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 […]
Category Archives: Criminal Defense
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 […]
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 […]
A few weeks after a shoplifting arrest in Texas, many people receive a certified letter at home from a law firm they have never heard of. The letter demands payment of several hundred dollars (sometimes significantly more than the value of whatever was allegedly taken) and threatens legal action if the amount is not paid […]
Texas is a permitless carry state. Since September 1, 2021, eligible adults can carry a handgun without a license. But constitutional carry does not mean carry anywhere. Texas Penal Code §46.03 establishes a list of locations where firearms are prohibited and carrying into any of them is not a Class C citation. In most cases, […]