Criminal Defense
Core strategy, procedure, and rights every Texas defendant should understand — from arrest and arraignment through trial and appeal.
Latest in Criminal Defense
When the Evidence Is AI-Generated: The Take It Down Act, Section 1466A, and What the Strahler Case Means for Criminal Defense
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…
Arson Convictions, Cameron Todd Willingham, and Texas’s Junk Science Writ
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…
Daniel Ross: A Frisco Traffic Stop, a Gun and the Hemp-Law Problem
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…
Adam “Pacman” Jones: Talent, Trouble, and a Pattern of Charges
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…
Can Police Get Into Your iPhone? How Apple’s New Security Is Reshaping Digital Evidence
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…
The Michael Morton Act, the Richard Miles Act and the Heath Opinion Now Under Fire
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…
Pitchford v. Cain: What a Batson Challenge Is, and Why the Jury Is Often Decided Before the First Witness
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…
Probabilistic DNA Software in the Courtroom: What Defense Lawyers Need to Watch For
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…
Texas SB 4 Goes Live May 15: What Defense Lawyers and Their Clients Need to Know Right Now
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)…
How Forensic Misconduct Can Unravel a Conviction: The Missy Woods Case and What It Means for Texas
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.…