Articles Posted in Criminal defense

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The community of Grand Rapids Michigan is reeling after an officer-involved shooting shows that a suspect was shot in the back of the head while resisting during a routine traffic stop. The events of this shooting are clear as day, but it remains unclear if any officer will be charged with a crime. This comes after police officers involved in the George Floyd murder rejected pleas offered by state prosecutors.

Bodycam footage shows that the officer pulled over a vehicle for having a license plate that did not match the vehicle. The officer pulls over the vehicle and the suspect immediately gets out of the car. The suspect does not have a weapon, looks confused, and tells the officer he has a license, but does not produce one. Later, the suspect can be seen walking away from the officer and then running. The officer pursues, tackles the suspect, and a struggle ensues. The officer draws his taser, the suspect intercepts it with his hands and diverts it. A struggle ensues. The officer is on top of the suspect when he discharges his weapon into the back of the suspect’s head. The suspect dies immediately. An autopsy confirms that the cause of death is a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.

Police reform advocates are saying this is another example of ineffective policing leading to tragedy. Pro-police advocates say that the suspect was still reaching for the officer’s taser when he fired the weapon.

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No, the George Floyd situation has not yet been resolved. Three Minneapolis police officers are still facing charges for aiding and abetting the murder of the detainee. Officer Derek Chauvin has been charged and convicted of causing his death. Chauvin was the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes before he lost consciousness and died. The three others stood by and watched as Floyd was asphyxiated to death.

Chauvin argued at trial that Floyd had a history of heart problems and drug dependency which contributed to his death. However, they could not prove that there was anyone alive who could survive a grown man kneeling on their carotid artery for 9 minutes. Hence, he was convicted of the homicide of George Floyd.

The three men have been convicted of violating Floyd’s civil rights and two of the officers were charged with failing to intervene on Floyd’s behalf. The officers claimed that Chauvin was the lead officer on the scene and so they deferred to him for leadership. They said they were not trained to intervene on a suspect’s behalf against a police officer. However, federal prosecutors reminded them that they were, in fact, duty-bound to do so. 

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A young woman was with three male friends when a fourth individual attempted to hit on her. The girl was not having it and eventually, the friends stepped in on her behalf. The man who was hitting on the girl was affronted by this and two of her friends wound up dead with a third suffering severe injuries in a knife attack. Now, the man is on trial facing two first-degree murders and a third attempted murder charge. The defendant is claiming self-defense. The prosecution has rejected an offer for a lesser charge.

Will self-defense work here?

It is hard to say. Both the prosecution and the defense are establishing their own timeline for events. Prosecutors will say that the defendant hit on a girl and that her friends warned the defendant off. The defendant then became irate and stabbed them after further disputes related to the unwanted attention emerged. The defendant claims that the friends organized an assault on him in which he was placed in a chokehold. This led to further altercations that eventually led to the stabbing.

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A Chicago area man is facing multiple felonies in Michigan after he showed up at a rural parochial school for unknown reasons. Police were called to the school, but the man had already left. He was found later at a local McDonald’s. Police confronted the man and asked for identification. The man said his ID was in his vehicle, but when he got back inside, he drove his car directly into the police SUV and drove off. Eventually, the vehicle skidded off the road and the driver abandoned it. The suspect took off on foot where he was eventually apprehended. He is now facing multiple felonies related to assault with a vehicle on an officer. He is facing a separate charge of driving with an altered or forged driver’s license.

No one, however, knows why the man was in rural Michigan at the time. The man has no ties to the local community and appears to be entirely out of sorts with his environment. Nonetheless, he did use a motor vehicle to strike a police vehicle with a police officer inside it. So, despite the fact that he may be fighting off an undiagnosed mental illness, he will face consequences for those actions.

What are his chances of pursuing an insanity defense?

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It is unlawful to take video footage of someone in a restroom without their consent or knowledge. This is a fact that one Chicago-area music executive has learned the hard way after nude videos surfaced of his former nanny. Now, more allegations are pending as police have confiscated sim cards with more images of nude women. 

As a result of the charges, the executive, who is the son of a billionaire, has lost two jobs as the president of various establishments and his other job as the CEO of Audiotree. The CEO has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Civil suits have also been filed by the women found on the tapes. 

