By Douglas E. Huff | Partner, Deandra Grant Law | Dallas, Texas On April 7, 2026, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio announced the first federal conviction under the Take It Down Act, the bipartisan federal statute signed by President Trump in May 2025 that criminalizes the non-consensual publication of intimate […]
Category Archives: Criminal Defense
In late April 2026, The Appeal reported on the appeal of Maria Montalvo, a New Jersey woman convicted in 1996 of murdering her two young children in a car fire and sentenced to 100 years in prison. Her attorneys at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender argue that every forensic indicator the State’s […]
By Deandra Grant & Griffin Grant Welcome to The Defense File, where we examine the criminal cases of public figures through the lens of Texas criminal law. Each entry looks at what happened in court, what the defense argued, and what a defendant would have faced (and how they might have been defended) if the […]
By Deandra Grant & Griffin Grant Welcome to The Defense File, where we examine the criminal cases of public figures through the lens of Texas criminal law. Each entry looks at what happened in court, what the defense argued, and what a defendant would have faced (and how they might have been defended) if the […]
By Douglas E. Huff | Partner, Deandra Grant Law | Dallas, Texas In March 2026, Apple released iOS 26.4. Buried in the release was a change that has (quietly) reshaped the landscape of mobile-device forensics. A feature called Stolen Device Protection, or SDP, which Apple introduced in iOS 17.3 in early 2024 as an opt-in […]
Most people who are not lawyers do not think much about criminal discovery. It sounds like procedure which is the dry, technical part of how a case moves through the system. But discovery is the work of getting the truth into the courtroom, and the rules that govern what each side is required to turn […]
By Deandra Grant | Deandra Grant Law | Dallas, Texas On May 28, 2026, the United States Supreme Court reversed the conviction and death sentence of Terry Pitchford, a Black man on Mississippi’s death row, ruling 5-4 that the state trial court never properly evaluated his claim that prosecutors had unconstitutionally struck black jurors at […]
This month Cybergenetics (the company behind the TrueAllele probabilistic genotyping system) announced the launch of the TrueAllele Investigative Database (TA-ID), a tool built to re-examine DNA evidence that crime labs previously set aside as “inconclusive”: the low-level, partial, degraded, and mixed samples that traditional analysis could not search. The pitch is that thousands of stalled […]
On April 24, 2026, the en banc Fifth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction that had kept Senate Bill 4 (the 2023 statute creating new state criminal offenses for unlawful entry into Texas) on ice for nearly three years. The 10–7 ruling did not decide whether SB 4 is constitutional. It held that the plaintiffs (Las […]
For 29 years, Yvonne “Missy” Woods was a star analyst at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. She testified in high-profile murder trials. She was trusted as the gold standard in DNA testing. Prosecutors built cases around her results. Juries convicted defendants on the strength of her reports. Then, in September 2023, an intern doing a […]