Articles Posted in Criminal Defense

A Middlesex County judge has ruled that a gang member’s mail can be used as evidence against him in order to prove witness tampering. The judge concluded that gathering such evidence does not violate the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment or New Jersey Administrative Code.

In handing down his precedential ruling, Judge Douglas Wolfsen stated, “Managing gangs…requires prison officials to have a comprehensive strategy to identify gang members, prevent their criminal activities, and mollify the threat they pose to institutional security.”

In 2001, David Young, an admitted Crips gang member was in prison awaiting trial on charges of attempted murder and assault. Investigators received permission from the prison’s administrator to monitor the inmate’s non-privileged mail.

Can police search a cellphone without a search warrant under the “incident to arrest” exception to the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to tackle this question and has heard oral arguments involving an issue that has divided state and federal courts.

At the heart of the matter is whether police have the right to search the contents of a cell phone if they deem that doing so will secure key evidence and keep it from being destroyed. While it is legal for an officer to conduct a warrantless search for items on an arrestee’s person or in an area that a person can access at the time of their arrest, there has been no clear-cut ruling whether an officer needs a search warrant before searching information on a cell phone.

Smartphones have become ubiquitous (two-thirds of Americans carry them) and are, for all intents and purposes, mobile computers. The courts have consistently ruled that it is illegal to search a home computer without a warrant, so the question remains whether a cellphone can be classified as a computer-like device and, if so, would law enforcement still have the right to search it incidental to arrest?

The New Jersey Supreme Court has heard arguments concerning the case of a New Jersey rapper whose attempted murder conviction was overturned after an appeals court ruled that the prosecution’s reading of the defendant’s rap lyrics at his trial was inappropriate and prejudiced the jury.

The rapper, Vonte Skinner, was convicted of shooting a drug dealer he worked with in 2005 and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. During the trial, the prosecution read 13 pages of the rapper’s rap lyrics, many of them graphic and violent. Those lyrics hadn’t described the actual crime he was accused of and had been written three or four years earlier.

On appeal, the court faulted the lower court for allowing the lyrics to be read and overturned the conviction. The prosecution then appealed that decision to New Jersey’s high court.

A New Jersey judge has said that the New Jersey Legislative Select Committee on Investigation cannot compel New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s former deputy chief of staff and the governor’s two-time campaign manager to provide documents that could potentially incriminate them in last fall’s “Bridgegate” scandal.

Mercer County Assignment Judge Mary Jacobsen dismissed the legislative committee’s lawsuits that sought Bridget Kelly’s and Bill Stepien’s compliance to provide the committee documents relating to their roles in the closure of local access lanes to the George Washington Bridge.

Both had maintained that their Fifth Amendment rights would be violated if they turned over the documents the committee was seeking. Usually, Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination are invoked while answering questions from prosecutors, but the judge maintained that the courts have “long recognized that individuals may also assert the right in response to a demand for documents.”

Eyebrows were raised recently when Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice married his fiancée, Janay Palmer, a day after he was indicted by a New Jersey grand jury on a third-degree aggravated assault charge in connection with an alleged altercation he had with her at a New Jersey casino on February 15. Rice allegedly knocked Palmer unconscious at the Revel Casino and Hotel in Atlantic City. She was also charged with simple assault, but that charge was dropped.

By some accounts, the marriage was not supposed to take place until this summer. So, this sudden turn of events begs the question: under New Jersey law can Palmer invoke spousal privilege and not be compelled to testify against her (now) husband in this case?

Some legal experts contend that if Palmer chooses to invoke spousal privilege, it will most likely be granted and she will not be compelled to testify against Rice; making the prosecution’s case flimsy at best without testimony from the alleged victim.

The criminal defense attorneys at Lubiner, Schmidt & Palumbo, LLC have been following with great interest the findings of a New Jersey Supreme Court committee, chaired by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. The findings recommended the state’s bail system be redesigned to more accurately assess risks posed by defendants.

The committee said in its report that the current bail system is skewed toward defendants who have the financial means to post bond and does not fairly assess whether those defendants pose a danger to the community or are flight risks. Conversely, those who may not be able to afford relatively small bail and pose little risk, stay in jail while awaiting trial.

The judicial committee recommended that risk assessment be implemented for every defendant — regardless of his or her ability to pay bond. The report said that it would make the system fairer by eliminating the “over-reliance upon money in determining who remains incarcerated while awaiting trial.”

A 30-year-old Bloomfield man is free, but the two Bloomfield police officers who arrested him are fighting charges themselves after footage from a police cruiser’s dashboard camera showed that allegations against the man of eluding police, resisting arrest, and assault were false.

The case began to unravel when the suspect’s defense attorney requested that police hand over all recorded evidence of the incident. According to The Raw Story, the Bloomfield Police didn’t hand over a tape from a second police vehicle until evidence revealed there had been a second vehicle at the scene of the traffic stop.

Allegedly, that second tape told a different story than what the arresting officers had reported. It showed that the suspect had complied with police during the traffic stop and that one of the officers was repeatedly punching him in the head while he was complying. An officer repeatedly and loudly accused the suspect of trying to take his weapon, even while his hands were clearly raised in the air

New York Knicks point guard Raymond Felton was arrested and later arraigned on two felony gun charges after his wife, accompanied by her attorney, turned in a semi-automatic handgun that he allegedly owns over to police. The lawyer claimed that Felton’s estranged wife, who has filed for divorce, no longer wanted the handgun in the house.

Felton was arrested after turning himself in following a Knicks’ game with Dallas. He was released on $25,000 bail and was later arraigned and charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree and criminal possession of a firearm.

The state of New York, and New York City in particular, have some of the nation’s strictest gun laws. The handgun allegedly in Felton’s possession, a Belgian-made FN Herstal model, was loaded with an ammunition magazine containing 18 high-velocity bullets. The NBA player allegedly did not have a permit to possess the weapon in New York City.

In Sept. 2013, Governor Chris Christie signed into law a bill that eased some of the barriers that kept children from participating in New Jersey’s medical marijuana program. The new law allowed dispensaries to offer edible marijuana products to minors, but stipulated that the edible products could only be offered to children.

The Legislature also had initially sought a change that would allow parents to seek medical marijuana for their children after obtaining permission from only one physician.

Christie vetoed that aspect of the proposed bill. So parents must still get permission from a physician and a psychiatrist in order to receive medical marijuana treatment for their children.

New Jersey was the last state in the union to authorize the use of stun guns as a law enforcement tool. It wasn’t until 2006 that the state authorized their use and some counties did not start issuing them to police until just recently.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are being arrested you should know that officers do not have the right to arbitrarily use a stun device on you. In fact, New Jersey has one of the most comprehensive and strict stun gun policies in the nation.

Originally, New Jersey officers were only allowed to use the devices to stun emotionally disturbed people armed with a deadly weapon. Those restrictions were eventually relaxed to allow law enforcement to use a stun device on anyone threatening death or serious bodily injury to an officer or another person — or to prevent the escape of a violent offender.