Understanding the Law

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A Chicago-area father is facing weapons charges after his 3-year-old son shot and killed his own mother while playing with the weapon in the back seat. The father is now facing a misdemeanor gun charge. The mother was brought to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. The child has been offered trauma counseling services that he will likely need for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, the father is facing a misdemeanor charge of unlawfully transporting a weapon. The father had a license for the gun, but transporting it in the backseat of your vehicle while your 3-year-old is back there is considered a crime. 

Accidental shootings involving children are now a major problem across the United States. Since 2015, over 2,000 individuals have been accidentally shot by children. 90% of those individuals were other children with about 70% of the shootings happening in the home. The pandemic and quarantine made the situation worse, with accidental shootings rising over that period. 

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It took prosecutors 45 minutes to read through all of the charges filed against two men who committed dozens of batteries, armed robberies, and at least one murder over the course of four hours. Police said they left nearly two dozen victims over the course of the crime spree and horrifically beat a man to death in front of his family as he was trying to put up Christmas lights. 

This is precisely the type of crime that Chicago is riddled with, leaves people afraid for their safety, and confounds any attempts to rationalize the event. The two men prowled the streets with a crowbar and a baseball bat looking for easy victims. One of the victims was a family man hanging Christmas lights. His children were there to witness the beating and killing of their father. 

In another incident, the men terrorized a family and stole the father’s paycheck while his 4-year-old son was present in the vehicle. They are unlikely to see the outside of a prison cell in their lives for these crimes. DNA evidence from the crowbar and the bat will show the victim’s blood and connect them to the crimes. 

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A Chicago man who was convicted as a teen for murder will now be freed from prison after his conviction was overturned after 37 years behind bars. The National Registry of Exonerations reported that this was the 3,000th conviction lifted since 1989 when the registry began tracking overturned convictions. The suspect was released from prison after 30 years behind bars, but not because his conviction was overturned — because he was paroled. He will now have the conviction expunged from his record, for all the good it will do him, and he will seek a certificate of innocence from the state. 

The defendant was framed by a group of rogue officers operating within Chicago P.D. during the late 80s. The police found the teen walking down the street, beat him, and charged him with murder. The group resorted to framing, planting evidence, and gaining confessions through torture and beatings. 

Exculpatory evidence had been suppressed at the original trial and the defense attorney representing the wrongfully-convicted defendant said he did not know about witness testimony that would have tied another man to the shooting. 

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Two officers approach a suspect who opens fire on them. They return fire and strike the suspect. The suspect has now been shot. The police have him in cuffs and are searching him to determine where the gun is. The officer is patting him down. Another officer is standing near him. The officer who is doing the patdown hits his head on the other officer. Thinking it was the suspect who tried to strike him, he punches the man in the groin several times. 

Bodycam footage does not show the suspect threatening the officer at the time of the arrest. The officer was relieved of duty and then charged with aggravated battery and official misconduct. However, a grand jury declined to file charges against the officer and so, the case has been dismissed.

Understanding the Problem

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Defendants who confess to crimes rarely can go back into a courtroom and then say that their confession was coerced. This is especially true when the police have stopped looking for other suspects. Children are especially easy to get to confess to things they did not do because they just want the anxiety caused by the questioning to stop. Police will pressure them with more anxiety if they do not say what they want to hear and offer them incentives for confession, regardless of whether or not it is the truth. In this case, a teen confessed to shooting a clerk directly in the face during an armed robbery. He was plied with McDonald’s into the confession.

While juries will not listen to individuals who say they falsely confessed to the crimes, the courts will, especially children, and especially in a place like Chicago where there is a long history of police convicting suspects using torture and extortion. 

In this case, the police told the teen that they would give him some McDonald’s if he told them he was there. The teen complied, ate the McDonalds, and was promptly charged with attempted murder, armed robbery, and enough felonies to put him behind bars for two lifetimes. Meanwhile, the teen was later able to prove that he was at a basketball game at the time of the shooting. It goes to show you just how useless police interrogations are at producing the truth and just how narrowly this boy dodged a bullet.

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