The right to drive is a privilege, which is mainly governed by the individual states. Traffic violation attorneys deal with a mix of regulatory and penal (criminal) offenses typically based on violations of state statutes and county, city or other local ordinances relating to the operation of vehicles. However, federal implications may apply, depending on the nature of the violation.Traffic violations are considered criminal matters, and are handled as criminal law cases. As a result, the sentence imposed is an obligation that the offender has towards the state for violation of law. This means that the offender can be ordered to forfeit his/her personal freedom, rather than just being ordered to pay a money judgement to someone else, which is the typical civil law outcome. The state could be a local township, municipality, city, county, state, or even the federal government. However, unless you've committed a major violation or the violation is otherwise dangerous or life-threatening to other motorists, the officer will simply issue you a traffic ticket.A traffic ticket ... Read more..
Archive for November, 2007
The Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended, provides U.S. citizens with two options for facilitating the immigration of future spouses to the United States: the K-1 fianc้ visa and the alien-spouse immigrant visa. In many cases, the processing time for a fianc้ visa is shorter than that for an alien spouse. Fianc้ visa processing can take several months from the filing of the petition to the final adjudication of the visa. Total processing time for the alien-spouse visa can take 6-12 months depending on individual circumstances. If your alien fianc้ is already in the United States and plans to adjust status in the U.S., contact the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Marriage in the United States: Fianc้ Visa U.S. citizens may file an I-129F petition with USCIS for the issuance of a K-1 fianc้ visa to an alien fianc้. A citizen exercising this option must remain unmarried until the arrival of the fianc้ in the U.S., and the wedding must take place within three months of the ... Read more..
Shannon L. Strong, says Paul Morrison, a prosecutor in Olathe, Kan., is ''a very prolific auto burglar.'' The case against him, tried there in March, was in many ways routine. But what happened at his trial and others in Kansas may provide -- if not in the federal system, at least in other states -- a way out of the chaos created by the Supreme Court's decision last month on sentencing guidelinesIn a decision known as Blakely, the Supreme Court ruled that except for prior convictions, any factor increasing a criminal sentence must be admitted by the defendant or proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Judges, the court ruled, may not make such an additional determination themselves.The case concerned the sentencing law in Washington State, but its logic seems to require revisions to the federal guidelines and similar laws in other states.The decision has caused ''the legal equivalent of a 40-car pileup,'' said Margaret Love, a former Justice Department official.On Friday, the federal appeals court in Chicago ... Read more..
A federal judge in Boston ruled on Monday that federal sentencing laws were unconstitutional because they gave prosecutors too much power.In an impassioned 177-page decision, the judge, William G. Young, described a system in which prosecutors used various strategies to reward those who pleaded guilty and to impose exceptionally harsh sentences on those who chose to stand trial and then lost.''The focus of our entire criminal justice system has shifted away from trials and juries and adjudication to a massive system of sentence bargaining that is heavily rigged against the accused citizen,'' Judge Young, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Boston, wrote in a decision reconsidering the sentences he had imposed on two defendants.Judge Young acknowledged that similar challenges to the sentencing guidelines had been rejected by all of the appeals courts that had considered them. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the guidelines themselves in 1989, but he said more recent Supreme Court cases supported his analysis.The Supreme Court is now considering a similar ... Read more..
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — Eighteen years have passed since an Idaho murder defendant took his lawyer’s advice to reject the state’s offer of a guilty plea that would have resulted in a life sentence. The defendant, Maxwell Hoffman, went to trial instead, and was sentenced to death for participating in the murder of a government informer.A federal appeals court eventually ruled that the lawyer’s advice reflected such bad judgment as to fall below the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of the effective assistance of counsel. On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would use the case to decide how appellate courts are to evaluate claims of ineffective assistance of counsel in plea negotiations.To that question, posed by Idaho’s attorney general in the state’s appeal, the justices added a question of their own: What should the remedy be for bad legal advice during plea negotiations if the defendant is later convicted and sentenced after a fair trial?In its opinion, issued in July 2006, the United States Court of Appeals for the ... Read more..
