The Overland Park Municipal Court court handles misdemeanor criminal, traffic, and probation violation cases that arise in this city. Some of the typical cases include: driving under the influence (DUI), drug possession, shoplifting or theft, trespassing, minor in possession of alcohol, driving with an expired license or tag, and speeding.
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Our Johnson County, Kansas law firm located in Leawood is a veteran-owned business. One of our attorneys and owners, George Thomas, had a prior career as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps before attending law school and becoming an attorney. He attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) on a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) scholarship from 1986 to 1990.
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We have moved our bankruptcy, criminal defense, and traffic law firm to a new location in Leawood, Kansas. After spending the past 22 years located in Prairie Village, Phillips & Thomas, LLC, will now be located in beautiful Park Place in Leawood, Kansas. Park Place is located just one block north of Town Center Plaza Shopping Center and also is close to the former Sprint Campus. We are also near the busy intersection of 119th Street and Nall and are also just a few minutes south of I-435. The new address is:
Our phone number of 913-385-9900 and email addresses will remain the same. We look forward to serving you at our new location!
When a criminal case has been filed, an arrest warrant will often be issued by a judge. Obviously, no one wants to have active warrants out there pending in the system, since it means a person can be taken into custody at any time. It turns out that courts and law enforcement agencies don’t like active warrants, either. The more warrants that are out there, the greater the burden of work that is placed on agencies to process and clear them.
The marijuana law in Missouri, like much else in life, is constantly evolving. Around the country, significant shifts have occurred in recent years with regard to longstanding laws about marijuana possession and prosecutions. In 2018 Missouri legalized the use of medical marijuana for patients with certain medical conditions who get approved by their doctor.
After you’ve been doing criminal defense work for over 17 years, you start to notice patterns. You see certain things repeat themselves over and over. So I wanted to say a few words here about one of the most commonly encountered defense issues.
And that is: how to avoid getting violated on probation or diversion.
Let’s say you’ve already been placed on probation or diversion. You want to be successful. You want to complete it and be done with it. I get that.
Life can take unexpected twists and turns. We can have all sorts of problems. Some of them are medical problems. Some of them are accounting problems. Some of them are family or relationship problems.
And some of them are legal problems.
But we don’t often find many step-by-step guides on how to solve legal problems. Why is this? Well, there are a lot of reasons: not diagnosing the problem, being misled by the media, or not acting fast enough.
Cases involving law enforcement officers posing as juveniles online are common. A typical scenario is found in the recent case of State v. Anderson (WD77202) from the Western District of Missouri Court of Appeals, which was decided in May 2015. In the Anderson case, a law enforcement officer created a female online profile for a dating site, using a profile with the name Kaitlyn that alleged “she” was 19 years old. The profile was then posted to the site.
Many of these computer “decoy” cases involve scenarios where a law enforcement officer is purporting to be a minor. The issue then often becomes some version of this question: did the defendant actively participate in the exchange, or was he tricked into doing something that he might not have done otherwise?
When will a search warrant be supported by probable cause? What is the “exclusionary rule”? And what is the “good faith exception” to the exclusionary rule? These were some of the questions considered by the Missouri Court of Appeals last month (February 2015) in the case of State v. Gregory Robinson Sr, (WD 77664), which came out of Randolph County, Missouri.
The Defendant (Robinson) was charged with manufacturing drugs. At his trial, his attorney filed a motion to suppress the evidence seized in the case, claiming that the search warrant used by the police officers did not show sufficient “probable cause” to search the premises. He won his motion, and the evidence was suppressed. The State, however, appealed.
Does it matter how a jury is selected in a criminal case? Can the method used in seating a jury cause reversible error? According to the Kansas Court of Appeals, the answer is yes. A recent case discussed these issues and how they would be applied. The case was State v. Crabb, decided in February of this year (KS Court of Appeals No. 110,673).
In the Crabb case, defendant Christopher Crabb appealed his conviction of one count of interference with law enforcement. Crabb claims the district court committed reversible error by using the so-called “hot-box” method of jury selection over Crabb’s objection instead of using the statutory method of jury selection set forth in K.S.A. 22-3411a. He also argued that the district court erred in instructing the jury and that he was denied a fair trial based on prosecutorial misconduct and cumulative error.
Kansas City Bankruptcy And Criminal Case Defense Information 