The Denver Post reports:

Beyond the log-in screen of Ramona Fricosu’s laptop computer lies what federal prosecutors say could be the key evidence in the bank-fraud case against her.

There’s only one problem: Prosecutors don’t know her password.

Thus, in an extraordinarily rare move, prosecutors in Denver are seeking a court order forcing Fricosu to unlock the computer so that they can obtain files they would use to try to convict her and her ex-husband.

Civil liberties groups say the extremely rare move could test the very fabric of the Fifth Amendment’s protections against self-incrimination in criminal cases.

“If the government wins in this case, and they are able to force her to decrypt the laptop … it’s the erosion of the Fifth Amendment,” said Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a brief in support of Fricosu. “It’s seeing the Fifth Amendment not keeping up with advances in technology.”

On the other hand, prosecutors counter that modern data encryption methods make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement officials to access key evidence stored in computer hard drives without the passwords.

“Failing to compel Ms. Fricosu,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia Davies wrote in a court filing, “amounts to a concession to her and potential criminals (be it in child exploitation, national security, terrorism, financial crimes or drug trafficking cases) that encrypting all inculpatory digital evidence will serve to defeat the efforts of law enforcement officers … and thus make their prosecution impossible.”

Ramona Fricosu and her husband were indicted in 2010 on charges of defrauding banks out of more than $900,000 in a complex mortgage-foreclosure scam.

If you are in need of criminal defense lawyer in California, please contact the Fresno based law firm of Hammerschmidt Broughton Law Corporation.  Our attorneys can be reached at (559) 772-4614. We are also on the Web at www.hbcriminaldefense.com.

The Associated Press reports:

Franky the drug dog’s supersensitive nose is at the heart of a question being put to the U.S. Supreme Court: Does a police dog’s sniff outside a house give officers the right to get a search warrant for illegal drugs, or is the sniff an unconstitutional search?

Florida’s highest state court has said Franky’s ability to detect marijuana growing inside a Miami-area house from outside a closed front door crossed the constitutional line. The state’s attorney general wants the Supreme Court to reverse that ruling.

The Supreme Court has approved drug detecting dog sniffs in cases involving traffic stops, airport luggage, and packages in transit. However, the Florida case is different because it involves a private home, which the Supreme Court has continued to emphasize is entitled to greater privacy. In the 2001 ruling in Kyllo v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a thermal imaging device used by police outside a home to detect heat from marijuana-growing lamps operated inside a home constituted a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

“We have said that the Fourth Amendment draws a firm line at the entrance to the house,” the Supreme Court wrote in its opinion. The justices added that the thermal devices could detect such intimate details as “at what hour each night the lady of the house takes her daily sauna and bath.”

Although law enforcement officials can knock on a home’s front door in the hopes that someone will answer, if a person inside the home refuses, officers must obtain a search warrant which would require evidence of a crime.

UPDATE: The Supreme Court has agreed to take the case.

If you are in need of criminal defense lawyer in California, please contact the Fresno based law firm of Hammerschmidt Broughton Law Corporation.  Our attorneys can be reached at (559) 772-4614. We are also on the Web at www.hbcriminaldefense.com.

Sunny Jacobs

In 1976 Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs was accused, along with her husband Jesse Tafero, of murdering two police officers in Florida during a traffic stop. Jacobs had testified that the driver of the car, a friend of her husband’s, was the one who shot the police. The friend, Walter Norman Rhodes Jr., ended up testifying against Jacobs and her husband, who were both ultimately convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. Rhodes was sentenced to three life sentences. In 1981 Jacobs, who continued to maintain her innocence, won an appeal and the Florida Supreme Court changed her sentence from death to life in prison. However, in 1990 her husband Jesse Tafero was put to death by electric chair in a horrifically botched execution.

In 1992, Jacobs’ conviction was overturned on appeal after Rhodes ended up confessing to murdering the officers (which Jacobs had testified to in her trial in 1976), and after a jailhouse informant, who had implicated Jacobs years earlier, recanted.

In their 1994 book In Spite of Innocence, Hugo Bedau and Michael Radelet, a professor of philosophy and a criminologist respectively, wrote regarding the case that “if Jacobs was innocent, then the execution of Tafero was probably the execution of an innocent man, because the same evidence (later shown to be insufficient) used to convict Jacobs had also been used to convict Tafero. The information that freed her would have freed him — if he had not already been executed.”

Peter Pringle

In 1980 Peter Pringle was accused of being one of three men who murdered two police officers in Ballaghaderreen, Ireland. He was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. (Although Ireland abolished the death penalty in 1990, at the time of Pringle’s conviction killing a police officer was a capital offense.) In 1981, and only a few weeks before his execution date, the president of Ireland commuted Pringle’s sentence to forty years without parole.

During his time in prison he continued to declare his innocence and pursue justice. Acting as his own attorney, in spite of having left school at age 13, Pringle was ultimately able to prove that an interrogating officer at the time of his arrest in 1980 had written down his alleged confession before he had ever been interrogated. In May 1995, according to Pringle, “the case was quashed by the court of criminal appeal on the grounds that my conviction was unsafe and unsatisfactory.”

