San Francisco & Bay Area Criminal Defense Lawyers

The Ninth Circuit Court affirmed in part and dismissed in part a ruling by the district court on Monday, September 13th. The Ninth Circuit held that the government had no right to retain seized drug-test results of professional athletes other than those specified in a search warrant. The Major League Baseball Players Association ("players") and Major League Baseball came to an agreement on anonymous and suspicion-less urine sample drug testing of all players. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc. (CDT) an independent company, administered the sample tests for the members of the players. The results of the tests were maintained by CDT with the lists of players and their respective results and the company that actually performed the testing, Quest Diagnostics, Inc., kept the testing samples. The government investigated the Bay Area Lab Cooperative (Balco), which it suspected of providing steroids to players and learned that ten players had tested positive in the CDT program. The gov...

On August 12 th , a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court voted to deny a petition for rehearing en banc a case which many consider a controversial ruling on the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy. The original ruling of United States v. Pineda-Moreno was decided in January of this year. In Pineda-Moreno , the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed a district court ruling that effectively allows law enforcement officers to secretly place a global positioning system (GPS) device on an individual’s car without securing a warrant from a judge. In the August 12 th Order, Judge Kozinski issued a dramatic and scathing dissent of the denial of the rehearing on banc. The facts of the case were as follows: in 2007 Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents attached a GPS device to the underside of Juan Pineda-Moreno’s vehicle on several occasions over a four-month period based on suspicions that he was involved in a conspiracy to grow and distribute marijuana. On four of these occasions,...

The California Court of Appeals determined on Wednesday, September 1st, that security guards at a shopping mall can be victims of a robbery although they are not the owners of the stolen property and are not directly employed by the store that owned the property. The court determined this based on the evidence that the guards had a 'special relationship' with the store and had the duty and authority to retrieve its stolen property. Additionally, the court rejected the defendant's claims that the jury instructions on this point were incorrect and his mid-trial motion for self-representation under Faretta v. California (1975) 422 U.S. 806 , ( Faretta ). Richard Gary Bradford stole six bottles of perfume from Victoria's Secret and was noticed by the shift manager, Nina Paiz, walking out of the store with the perfume. Paiz spoke with two security guards, Steven Conyers and Arthur Sandoval, and reported Bradford's actions. Conyers and Sandoval followed Bradford and conta...