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 A few weeks ago, I suggested that there were four options for Judge Emmet Sullivan related to the government's motion to dismiss the charges against Michael Flynn. At the end of the post, a little tongue in cheek, I noted that “[m]aybe, in his wisdom,...
By Sara Kropf On May 7, 2020, the Department of Justice moved to dismiss the false statement charge against former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn. This is a remarkable request for a couple of reasons. First, Flynn had already pleaded guilty to the...
By: Sara Kropf Remember when everyone was talking about whether now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh was lying to Congress when he seemed a bit less-than-candid about his drinking in high school? Seems like a million years ago. Anyway, it turns out that lying to Congress is a...
By: Sara Kropf On August 21, 2018, former Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to multiple criminal counts, including campaign finance fraud. During his plea hearing, Cohen implicated the President in the crime, saying that Cohen had paid Stormy Daniels...
By: Sara Kropf Much was made this week of the fact that Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty without a written cooperation agreement. He pleaded guilty to multiple federal offenses, including tax fraud, campaign finance violations and bank fraud. The...
By: Sara Kropf Many of my white-collar clients are startled to learn how long a government investigation and criminal trial take. They think it will last a year, maybe 14 months. Instead, it can take years. Delay can work to my clients’ advantage, allowing us time to...
By: Sara Kropf I teach a continuing legal education class on defending white-collar criminal cases. When I developed the curriculum, I quickly realized that one of the class’s main goals was to teach everyone the lingo of being a white-collar defense lawyer. This is...
By: Sara Kropf I’ve been thinking recently about the inequalities of negotiations when you are a criminal defense attorney. We do a lot of negotiating for our clients, right? And we often lose. Badly. We make plea deals for our clients and they end up with felony...
By: Sara Kropf Several of the cases I’ve featured in my posts over the last year have had significant developments or come to a close. It’s always interesting—and moderately depressing—to see how things turned out. When an FBI Agent Is the Bad Guy First up we have...