However, it is also...

One of the most important numbers in the law of driving under the influence (DUI) is a driver’s blood alcohol content, or BAC. But if your BAC is the amount of alcohol that is in your blood, how can police get a...

Pennsylvania’s criminal law allows police to conduct sobriety checkpoints to enforce the state’s laws against driving under the influence, or DUI. However, not all states in the U.S. permit sobriety...

Law enforcement officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) went to great lengths to investigate and charge international students with visa fraud. So far, in fact, that the defendants might be able to raise a strong...

In Philadelphia, there are five ways for a driving under the influence (DUI) to begin: After police notice a driving infraction During a pretextual stop After a single-vehicle car accident, or a crash that only damaged...

The police union in Philadelphia has vowed to appeal a court’s ruling that the city’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, could refuse to call certain police officers to the stand who had been labeled as unreliable...

A woman in Delaware is being accused of child abuse after one of her children was brought to the hospital with facial injuries. The case involves some disturbing facts that could be used to prove that she acted knowingly...

In our last blog post, we discussed hearsay and why it matters, as well as why it’s been in the news so much lately. While any single blog post will always fail to convey all of the intricacies inherent in hearsay law,...