Flagstaff, AZ
Criminal defense Lawyer at Flagstaff, AZ
Practice Areas: Criminal Defense
OUTCOME: Won
The youngest of the three men charged in the September 2013 gang killing of 23-year-old Juan Hernandez has been found innocent on all charges. A jury found Norberto “Beto” Ramos-Madrid, 19, not guil ... ty of second-degree murder in Coconino County Superior Court Tuesday morning after less than two hours of deliberations. Jurors also found him not guilty of assisting a criminal street gang and two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
OUTCOME: Won
The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled last week that asserting one's constitutional rights does not give police sufficient cause for detention and search. The ruling treated a January 8, 2008 incident in ... which Alvin J. Sweeney was pulled over for allegedly following a car too closely. Arizona state police Officer Mace Craft claimed that he had timed the gap between Sweeney's car and the vehicle in front of him at 0.88 seconds. Sweeney had a Canadian driver's license and was driving a rental car with the appropriate paperwork. This, and Sweeney's nervousness, aroused Craft's suspicion. "Considered in the aggregate, these factors did not give rise to objective reasonable suspicion of anything," Swann wrote. "A reasonably prudent person's suspicions would not be raised after observing a foreign national driving a clean, deodorized rental car with an atlas on the passenger seat, who upon being stopped and questioned outside in the three-degree weather by the police, failed to articulate with specificity the places he had visited while staying in an unfamiliar city. A holding to the contrary would subject nearly everyone to a continued, intrusive detention following a routine traffic stop." The court threw out the evidence against Sweeney as illegally obtained.
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