December, 2017

Subscribers to the Criminal Defense Resource Center’s online resources, found at www.sado.org, have access to more than 1,800 appellate pleadings filed by SADO Attorneys in the last five years.  The brief bank is updated regularly and is open to anyone who wants to subscribe to online access.  On our site, briefs are searchable by keyword, results can be organized by relevance or date, and the pleadings can be filtered by court of filing.  Below are some of the issues presented in briefs added to our brief bank in the last few weeks. For confidentiality purposes, names of clients and witnesses have been removed.

BB 301030:  Defendant was denied a fair trial by the introduction of gang membership where there was no gang motivation for the shooting and the evidence was irrelevant and unduly prejudicial.

BB 300947:  MCL 777.49 was improperly applied to increase defendant’s sentence because it is void for vagueness.  The sentence must be vacated and the case must be remanded for resentencing.

BB 300928:  Defendant’s mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole violates due process and is cruel and unusual punishment given that he was only 18-years-old at the time of the shooting.  This Court should vacate his sentence and remand for resentencing.

BB 300848:  The trial court made erroneous factual findings and ultimately abused its discretion in refusing to grant a new trial, where evidence adduced at the Ginther hearing proved that defendant’s state and federal rights to a fair trial and the effective assistance of counsel were violated because his attorney failed to undertake adequate investigation into the validity of the prosecution’s medical evidence concerning the cause of decedent’s death and failed to introduce expert witness testimony countering the prosecution’s theory.

BB 300055:  The trial court erred by imposing a consecutive sentence for resisting and obstructing when it was not a separate criminal violation.