According to Rule 3.8 of the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct, a prosecutor in a criminal case shall not: “[i]ntentionally fail to disclose to the defense, upon request and at a time when use by the defense is reasonably feasible, any evidence or information that the prosecutor knows or reasonably should know tends to negate the guilt of the accused …
On the morning of trial, the prosecutor finds out that the testimony provided by a police officer at the preliminary hearing was inaccurate. Although the prosecutor himself is not planning to call this particular police officer to testify at trial, he knows that the defense attorney is. So what does prosecutor do? Does he immediately contact the defense attorney to …
Mark Bennett refers to them as “letter lawyers”; they are the lawyers who, with the hopes of securing new clients, send out advertising materials to the people whose names and addresses have been listed on public arrest records. A friend of ours was charged recently with a misdemeanor traffic offense and received over 20 letters in the mail. She …
“We really didn’t check him out. He said he was this and could do that. We thought he was telling the truth.” — Henrietta Watson, grandmother of defendant Dontrell Deaner The blogosphere has been abuzz the past week with the story of Joseph Rakofsky, a 33-year-old lawyer two years out of law school who took on a murder case in …