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 Rebecca Guiterman Last week, the Second Circuit upheld Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking conviction and 20-year sentence. On appeal, one of the questions presented was whether Mr. Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with the United...
By Sara Kropf In late 2017, I represented a client who participated in a protest against the inauguration of Donald Trump in the District of Columbia on January 20, 2017. She was charged with conspiracy to engage in felony rioting, among other things, and faced the...
Note: A shorter version of this post was published by Bloomberg News on May 14. You can find the article here. By Sara Kropf I’ve written before about the Department of Justice’s questionable tactics in an FCPA case against two former executives for Cognizant...
By Sara Kropf Note: A similar version of this article was also published in Law360. When the Department of Justice indicts a defendant or prevails at trial, the Office of Public Affairs issues a press release. Those press releases tout the seriousness of the charged...
By Sara Kropf It has become a running joke among the defense lawyers I know that we can’t wait to see what the Department of Justice will announce as its newest “cooperation” policy at the annual ABA White Collar Crime conference. The ABA conference is the largest of...
By Sara Kropf Where the government indicts someone affects a host of key elements of a criminal case: How quickly the defense team will obtain key pretrial discovery; the composition of the jury pool; the speed of the trial; and likely outcomes for sentencing. In...
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 Rebecca Guiterman Trade secrets cases are on the rise. Most often, they happen when an employee steals confidential computer code or client lists or marketing plans. You may think of them as disputes between employers and employees (or, in one instance, by a...
By Sara Kropf Protective orders in criminal cases are . . . . typical. Boring, even. (Are you really going to read a blog post about protective orders?) But even the most mundane procedural matters seem to take on outsized importance when they arise in the criminal...