They meet, they marry

In 1998 Pringle met Jacobs at an Amnesty International event in Galway, Ireland, where Jacobs was speaking about her experience on death row and how she had her conviction overturned. Six months later Jacobs returned to Ireland for another event, and this time she and Pringle fell in love. They eventually married in November 2011.

“We didn’t just share a past, we had a vision for a future,” said Ms. Jacobs, who now travels with Pringle to various locations in the United States and a dozen other countries where they both speak on human rights and abolishing the death penalty.

Their story also inspired the creation of a now renowned play called “The Exonerated,” which opened Off Broadway in 2002 and tells Jacobs’ story and the stories of five others who were convicted for crimes they didn’t commit. 28 actresses have since portrayed Sunny Jacobs, including Mia Farrow, Lynn Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, Kathleen Turner, as well as Brooke Shields, Marlo Thomas and Amy Irving, all three of whom attended the wedding of Jacobs and Pringle.

If you are in need of criminal defense lawyer in California, please contact the Fresno based law firm of Hammerschmidt Broughton Law Corporation.  Our attorneys can be reached at (559) 772-4614. We are also on the Web at www.hbcriminaldefense.com.

The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for nine hours over two days before reaching their verdict. Murray, a 58-year old cardiologist, was charged with the lowest possible homicide offense. He faces a maximum sentence of four years in state prison and a minimum sentence of probation. He could also lose his medical license.

During the trial prosecutors portrayed Murray as incompetent for complying with Jackson’s request to have Propofol administered as a sleep aid to deal with extreme insomnia. Witnesses testified that Murray administered the anesthetic in an unmonitored setting, fumbled at basic resuscitation, and did not keep records, all of which experts said led directly to Jackson’s death by overdose.

Jurors were told that as Jackson stopped breathing and was suffering cardiac arrest while under the influence of Propofol, Murray talked on the phone and exchanged email and text messages. Witnesses testified that in the moments after discovering Jackson had stopped breathing, Murray delayed making any calls for help and lied to paramedics and emergency doctors.

Key to the government’s case against Murray were his own words from a police interview two days following Jackson’s death where he relented to giving Jackson the Propofol after the singer repeatedly begged for it. While the admission in the interview was enough evidence of Murray’s guilt, a witness for the prosecution said the amount of Propofol found in Jackson’s system during an autopsy showed Murray lied about how much of the anesthetic he administered.

Murray’s defense attorneys said Jackson was to blame for his own death. Due to pressure to perform and suffering an addiction to painkillers, Jackson took matters into his own hand by swallowing a sedative and self-administering the Propofol, a mixture which Murray’s attorneys contend instantly killed him.

Yet defense witnesses were unable to address a key point which the prosecution’s medical experts repeatedly emphasized: that even if Jackson caused his own death, Murray was still liable for leaving him alone.

If you are in need of criminal defense lawyer in California, please contact the Fresno based law firm of Hammerschmidt Broughton Law Corporation.  Our attorneys can be reached at (559) 772-4614. We are also on the Web at www.hbcriminaldefense.com.

The ruling (PDF), which reversed a magistrate judge’s ruling, examines the government’s attempt to get data from the undisclosed service provider amid a U.S. Attorney’s Office investigation of an armed robbery of an armored truck.

The case gave the court the opportunity to explore the scope of a ruling earlier this year by the D.C. Circuit Court requiring police to obtain a warrant before engaging in long-term surveillance of a suspect using a GPS device attached to the suspect’s car. The court in that case overturned the conviction and life sentence of Antoine Jones, holding that police use of a GPS tracking device without a warrant to establish evidence that was used against Jones at trial violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure.

The case is United States v. Jones. Oral arguments before the Supreme Court are scheduled for November 8, 2011.

Magistrate Judge John Facciola, who ruled against the government in the armed robbery case, said the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in Jones required the government to obtain a warrant to compel the cell phone service provider to release a suspect’s cell phone location data.

District Judge Lamberth said that Facciola concluded that cell phone data — including the location of the tower that transmitted a call—is “tantamount to the sort of continuous GPS surveillance” at issue in the GPS case.

A “reasonable cellular phone customer presumably realizes that his calls are all transmitted by nearby cell-site towers, and that cellular phone companies have access to and likely store data regarding the cell-site towers used to place a customer’s calls,” Lamberth said.

Lamberth said a person’s “decision to place a cellular phone call and thus provide information regarding his location to the phone company thus defeats an individual’s privacy interest in that information.”

The disclosure to prosecutors of a limited number of specific calls “does not paint such a detailed portrait of an individual’s life,” the judge said.

The information the government wants, Lamberth said, reveals only an approximate position from the spot the person made the phone call. The data, the judge said, does not indicate how long a person remained in any given position.

If you are in need of criminal defense lawyer in California, please contact the Fresno based law firm of Hammerschmidt Broughton Law Corporation.  Our attorneys can be reached at (559) 772-4614. We are also on the Web at www.hbcriminaldefense.com.