By Sara Kropf When a regular person does something wrong, the Department of Justice has no qualms about bringing criminal charges against him. When the Department of Justice does something wrong, well, it asks for a second chance. A few years ago, I wrote about...
By Sara Kropf If the Department of Justice has accused someone of a crime, it's no surprise that he can’t say, “aw, ya got me,” and walk away from the accusation. Au contraire. DOJ will prosecute that person to the fullest extent of the law and the whole process will...
By Sara Kropf In the last post, I explored whether bad-actor prosecutors and agents can avoid creating Brady material in interview memos. If an agent doesn’t take notes documenting exculpatory statements made by a witness in a criminal investigation, and those...
By Sara Kropf I’ve written before about the serious problem of prosecutors not disclosing Brady material to a defendant. (See here and here. Oh, and here too.) Failure to turn over exculpatory evidence is a serious constitutional violation. It’s also incredibly...
By Sara Kropf A year ago, I wrote a post lamenting the fact that prosecutors get every benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether they committed intentional Brady violations. My point was that judges routinely credit weak evidence of a defendant’s state of mind in...
By Sara Kropf In most white-collar cases, intent is the key issue. The government generally has to prove that the defendant intentionally acted to break the law and it wasn’t simply a mistake or an oversight. Circumstantial evidence is enough to prove intent, and, at...
By: Sara Kropf The government usually turns over interview memos, or FBI 302s, during discovery in a criminal case. As I’ve written before, a 302 is a summary of a witness interview written by an FBI agent. It is in narrative form, sometimes has quotes in it (but more...
By: Sara Kropf The Department of Justice has been humiliated in its misguided prosecution of over two hundred Inauguration Day protestors. It has lost every single case to go to trial. It has engaged in intentional violations of the rules. And it has cost taxpayers...
By Dan Portnov In certain legal (nerd) circles, coining a phrase or term of art is one of the surest ways to achieve immortality – think Tim Wu’s first use of “network neutrality” in a 2003 journal article or Justice Felix Frankfurter’s opinion in Rochin v....
By: Sara Kropf A few months ago, I wrote about the successful effort by a U.S. Attorney’s Office to convince the First Circuit to remove the name of a prosecutor involved in a case about Brady violations. Now, in a case in Philadelphia, a USAO did not ask the district...