Drug Crimes

If you’ve been accused of drug possession, there are several specifics the prosecutor must prove in order for you to be convicted. It’s not enough for them to simply show up in court and say that the police found what they believe to be drugs on your person. If you find yourself in this...

Colorado and Washington legalized adult possession of marijuana in 2012. Since then, a large majority of states have legalized weed, either entirely or for medical use. Still others have decriminalized the drug, meaning that possession results in a fine instead of incarceration. Included among the fully legalized states are California and Illinois, two of the most...

A criminal drug conviction can haunt an individual for years. Potential employers, landlords, creditors and even government agencies often make immediate judgments upon seeing marks on an individual’s history. While it is possible to seal recent criminal drug convictions, doing so can be complicated and time-consuming. A waiting game The first step toward filing...

In most cases, the police need to have a search warrant issued by a judge before they can enter a private residence, search the residence, or seize items from the residence. If they do not have a warrant, they are not permitted to search a residence or seize items that they find in it...

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case in which a defendant’s SUV was seized by the state after he was convicted of a drug crime. Many states and the federal government engage in asset seizures after drug and other arrests, often before a conviction has been obtained. All the government has...

Alexandria S. is not what you think of as a drug dealer. A suburban mother of three, she became addicted to her prescription Percocet while being treated for back pain. When she couldn’t get off Percocet, she turned to heroin, which is chemically similar. Across the street, her neighbor was also suffering from an...

Across the United States, around 13.2 million misdemeanor cases are filed every year. Unfortunately, there are no statistics on how many of those cases result in conviction — much less on how many wrongful convictions occur. Some data is available from the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of Michigan Law...

In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has said that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “excessive fines” applies to states and local governments as well as to the federal government. The high court had never actually ruled that the clause applied to states and local governments, although many people assumed that it did....

With marijuana legal in Colorado, but illegal under federal law, you would think the temptation to grow the plant on public land would be relatively low. Unfortunately for Colorado’s forests and mountains, illegal cannabis growers continue to cut costs by cultivating in state and national parks and forests. And, it may be getting worse,...

While laws surrounding marijuana in Colorado have relaxed over the years, do not take this as a false sense of security – thinking that drugs are now just legal and that there are no repercussions after getting caught. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In this post, we are going to set the...