By Mani Dabiri | Published January 12, 2019 | Posted in Civil Business Litigation and Investigations, Federal and State Criminal Defense, Government Subpoenas and Investigations, Post-Conviction Defense and Appeals, White-Collar and Regulatory Defense | Tagged Tags: CPRA, dueprocess, forensics, pitchessmotions, smartoncrime, technology, witnesses |
New California Criminal Laws: Part Deux
Here are three more new laws for this week. The public has greater access to police personnel files. This is Senate Bill 1421. It declares that the public has an important interest in law-enforcement transparency because it is essential to having a just and democratic society. It then amends the Penal Code to confer more access Read More
Read MoreNew Federal Rules Proposed About Sexual Harassment on Campus
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Education proposed new rules on the handling of sexual-harassment complaints on school campuses that receive federal funding. The regulations aim to address when a school violates Title IX, a federal law against sex discrimination, based on the way it responds (or doesn’t respond) to such complaints. There is a Read More
Read MoreIf At First You Don’t Succeed?
Last week, a federal court heard the appeal of Monica Los Rios, the woman who claims NBA star Derrick Rose and two friends gang-raped her in 2013. She never called the police but filed a civil case against him two years later, asking for over $21 million in damages. And she took her case all Read More
Read MorePrivacy Across the Pond
We’re fresh off a conference on how privacy laws in Europe affect life and business in the United States. So we tip our hat to the law firm that spotted this case about just that. The background is that one business had sued another in England and won. Then it had sued again here to collect on the Read More
Read MoreWhy We Defend People
In 2009, I was a prosecutor in Orange County when I became a defendant in my own criminal case. I was falsely accused of domestic violence, and I was charged with two felony counts even though I was the one who called the police three times that night over my accuser’s behavior. It was surreal. Read More
Read MoreWhen You Walk a Mile in Their Shoes
You may never serve on a jury, but suppose you did. How would you feel—how would any of us feel—if we voted to convict someone innocent? This person knows. In 2009, she voted to convict a 17-year-old boy for murder based on the testimony of one eyewitness. The witness and victim were friends, and they were Read More
Read MoreThrowing Pitches in a Civil Case
Make that Pitchess with an extra s—as in Pitchess motions. In California, they’re how you ask a court to order the production of a police officer’s personnel file in litigation. We’ve written about them in the context of criminal cases, but the procedure’s the same in civil cases, as a court of appeal recently explained in an employment case. A Read More
Read MoreIf At First You Don’t Succeed
Here’s that DUI case we alluded to last week. It’s based on a driver’s challenge to his license suspension after his arrest. His post-arrest blood test showed a blood-alcohol concentration (or BAC) of 0.23 percent. He challenged this finding at the DMV’s administrative hearing and lost. He then petitioned the superior court to overturn that finding and lost Read More
Read MoreLies, Damned Lies, and Sex Crimes
If you thought the case from last week was bad, here’s another one that’s worse. This time, the supposed victim hasn’t stepped forward to admit she lied, so the man she accused of child molestation sits in prison, as he has for seventeen years, and the system seems powerless to stop it. What happened? The jury never saw medical records Read More
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