In an internationally watched case, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned Bill Cosby’s conviction finding that he had been improperly prosecuted after relying on what he believed was a promise of immunity from then District Attorney Bruce Castor which caused Cosby to testify in a civil case brought by one of his victims and make various [...]
In its June 3rd decision, the Supreme Court greatly narrowed the scope of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The CFAA, the main federal anti-hacking law, prohibits outside actors from illegally accessing – breaking into – government or private computer networks. In addition, it is routinely used to charge authorized users of a [...]
“These are people with brain damage, they’re f--king retarded, they’re on the goddamn spectrum. But they’re our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our coworkers — they’re part of our country. These aren’t bad people, they don’t have prior criminal history. Fuck, they were subjected to four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the [...]
On April 19, 2021, one day after Governor Phil Murphy conditionally vetoed a bill that would have eliminated mandatory minimum prison sentences for a broad set of crimes, New Jersey’s Attorney General, Gurbir Grewal, issued a groundbreaking internal directive to prosecutors (the “Directive”) that exercised prosecutorial discretion to effectively eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug [...]
We are proud to announce two of Stahl Criminal Defense attorneys have been selected for the 2021 New Jersey Super Lawyers® list. Robert G. Stahl for White Collar Crime Andrew Olesnycky for Criminal Defense Robert Stahl’s 2021 selection marks his 15-year anniversary as a Super Lawyers® honoree, as he has been listed in every edition [...]
Robert Stahl was featured on Court TV on March 23, 2021 to weigh in on the Colts Neck, NJ, mansion murders of two adults and two children.
On February 22, 2021, New Jersey became the 14th state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana when Governor Phil Murphy signed a group of laws that enacted the marijuana legalization ballot measure approved by more than two-thirds of New Jersey voters in November.
One of the great tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the thousands of New Jersey pretrial detainees who – despite being presumed innocent and not having been convicted of any crime – are languishing in unsafe conditions in county jails while courts remain closed to jury trials. On February 11, 2021, the New Jersey Supreme Court endorsed the reopening of thousands of detention hearings by inmates detained for longer than six months, citing the “due process concerns” caused by the unexpectedly lengthy suspension of criminal trials in New Jersey.
President Biden just signed an Executive Order to phase out the federal government’s use of private prisons. For-profit, private prison systems have been found to provide less humane and less safe environments overall, in an effort to increase profits. While signing the Order, the President stated that “[t]his is the first step to stop corporations from profiting off incarceration, that is less humane and less safe, as studies show . . . [a]nd this is just the beginning of my administration’s plan to address systematic problems in our criminal justice system.”
Gurbir Grewal, the New Jersey State Attorney General, recently announced a new policy that will affect the State’s more than 38,000 police officers beginning on December 31, 2021. The change comes after two years of study into racial disparities and other issues involving the use of force in New Jersey. The new rules, which will limit the use of force, ban using police dogs on suspects who are simply resisting arrest and require departments to review every incident where force was used, are focused on protecting the “sanctity of human life.”