Defense Lawyers

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Circuit Court Judge Edward Hogshire refused a defense request Wednesday to strike charges against George Huguely V, finding that there was "ample evidence to support a jury finding in favor of all of the indictments" against the former University of Virginia student, including premeditated murder. Huguely is accused of drunkenly beating to death his former girlfriend, Cockeysville-native Yeardley Love, shortly before they were set to graduate. He is charged with murder, breaking and entering, assault, robbery and other crimes in connection with Love's death in 2010 and the theft of her laptop.

NEW YORK - The trial in the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa is to begin this morning in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, and indications are that the government's first witness will be an informer who worked for the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden until 1996, when he agreed to cooperate with the American authorities. The witness could take the stand as early as tomorrow, after both sides finish their opening statements. The government has been concealing the identity of the witness, a convicted terrorist known only as "CS-1," for almost five years and has resisted all attempts by defense lawyers to learn his identity.

CHESAPEAKE, Va. - Within an hour of the jury's decision Tuesday to spare the life of convicted Washington-area sniper Lee Boyd Malvo, cartons of sniper case files rolled out of the courthouse in this Tidewater city, and the prosecutors, defense lawyers, police and victims' families headed home for the holidays. But any impression that this signaled the end of the saga of the Jamaican teen-ager and of John Allen Muhammad, sentenced to die for his conviction as the elder member of the sniper duo, would be wrong.

The high-profile death-penalty retrial of Scotland E. Williams, which culminated in Friday's sentence of life in prison without parole for two murders, is raising critical questions that other defendants also face, defense lawyers say."There are issues that have come up in this case that I see as having a potential for trouble," said Nancy M. Cohen, one of Williams' three public defenders.The biggest issue, now in a federal appellate court, has piqued the interest of defense attorneys in the state because it challenges the FBI, whose expertise local law enforcement agencies turn to routinely.

CUMBERLAND -- Lawyers for John A. Miller IV, an unemployed store clerk charged with murder in the strangulation last year of a 17-year-old Carroll County girl, asked a judge yesterday to limit the evidence that could be used to decide whether their client should be sentenced to death in a trial scheduled to begin next month.In a series of motions addressing the sentencing hearing that would take place if Miller is convicted, Assistant Public Defenders Jerri A. Peyton-Braden and Jerome M. Levine asked Allegany County Circuit Judge Gary G. Leasure to restrict the "victim impact statements" that could be presented by relatives of the slain girl, Shen D. Poehlman.

Closing arguments in Ruthann Aron's murder-for-hire trial took all day as prosecutors and defense lawyers tried to distill three weeks of testimony from 47 witnesses into their last, persuasive messages to jurors.Prosecutors told the 10 women and two men to remember that no matter what her mental disorder, Aron knew what she was doing when she hired a hit man in June to kill her husband and a lawyer.The proof, argued Deputy State's Attorney I. Matthew Campbell, is in the 15 tapes of conversations between Aron, a police officer posing as a hit man and their go-between.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Lawyers for Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants refused to attend a special court hearing yesterday, pointing to worries about violence and the recent assassination of one of their colleagues. The defense attorneys have demanded that the Iraqi government and U.S. forces let them deputize their own relatives and tribesmen as armed bodyguards before they agree to continue to take part in the trial, which opened Wednesday. Prosecutors interviewed a former intelligence officer who is in poor health in a private hospital yesterday in the presence of an investigative judge but without defense lawyers.

Attorneys for two Jewish brothers, who are accused of beating a black teen while patrolling their Northwest Baltimore neighborhood, argued Monday that their trial should be delayed or transferred because African-American leaders and the news media have inextricably linked it to the Florida killing of Trayvon Martin. The similarities between the cases "are conspicuous," defense lawyers for Avi and Eliyahu Werdesheim wrote in an eight-page motion filed in Baltimore Circuit Court, shortly before the brothers' trial was set to begin after six postponements.

A drunken driver crashes into another vehicle. The drunk is injured. The other driver is hurt - maybe even killed. So the drunk gets rushed to the hospital. A police investigator, trained in the handling of evidence in such cases, goes there, too, hoping to collect the blood samples that could convict the perpetrator of driving under the influence or even more serious charges. But once in the emergency room, the investigator is told it is hospital policy not to allow its medical personnel to help collect such evidence because they could be hauled into court and diverted from patient care.