Carjacking can be a terrifying crime for the victims. Recently, in Houston, police released video of how a woman and her 11-month-old niece were dragged from a minivan in the daylight as shots were fired nearby Police appealed for witnesses in the Houston carjacking.

Houston police released the shocking surveillance last October, reported KXAN. The footage featured four men running from a car that was at a standstill in a ditch toward the minivan.

The KXAN report noted one of the men fired a gun at the car as they ran in from the 6800 block of London St. on the south side of Houston. A man was killed and another was wounded.

A report on KPRC stated security video acquired by police from a nearby motel showed two men in the front yard of a nearby house. One started running as a stolen Mazda pulled up. Four gunmen were inside already shooting from the car. However, the driver drove into a drainage ditch.

The men ran out of the disabled car. As one approached Cullen Boulevard, three others ran up to a dark green Kia Sedona parked close by. The TV channel report said the woman in the minivan was there to pick up a friend at the motel.

The woman was forced out of the car at gunpoint by one of the men. The video footage showed her tumbling to the ground. She clutched the baby in her car seat.

Police said neither the woman who was in the car nor the baby was harmed in the incident. Two men at the scene were not so lucky.

One of the men targeted by the gunmen, 22-year-old Walter Fields, was wounded but is expected to survive police said. The second victim, Sam Johnson, 53, was killed at the scene.  Johnson worked as a handyman at a nearby convenience store. Fellow employees speculated he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Houston police arrested Mertroy Harris, 27 on murder charges and searched for three others.

Carjacking is a very serious crime in Texas. It is often accompanied by extreme violence.

In 2017, in Houston, 47-year-old Pedro Aguilar, was killed in a botched carjacking attempt. A report on Associated Press stated the carjackers attempted to take the family’s car only to discover it had a manual transmission and they were unable drive it.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Department stated Aguilar pulled up at his family’s apartment. Another car pulled alongside him with at least two suspects in the vehicle. They dragged Aguilar from his vehicle and beat him before shooting him in the chest. He died at the scene of the attempted carjacking.

The offense of carjacking is defined by Texas law as the taking of a vehicle from the owner or driver by force or the threat of force. The owner may fear often violence. In Texas, carjacking is prosecuted under the state’s robbery law. The owner should be in or in close proximity to the vehicle for the offense to take place. The charge cannot be brought for the taking of an empty car.

If you have been charged with carjacking, please call our Tarrant County criminal defense lawyers today.

With a record number of Americans becoming addicted and dying of opiate addiction, the federal authorities are targeting opiate crimes.

In October, President Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic an emergency. However, he offered few concrete policies on the issue.

In 2016 alone, the opioid crisis killed more than 64,000 Americans, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered more specifics in November. For the first time in two decades, the Drug Enforcement Administration is to open a new field office, Sessions announced. The heat is on opiate crimes.

Jeff Sessions said the DEA’s 22nd field office would be located in Louisville in Kentucky, which is in a region seeing numerous overdoses of the prescription painkiller and heroin as well as the deadly synthetic drug fentanyl.

Sessions said at least 90 federal drug agents will be redeployed to the Louisville office. They will conduct anti-opioid operations throughout Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee.

A report in USA Today noted Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is reviewing whether to pursue a repeal of 2016 legislation backed by the drug industry that harmed law enforcement’s ability to stop suspicious shipments of opioids linked to rises in overdose deaths.

The suspicious sale of opioids is being monitored as well as prescription patterns by doctors.

A report of the Criminal Justice Police Foundation noted opioid overdoses have reached record highs. The report said:

“To expand treatment, we must increase funding for and acceptance of medication-assisted treatment. To reduce overdose deaths, we need Good Samaritan and naloxone access laws. To reduce disease transmission, we need to expand needle exchange programs.”

While the so-called “pill mills” are being targeted, the report noted many opiates were not being wrongly prescribed.

It said over-prescription by well-intentioned doctors was a significant problem and even a small decline in prescriptions pushed hundreds of thousands of patients to buy opioids illegally on the street. As doctors cut prescriptions, more patients are likely to turn to the street market and to end up on heroin.

On June 9, 2017, in Texas, Governor Greg Abbot signed a bill from the legislature amending both the Texas Controlled Substances Act and the Texas Pharmacy Practice Act.

The law adds a new section to the TCSA requiring pharmacists to check the Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) before dispensing certain drugs, including opioids, benzodiazepines and barbiturates.

There are a wide range of drug crimes. The new crackdown raises the prospect of more doctors and others facing criminal sanctions.

If you have been charged with a narcotics offense in Tarrant County, please call us today for a free consultation about your case.

During court proceedings, both sides can make requests to the judge. These are known as motions in criminal cases.  Motions can be made in a written format or orally.

Motions include such requests to dismiss certain charges, to set a different date for a trial and even to dismiss a case completely.

On the courtroom TV dramas, we often see each side submitting repeated motions to the judge during the trial.

However, motions can be made before a trial, during the hearing, or even after a trial. The initial stage of a motion involves giving notice to the opposing party of the intent to file a motion. Attorneys should not randomly file motions. There should be legal precedent and reasoning put forward before a motion can be filed.

After the filing of a motion, there will be a hearing giving each side the opportunity to make arguments for and against it.

Both sides can make arguments for or against the motion. Sometimes the attorneys will reach an agreement about certain facts and issues. This is called a stipulation. Courts favor stipulations because they speed up the issue but they typically need to be approved by a judge.

