Recently in Criminal Law Category

Nicole Grant will pay for her $42,152 mistake, even if she'll only pay $125 at a time.

In 2009, Grant was indicted on one count of stealing government property in excess of $1,000 after she failed to notify the government that she was no longer eligible for Supplementary Security Income ("SSI") after she subsequently married.

She pled guilty and was sentenced to probation, brief home confinement, and restitution. Her presentencing report factored in her income, expenses, debts, and tax refunds for the preceding four years, leading the judge to require her to pay $250 per month in restitution payments. That was lowered to $125 in 2010.

Last month, we brought you the tale of attempted sodomizer and legal pioneer William MacDonald. Old MacDonald, at age 47, requested oral sex from a 17-year-old girl, then accused her of rape after she denied his advances. He was convicted under Virginia's "Crimes Against Nature" anti-sodomy statute. To recap, that statute reads:

If any person ... carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a [felony.]

A plea bargain is supposed to bring finality to a case. Along these lines, the Supreme Court, in Blackledge v. Perry, stated:

when a criminal defendant enters a guilty plea, he may not thereafter raise independent claims relating to the deprivation of constitutional rights that occurred prior to the entry of the guilty plea ... [He] is limited ... to attacks on the voluntary and intelligent nature of the guilty plea.

However, when the prosecution's entire case relied upon fictitious statement made by a corrupt police officer, how "voluntary and intelligent" can that plea be?

Michael Woods is in tax trouble. He allegedly pulled identities and Social Security Numbers off of a computer at his day job (at the Veteran's Administration), and used those identities to claim nonexistent dependents on clients' returns.

Woods, who represented himself and testified on his own behalf, was convicted by a jury and sentenced to 132 months' imprisonment, three years of supervised release, and restitution in the amount of $464,599. He appealed.

Moments after the seventeen-year-old girl returned to the vehicle, MacDonald made an indecent request - oral sodomy. She refused, and returned him to the Home Depot parking from whence he came.

Months passed by and, still stinging from the rejection, he filed a police report alleging that she forcibly performed oral sex upon him. His actions, ill-advised as they were, were the catalyst for criminal charges, years of legal tumult, and in the end, the termination of an unconstitutional statute.

One of his convictions was for solicitation, which itself requires a predicate felony. That felony was sodomy. The statute reads:

Man, Mann. You're still fighting this case?

Robert Mann was convicted of crack and powder cocaine possession in 1998. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, in large part because of the amount of crack involved.

We all know what happened next: The great crack reform brought forth by the Fair Sentencing Act.

An anonymous juvenile offender, whose identity is sealed under federal law, was required to register under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) after he sexually assaulted his two half-sisters, ages 10 and 6. Being a juvenile offender, his court case was kept under seal (hence his lack of identity in this case) due to the requirements of the Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act (FJDA).

Obviously, there's a bit of dissonance between the two laws. SORNA requires identification and registration, as well as semi-regular appearances for photos. FJDA requires that a juvenile's record be sealed unless he is tried as an adult, as the legal system does not wish to have the crimes of a minor follow him for life.

Police received a call about a domestic assault and arrived to find that the lady of the home had fled and the husband, Joseph Yengel, Jr., was angry, agitated, possibly armed, and threatening to shoot law enforcement officers. He was eventually talked into coming out of the house unarmed and was then placed under arrest.

Sergeant Staton interviewed Mrs. Yengel, who indicated that there were many firearms and a grenade in the house. She directed him to the upstairs master bedroom, where she collected and handed over a variety of firearms. Sergeant Staton then asked about the grenade. Mrs. Yengel led him to a locked closet where she had seen her husband store the grenade two years earlier.

In the criminal case that won't die, Rodney Anton Williamson ("RAW") makes his way to the Fourth Circuit once again - after prevailing somewhat with SCOTUS with a remand order.

Cops caught RAW with kilos of cocaine after using a wired snitch to record a conversation. RAW claimed the conversation -- which occurred after a sealed indictment had been issued -- violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel and Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

He initially lost that Sixth Amendment claim in the Fourth Circuit. But when it reached SCOTUS, the government conceded the point but argued harmless error.

State secrets leaked. Sealed private investigations. It is almost certain that this WikiLeaks debacle will some day become a spy-thriller movie.

We’re all familiar with PFC Bradley Manning’s leak of confidential information to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. As part of the government’s investigation into possible criminal charges, they requested electronic communications of those two, plus a security researcher, a Dutch hacker, and an Icelandic Parliament member. That’s quite the ensemble cast of characters.