San Antonio Criminal Defense Blog

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people between the ages of 12 and 20 are responsible for consuming roughly 10 percent of all the alcohol consumed in our country. The members of this age group are also partial to binge drinking, and their parents may know nothing about it—until law enforcement stops their teens on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.

What binge drinking means

Since as far back as the 1930s at least, researchers have chronicled inaccuracy issues related to eyewitness identification. For people in Texas who are charged with crimes, a misidentification by an eyewitness can be difficult to overcome at trial. A theme among researchers is that memory is not the same as a tape recording. Memory can be influenced by events that occur later, even including things like the body language of police during lineups.

Eyewitnesses are more likely to make identification mistakes regarding a person of a race other than their own. Judges sometimes instruct juries on the problem, but that may not go very far toward eliminating prejudice. According to the Innocence Project, misidentification by eyewitnesses was a factor in 71 percent of the convictions that have later been overturned based on DNA evidence. There have been more than 350 such wrongful convictions overturned since 1989.

A state trooper suspected the presence of drugs in a 2008 Chrysler sedan during a traffic stop on U.S. Highway 59 in Angelina County. The trooper based the suspicion on a conversation with the 28-year-old male driver. After requesting the support of a police drug dog, a search of the vehicle ensued.

Police reported finding 8.5 pounds of marijuana in the car's trunk. Officers also claim to have seized over 1 pound of pills that contained a controlled substance and over 50 grams of a controlled substance in liquid form.

Texas residents who have been victims of hate crimes should be aware that the Civil Rights Program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is tasked with investigating such crimes. Every year, the agency investigates hundreds of hate crimes and makes efforts to identify and prevent additional incidents by using public outreach, associations with various community groups and law enforcement training.

The investigations of hate crimes that were conducted by the FBI used to be restricted to the crimes in which the alleged offender committed acts based on their bias against a person's national origin, race, religion or color. The investigations were also limited to cases in which the victims of the hate crime were taking part in federally protected activities. The agency began investigating hate crimes with no restrictions after the promulgation of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, which also increased the agency's reach with regard to the investigation of hate crimes that took place against individuals based on the offender's biases of perceived or actual disabilities, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity.