By Sara Kropf This week, the Department of Justice announced that it was dropping charges against MIT professor Gang Chen. It had accused him of hiding his ties to China and indicted him for wire fraud, failing to report a foreign bank account, and making a false...
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 I was perusing recent opinions from the courts of appeal for possible blog post ideas when I came across an odd-looking errata sheet. Here’s an excerpt: That’s odd, I thought. I took a look at the original opinion in the case. The First Circuit wrote an...
By: Sara Kropf Elected officials under government investigation try to avoid indictment like any other white-collar client. They know that if charged with a crime, it will be nearly impossible to win re-election. Once indicted, though, they fight back, and fight back...
By: Sara Kropf In a civil case, a defendant cannot recover attorney’s fees from a plaintiff, even if the defendant wins. There are a few exceptions to the “American rule,” such as a when there’s a statute governing the case or the contract between the parties allows...
By: Sara Kropf In Part I of the series, I introduced the idea that defense counsel are increasingly fighting back against DOJ in creative ways. In Part II, we talked about Sheldon Silver and his defense counsel's efforts to use DOJ's very public statements against Mr....
By: Sara Kropf In Part I of this series, I pointed out that DOJ uses the media as a tool to punish defendants. It publicizes indictments, without equally publicizing acquittals and dismissals. This post is the second in a series exploring how defense lawyers are...
By: Sara Kropf Prosecutors who engage in misconduct are rarely subjected to ethics charges. In a recent case out of the Ninth Circuit, the prosecutor engaged in wrongdoing, the court suggests that he should be referred to the bar, yet there is no indication in the...