By Sara Kropf The Sean “Diddy” Combs criminal case has garnered plenty of attention for its salacious allegations. Rather than parsing the RICO and other charges, however, I’m going to capitalize on the case to explain some of the nuts and bolts of pretrial practice...
By Sara Kropf When 98% of federal criminal cases are resolved by plea agreements, you may expect that courts would fiercely protect defendants’ constitutional rights during the plea bargaining stage. Nothing could be further from reality. In fact, the Supreme Court...
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 a high-profile case in the Eastern District of New York, the Department of Justice has once again shown that it cannot be trusted when it comes to discovery. DOJ recently disclosed that it had failed to give 15,500 pages of emails from its star...
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 In the first post on this topic, I described the basics of Rule 17(c) subpoenas. This post will offer some practical tips to convince a court to issue a subpoena to a third party to obtain documents for your defense. As we described in our earlier post,...
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...