Posted on June 25, 2009 in Federal Crimes & White Collar Crimes

The tremendous and unfair disparity between crack and powder cocaine in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines is no more! For many years, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for offenses involving the possession or sale of crack cocaine were exponentially more severe than the guidelines for offenses involving only powder cocaine. For example, a defendant with no prior criminal record who possessed a kilo of crack cocaine would face a guidelines sentence of between 15 – 20 years without parole. That same defendant would face a sentencing range of between 5 – 6 years if he possessed a kilo of cocaine powder.

For years, criminal defense attorneys, interest groups, and even many federal judges objected to the disparity, noting that there was no rational basis to treat crack cocaine differently from powder cocaine. Statistics revealed that the disparity adversely affected African Americans, who were most often charged with offenses involving the crack cocaine guidelines.

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 Posted on June 23, 2009 in Personal Injury

The National Transportation Safety Board has announced that it is taking over the investigation of Monday’s fatal crash of two trains on the Washington Metro’s Red Line. The NTSB involvement can only be a good thing. First, the NTSB has significant resources and has a history of not being afraid to mix it up with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Administration.

I first became involved in representing train accident victims in 1996 when I represented a Baltimore, Maryland family who lost their son in the fatal Amtrak/ MARC Maryland Rail Commuter train crash on February 16, 1996 in Chase, Maryland. In that accident just outside of Washington, 12 people were killed and the NTSB conducted a very comprehensive investigation. In the 1996 accident investigation, the NTSB determined driver error and signal malfunction as the cause.

History has shown that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Administration does not always like to point a finger at itself. Over the past three decades, the NTSB has criticized the agency for papering over its safety deficiencies and failing to take corrective action from past mistakes. Just yesterday, Deborah A.P. Hersman, chairman designate of the NTSB, criticized the agency for failing to follow its three year old recommendation that the aging fleet be phased out or retrofitted. This week’s tragic accident marks the sixth fatal incident involving the DC Metro.

For more information about the legal nuances of commuter train accidents, please contact Steve Silverman.

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 Posted on June 19, 2009 in Appeals - State & Federal

https://www.silvermanthompson.com/lawyer-attorney-1300820.html https://www.silvermanthompson.com/lawyer-attorney-1300820.html As A Maryland Criminal Attorney I am often retained after a defendant has gone to court and received what they perceive to be an unjust result. Some of these clients were represented by other attorneys when the bad result was obtained and some were foolish enough to have attempted to represent themselves in criminal court which is always a bad idea. In criminal court, the State is represented by a trained prosecutor who has spent years studying and practicing the law and is intimately familiar with the Maryland Rules as wells as the Criminal Procedure Article. Why someone would go to court facing the possibility of large fines, probation or even the loss of one’s freedom without retaining an attorney who is as at least as knowledgable and experienced as the State’s Attorney, is incomprehensible to me. Yet, I see it almost every day, usually with very bad results for the defendant. I represented a defendant today who had recently made this mistake and as a result spent 10 days in jail in a case that never would have resulted in jail time had she been represented by an Aggressive Maryland Criminal Attorney. Here are the facts:

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 Posted on June 10, 2009 in Criminal Defense

Maryland Criminal Attorneys who represent defendants who are charged with possession of a controlled dangerous substance need to have a solid understanding of what types of conduct by the police will lead to the application of the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule states that in circumstances in which the police violate a person’s Constitutional Rights, any evidence collected by the police will be excluded from use at trial.

The most common situation in which the exclusionary rule is applied is in the context of a car stop. In order for the police to lawfully stop a motorist, the police officer must either witness a violation of the rules of the road such as speeding or running a stop sign, or the officer must have reasonable articulable suspicion (RAS) that the operator of the vehicle is committing a crime. If it is determined by the court that the officer neither witnessed a violation of the traffic laws or had RAS to believe a crime was being committed, all evidence that is gathered as a result of the illegal stop will be suppressed. That is exactly what happened in my case today in Essex District Court, in Baltimore County. Here are the facts:

My client was driving an automobile that is owned by a friend at approximately 1:30am in the Turner’s Station section of Baltimore County. The officer wrote in his report and later testified that he recognized the car and knew from a previous MVA check that the owner of the vehicle had a suspended license. The officer acknowledged on cross examination that he did not run the registered owner of the vehicle through MVA on this occasion and did not specify when the "previous" occasion was that he did. The Assistant State’s Attorney did not revisit this issue on re-direct as she should have.

