West Des Moines Iowa Criminal Defense Law Blog

After the police charge you with a crime, you will need to make an initial appearance in court. Before you enter the courtroom, be sure to know your rights and prepare the necessary materials.

The case involved South Carolina bank robbery. Witnesses were unable to ID the robber and the bank's surveillance video turned out to be too grainy to help. When the FBI finally arrived at a suspect, the man countered that the robber had been his brother. With only low-quality video to go by, how could investigators tell which brother had committed the crime?

The short answer is that they could not. Richard Vorder Bruegge, one of the FBI's most influential image examiners, reported that the FBI's suspect had a similar "overall shape of the face, nose, mouth, chin and ears" but didn't actually declare him a match to the grainy video. He admitted that the video was too low a resolution to fully identify the suspect.

These days, a lot of people are on the keto diet, a low-carb diet advertised to encourage weight loss. The diet puts your body into a state called "ketosis," where the liver begins to break down fat to fuel the body. Acetone, a byproduct of ketosis, is released through the breath in the form of isopropyl alcohol. This is different from ethanol, which is the type of alcohol people drink. The question is, can breathalyzers tell the difference?

It's not clear. According to a professor of forensic technology from Sweden's Linköping University explained to Men's Health recently that cheap models probably can't tell the difference. The head of a breathalyzer manufacturer agreed. The models that people buy on their own to self-monitor their blood alcohol content are somewhat different from those used by police. A metal film inside the device merely measures the number of alcohol molecules present.

The question of how much discretion federal judges should have when sentencing criminal defendants is an important one, and opinions have changed over time. In the 1980s and 1990s, Congress passed a large number of strict, mandatory minimum sentencing requirements.

These laws stripped judges of their traditional discretion to choose what sentence is reasonable or fair under the circumstances. They mandated certain sentencing ranges regardless of the facts of the specific case. Appeals courts were prevented from resentencing people, even in cases of clear injustice.