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 […]
Category Archives: Criminal Defense
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 […]
In March 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit handed prosecutors a significant victory in DNA mixture litigation. In United States v. Anderson, No. 25-1223, the court ruled that TrueAllele (a proprietary DNA interpretation software used by crime labs across the country) is reliable enough under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 to […]
One of the most common misconceptions about warrants in Texas is that they eventually expire in that if enough time passes without an arrest, the warrant becomes unenforceable and the problem goes away. For the vast majority of warrants in Texas, this is not true. Texas warrants do not expire on their own. They remain […]
If you have been accused of sexually assaulting a child in Texas, you are likely experiencing a level of fear and confusion that is difficult to put into words. The allegation alone can result in immediate separation from your family, loss of employment, and public scrutiny. And the investigation that follows will determine whether you […]
When you are under investigation for murder in Texas, the grand jury proceeding is often one of the first critical battleground and it is one that most people facing charges do not understand until it is too late to use it effectively. A grand jury decides whether the prosecution has probable cause to formally charge […]
you were stopped on I-35 in North or Central Texas and found yourself facing drug charges, you were not the victim of random bad luck. You were the target of a structured enforcement operation that has been running on this highway for decades. Understanding how that operation works is the starting point for understanding how […]
This week, Notre Dame Law School is hosting its second annual Death Penalty Abolition Week. Among the speakers are two men who, between them, spent nearly 60 years on death row for crimes they did not commit. Elwood Jones was convicted of aggravated murder in Ohio in 1996 and sentenced to death. He spent 27 […]
Indecency with a child is one of the most frequently charged sex offenses in Texas and one of the most misunderstood. Many people facing this charge (and their families) conflate it with sexual assault, assume it requires physical penetration, or don’t understand how the two separate offense types within the statute carry fundamentally different penalties […]
In early March 2026, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Mike Lee (R-UT) reintroduced two pieces of bipartisan criminal justice legislation: the Smarter Sentencing Act and its companion, the Smarter Pretrial Detention for Drug Charges Act. The fact that a Democratic Senate whip and one of the Senate’s most conservative members keep reintroducing this bill together […]