By: Sara Kropf Last December, Donald Blankenship was found guilty of conspiracy to violate mine safety laws. This is a misdemeanor. He was acquitted of the more serious felony charge against him for false SEC filings. In early April 2016, Mr. Blankenship was sentenced...
By: Sara Kropf A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about my disappointment that white-collar criminal defense attorneys too often treat cooperation with the government as a default position. Well, the government just sweetened the cooperation pot a little bit more....
By: Sara Kropf On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court decided Luis v. United States. It is a big win for criminal defendants and for criminal defense lawyers alike. The Court held that For the reasons stated, we conclude that the defendant in this case has a...
By: Sara Kropf Middle Tennessee State beats Michigan State. Yale beats Baylor. The Cinderella season is upon us. The next big winner is . . . FedEx. The government has accused FedEx of conspiring with online pharmacies to ship illegal drugs to dealers and addicts. The...
The Fifth Circuit handed two corporate executives at a medical device company a big win recently. I’ve posted in the past about the indictments and trial of two former executives at ArthroCare, Michael Gluk and Michael Baker. They were found guilty in June 2014 of...
By: Sara Kropf I just spent $1200 to listen to the Department of Justice’s sales pitch that I should bring in my clients to confess their crimes. Let me explain. Last week was the annual ABA White Collar Crime conference in San Diego. It’s a three-day conference,...
By: Sara Kropf It’s a common scenario: a company thinks an employee is using its computers to do something wrong. Maybe the employee is stealing clients for a new venture, copying data from proprietary research or leaking documents to the media about the CEO's...
By: Sara Kropf Peter Henning of the New York Times White Collar Watch published an interesting piece on February 8 about the confidentiality of reports filed by corporate monitors after a non-prosecution agreement against a company. The article describes a recent...
By: Sara Kropf Like most people, I read the news stories about Martin Shkreli's testimony before Congress this week. I saw the quotes about his eye-rolling and general snarkiness. His post-hearing tweet was amusing....
By: Sara Kropf Most criminal defense lawyers would have no idea how to draft an interrogatory. That’s ok; it doesn’t come up in their practices. And most lawyers who handle civil cases would have no idea how to advise a client whose testimony may implicate criminal...