Author: Mick Mickelsen
Texas, with its multi-million dollar oil and gas industry, sees a number of high profile white collar crime investigations every year. According to the U.S Department of Justice, four executives from Provident Royalties, Inc. have been sentenced in connection with a massive oil and gas investment fraud scheme in the Eastern District of Texas. The…
This was the question recently put to members of the Dallas criminal defense bar. When his peers were asked, Clint Broden was selected in four categories as the lawyer other criminal defense lawyers would go to if their son or daughter needed criminal representation. The categories were: If my son/daughter were charged with a FELONY…
Medicaid and Medicare fraud has made headlines recently after Texas Governor Rick Perry signed a series of bills to step up state enforcement and investigations into bad practices in the healthcare field. The legislation is also intended to set up procedural safeguards for health providers accused of wrongdoing. The new laws broaden the definition of…
In Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), the Court found the Fourth Amendment did not apply to wiretaps because “[t]he taps from house lines were made in the streets near the houses,” rather than in the houses themselves, employing a strict property bases Fourth Amendment analysis. Likewise, in Goldman v. United States, 316…
Yesterday I discussed whether the massive data mining efforts of the U.S. government presaged a Big Brother like invasion of privacy. Today I’ll consider the implications of government efforts to develop massive DNA databanks in order to solve crimes. In 2003 a man broke into a woman’s home in Maryland and raped her at gunpoint….
Based on the recent revelations published in the Guardian concerning the U.S. Government’s massive data collection efforts as part of its “war on terror,” many Americans are beginning to wonder if the government is not in fact engaging in a “war on privacy.” On the one hand some people are decrying the current state of…
DNA and the question of when and under what circumstances it can be taken from suspects has occupied many hours in the U.S. Supreme Court of late. This month the Supreme Court upheld the controversial police practice of taking DNA samples from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime. The justices…
This month Texas Governor Rick Perry signed Senate Bill 1611, more commonly known as the Michael Morton Act, which aims to reduce the number of wrongful convictions in the state. Few cases highlight more graphically the deficit in Texas’ criminal justice system than that of Michael Morton. Morton wrongly spent 25 years in jail for…
Mistrials are rare but we see them from time to time. In a high profile case in Texas a mistrial has been declared after a jury was deadlocked in the trial of a woman charged in the 2011 stabbing death of a Huston-Tillotson University athlete in Austin. In the case, the jury deadlocked 11-to-1 on…
A bill to study the causes of the numerous wrongful convictions we see in Texas passed through the House floor this month – but not without opposition. House Bill 166, has been put forward by Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, D-San Antonio. It would create the Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission, named after a defendant who…