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 Posted on June 04, 2009 in Driving Under the Influence

As a Maryland DUI/DWI Attorney I am often retained for representation by offenders who have been charged and or convicted repeatedly in the past. An offender with a prior history of multiple DUI/DWI convictions presents an entirely different problem than that which faces the average first or even second offender. As I have discussed repeatedly here in this blog, even first and second offenses present the potential for incarceration these days, but if the case handled correctly this result can usually be avoided.

Offenders with two or more prior convictions, however, face almost certain incarceration if convicted in any jurisdiction in the state. As any experienced Maryland DUI/DWI lawyer will tell you, Harford County is among the strictest (if not the strictest) jurisdictions in Maryland for these types of cases which makes the risk even greater than if the offender were charged elsewhere.

I recently represented a woman on her fourth offense. Not only was she a repeat offender but the facts were bad. Several people had called in to 911 to report that a car being operated by a women on Route 40 in Harford County was driving in an extremely erratic and aggressive fashion. The callers claimed that she was swerving from lane to lane, tailgating and speeding. The police responded to the area and located the car just as it was pulling out of a gas station. The police immediately activated their emergency equipment and stopped the vehicle.

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 Posted on May 29, 2009 in Driving Under the Influence

To be a successful Maryland DUI/DWI Attorney, it is necessary to have a thorough knowledge of what constitutes a legal or illegal stop of a motor vehicle by the police. Very often, the only plausible way to defend a DUI/DWI in Maryland is to attack the basis for the stop. The reason for this is that over the last decade or so the State Legislature has passed laws that make most DUI/DWI cases, in the words of former CIA Director George Tenant, "a slam dunk" for the prosecutor, once the prosecutor establishes that the police lawfully stopped the defendant.

This is especially true if the defendant took the breathalyzer and registered a reading of .08 or greater. This is because in Maryland, a person who is proven to have been operating a motor vehicle while having a blood alcohol content of .08 or greater is "per se" guilty of driving under the influence of alcohol. Even if the defendant didn’t take the breathalyzer, however, most police officers write thorough enough reports detailing their observations of the defendant’s performance on the field sobriety tests and conduct throughout the booking process, for the State to secure a conviction at least as to driving while impaired if not to driving while under the influence. We successfully defended a case in Howard County last month that presented this exact situation. Here are the facts:

Our client was pulled over for on Interstate 95 South for, according to the police officer, "weaving within his lane" and for crossing over the white line separating the shoulder from the far right travel lane one time. The officer properly conducted the field sobriety tests (the horizontal gaze nystagmus, the walk and turn and the one leg stand) and detailed poor performance on each test in his report. He then arrested our client and offered him the opportunity to take a breathalyzer. Our client agreed to take the test and blew a reading of .13. In this situation, for the reasons noted above, there was no defense to this case other than to challenge the stop.

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 Posted on May 28, 2009 in Driving Under the Influence

As a Maryland DUI/DWI Attorney who is in court on a daily basis, I am in a position fairly regularly to witness attorneys handling DUI/DWI cases who are clearly not qualified to do so. I am also regularly surprised that the clients that I meet with rarely ask me about my experience and background to determine my qualifications before agreeing to hire me. As a regular part of my initial consultation, I volunteer the information that I am a former Assistant State’s Attorney and that I am a 100% full time Maryland Criminal Attorney, but again, people rarely ask me these basic questions. This is a serious mistake that can have very serious consequences.