Defendants are not given complete control over motions, especially those made during a trial.

Motions in criminal cases are either pretrial motions, trial motions or post-trial motions.

Pretrial Motions

Motions made before a criminal trial may include:

• The dismissal of the case
• The reduction of a bail amount
• Reduction of charges or the dismissal of certain charges;
• A change of the trial venue
• Examination of police evidence
• The exclusion of drug paraphernalia evidence in a drug case;
• The exclusion of an improperly obtained confession;
• Dismissal of prior convictions

Trial Motions

Numerous motions may be made during the course of a trial. They include:

• A motion to strike when a judge may order the jury to discount evidence it heard.
• A motion to allow the judge and jury to view the crime scene;
• A motion seeking the dismissal of the prosecution evidence

If these motions are to be approved, they must be supported by evidence from the defense. An experienced criminal defense lawyer will be familiar with how to file a successful motion.

Post-Trial Motions

If a jury returns a not guilty verdict, the prosecution cannot file a motion to retry the case under any circumstances.

If the jury finds a defendant guilty, the defense can file a wide number of post-trial motions. A motion to overturn the jury verdict may be filed, although this is rarely successful.

The defense may seek a re-trial or make a motion to the judge to appeal the case to a higher court.

Motions are a very important part of the criminal justice process. If you have been charged with a crime in Tarrant County call us today for a free consultation about your case.

When serious crimes occur a teen offender may be tried as an adult. This was the case in late 2017 with a 16-year-old Fort Worth youth accused of killing a teen with a hammer.

A report on WFAA stated Judge Tim Menikos reached the decision over Jordon Roache after a four-hour hearing

Roache is accused of using a hammer to kill a Bedford teen. He was certified to stand trial as an adult.

Jordin Roache was rushed out of the courtroom Wednesday afternoon after Judge Tim Menikos reached his decision following an almost four-hour hearing in December.

An attorney for Roache argued that the teen would be held more accountable in a juvenile facility than in the adult system if he was found guilty.

He also reportedly questioned Bedford detectives about the prospects of locating another suspect in the brutal killing of 14-year-old Kaytlynn Cargill, a teen whose body was found in an Arlington landfill over the summer.

Bedford detective Anthony Shelley confirmed the case remains under investigation.

The 16-year-old was arrested at O.D. Wyatt High School in Fort Worth, stated his arrest warrant.

The warrant, obtained by the TV station NBC 5, said the 14-year-old was involved in a drug transaction when she disappeared. The suspect lived in the same apartment complex as the victim.

Investigators said they found the girl’s blood on a hammer in the boy’s room.

Cargill disappeared on June 18, 2017, when she was walking her dog in the Oak Creek West Apartments in Bedford where she lived with her family.

Her body was discovered two days later at an Arlington dump on Mosier Valley Road. The Tarrant County Medical examiner ruled the girl’s death was caused by homicidal violence. He was able to offer few additional details.

In Texas, 17-year-old offenders are treated as adults. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences for teens without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional.

However, the high court also permitted states to impose life sentences for juvenile offenders who are “irreparably corrupt” and “permanently incorrigible.”

Teens who have committed serious crimes like murder may be tried as adults in Texas and face the prospect of imprisonment in places intended to punish rather than rehabilitate offenders.

If you have been charged with a crime as a teen your life may be ruined at an early age. Please call us today for a free consultation about your case.

Key changes and criminal justice reforms were seen in 2017 as a new administration took a tough stance on crime and immigration.

The arrival of the Trump administration meant the appointment of a new attorney general. Jeff Sessions outlined a tough approach to offenses like drug crimes. He directed federal prosecutors to seek the harshest charges possible in criminal cases.

Sessions said prosecutors must charge the most serious “readily provable offense.”

Other changes saw a scaling down of police department investigations and the end of the National Commission on Forensic Science, a partnership between the Justice Department and independent scientists to investigate the effectiveness of forensic methods.

Some progressive criminal justice reforms were enacted in certain states, reported The Root.

In 2017, legislation was passed in New York and California to raise the age for which a juvenile is treated as an adult in the criminal justice system. The two states will no longer automatically prosecute 16- and 17-year-olds as adults.

Instead, teenagers in these two states may be processed in the juvenile-justice system.

Opponents of treating teens as adults say the system is aimed at punishment whereas juvenile justice systems have a greater emphasis on rehabilitation.

In Texas, 17-year-olds are processed in the adult criminal justice system. However, a movement to raise the age of adult criminal responsibility has resulted in unsuccessful legislation in the state legislature.

Also in 2017, the Supreme Court ruled, twice, that the sentencing of juveniles to life without parole is unconstitutional. Many states agreed to end this practice and to resentence inmates locked up before the landmark decisions.

In the landmark Texas case of Bobby Moore, the Supreme Court challenged the Texas definition of intellectual disability as outdated. Prisoners who are intellectually disabled should not face the death penalty. However, Moore from Houston faced execution despite challenges such as not being able to tell the time or understand the days of the week and the months of the year.

The Supreme Court took aim at the Texas standard. In a 5-3 ruling, it determined that the state did not properly consider whether Moore was too intellectually disabled to face execution.

The ruling set off numerous requests from inmates wanting their death sentences overturned in exchange for life in prison. At least 10 condemned killers from across the state are pursuing lesser punishments, a course prosecutors later agreed on in Moore’s case.

Please call us today if you have been charged with a criminal offense in Tarrant County.