By way of example, and I could offer many others, I was in Baltimore County District Court recently when I witnessed the shocking mishandling of a DUI/DWI case. The client was a second offender so the stakes were a little higher than for a first offender but the case was still very manageable if handled correctly. The attorney that handled the case, whom I will not name, was an attorney whom I know to be primarily a domestic and civil attorney. I watched in disbelief as he mishandled the case from beginning to end.

The first mistake he made was to allow his client to appear in front of one of the most prosecution oriented judges on the bench. One of the most important services that an experienced criminal defense attorney can provide is a deep knowledge of the tendencies of the various judges. This particular judge, who was a former prosecutor, is known to all who regularly practice criminal, and particularly those who practice DUI/DWI law, to be among the harshest sentencing judges in the state. An experienced criminal attorney could have (and would have) very easily avoided this judge with one of several available procedural tactics.

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 Posted on May 27, 2009 in Medical Malpractice

As an experienced Baltimore, Maryland medical malpractice lawyer, I am frequently asked to comment on malpractice cases from around the county. Recently, a Chicago hospital settled a case for $3 million after it failed to properly treat a toddler for an allergic reaction to penicillin, which had been given to her for an ear infection despite previous signs of an allergy to the medication. The suit and an Illinois Appellate Court decision tied to the case suggest that efforts by the hospital’s risk manager, who is not employed there any longer, to investigate the girl’s death may have been obstructed by hospital administrators. Apparently, syringes, Intravenous tubes and other medical materials, which were physical evidence of the girl’s treatment that day , were tossed minutes after she died.

I have handled a number of medical malpractice cases in Baltimore, Maryland and other places involving medication errors. Most of the cases fall into two categories: giving a patient a medication they are allergic to or giving the patient the wrong medication. In fact, I am handling two such cases now. In this day and age of extensive documentation, these kind of medication errors shouldn’t happen. There is no excuse. To see some of the cases I have handled, click here .

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 Posted on May 27, 2009 in Medical Malpractice

As an experienced Baltimore, Maryland medical malpractice lawyer, I am frequently asked to comment on malpractice cases from around the county. Recently, a Philadelphia jury awarded $2.185 million in a medical malpractice case in which it was alleged that a hospital and two emergency room doctors failed to timely read x-rays. The patient came to the ER at 8:35 am after experiencing chest, back and leg pains. He was quickly seen by a doctor, who ordered x-rays. After the x-rays were done, the emergency room doctor should have reviewed them before they were sent to radiology, but that did not happen. Because no one looked x-rays that day, no one realized that they showed a dissecting aortic aneurysm, a condition in which blood gets between the layers of the aorta wall and fills up the sac surrounding the heart, tightening it until the heart is not able to pump. The patient died at 7:05 pm from the undiagnosed condition.

The key to these cases, in addition to proving that the standard of care is to timely and properly read the x-ray, is to make sure that the there would have been enough time to do the life-saving surgery that this man needed. That requires a cardiothoracic or vascular surgery expert. In this case, this man had a condition that can kill him in minutes. The doctors in this case needed to quickly act on his complaints and not let the x-rays sit around in the hospital while this man died. It is a true tragedy.

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 Posted on May 27, 2009 in Medical Malpractice

As an experienced Baltimore, Maryland medical malpractice lawyer, I am frequently asked to comment on malpractice cases from around the county. Recently, a Rhode Island jury awarded a former truck driver $4 million in an orthopedic negligence case. The man filed suit in 2002 alleging that the doctor negligently performed surgery on his hand by slicing a nerve. This allegedly caused his hand to hurt, change color and temperature, and sweat. He eventually was diagnosed with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome, a chronic neurological disorder that causes severe pain. His hand since has become claw-like, and continues to have pain. As a result, he has become addicted to pain medication and relies on drugs to fall asleep each night.

This was a major verdict in a difficult case. While it would have been easy to show the jury the disfigured hand, juries sometimes have difficulty understanding Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, which is a chronic pain syndrome. The defense usually claims the person is exaggerating, and juries have difficulty grasping that a limb that may look ok is causing severe pain. Brining is experts to explain RSD to the jury is key.

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