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I Q. On Monday Bill decides to break into his neighbor's home to steal a coin collection. He uses a crowbar to jimmy the lock and puts the crowbar back in his jacket when he goes into the house. Would Bill be guilty of burglary, first? A. Yes. Under Alabama law burglary, first is committed when...

 

Alabama's governor has signed a law allowing an Alabama church to have its own police force.

What you need to know about the statute of limitations in Alabama criminal cases

Alabama has a new chemical castration law or the “Hasta Libido law” or the “we're going to juice your oranges” law. This law is new to Alabama but castration as punishment has been around for millennia. It's part of a long legal history of “punishing” a body part that causes offense. ...

 Under Alabama law, are different ways this crime can be committed. Let me teach this with four stories. First: Mr. Gill T. Azell decides steals the Huntsville Rocket Queens crown jewels, worth $2000. If he steals the jewels off the shelf at the Space and Rocket Center, he is guilty of t...

I like to teach by way of stories, so here it is:  Our friend, Muddy Waters, has pulled up in his pickup truck by Lake Guntersville to enjoy the sights. While he is there, he meets two attractive women, Patty Larceny and her friend Missy or “Miss” Demeanor. The women are standing next to a ...

In Alabama, the police officer is supposed to take your ticket, within 48 hours, to a magistrate so as to acknowledge under oath to the facts contained in the ticket. The idea behind this is to allow a neutral and detached party an opportunity to make sure there were legally reasonable grounds fo...

Is it legal for police to lie to me? In Alabama, under many circumstances, it is completely legal for the police to lie to you. The general rule in Alabama is that an officer acting in good faith can use deception trickery or artifice to detect crime. The police will commonly use lies and dece...

If you're a college student and you been arrested for a crime, you are probably concerned about how your school will react to the arrest.   The answer depends upon a variety of factors.  One issue is whether or not you are arrested on campus or off campus.  It was an on-campus arrest, It is mo...

A good lawyer can question someone until they're beaten like an egg. The secret is that we are really not asking questions at all. What we are doing, is telling our story but using a person who may not agree with us to do so. We do this by making a series of statements that the person needs to...

  Our legal system has two basic classes of crimes, those that require a mental state and those that do not.   Most crimes require some sort of evil intent to commit the crime coupled with some sort of action. As the Supreme Court explained most crimes require an evil-meaning mind with an evil...

      A  young woman was in a country bar. Two men invited her to go out to their truck to smoke some weed. She left with them.   Her family was concerned because she was missing. But the police delayed investigating it because people kept reporting having seen her at the bar after she been ...

  To be guilty of the crime of theft in Alabama, a person must have the intent to have stolen property.   So if I go to Walmart and I put a bag of dog food under my cart and then leave the store having paid for everything but the bag of dog food because I forgot it was there and I committed a ...

If the police smell marijuana coming from your home that gives them what is known as probable cause to believe there is criminal activity going on in your house. Probable cause means that based upon the facts and circumstances known to the officer at that time, he would have information that...

There are a lot of questions and confusion about when a person is justifiably acting in self-defense under Alabama laws. If I was, to sum up, the law in one word, it would be reasonableness. Alabama self-defense law looks to whether the person acted reasonably to defend themselves. So,...

 Law schools spend three years teaching law students how to think like a lawyer. Heres how to do it in three steps: I First, understand what a true fact is and know how to dispute its meaning.  To a lawyer, a fact is something that is not in dispute. When something is accepted as a fact, l...

 Of course, being arrested for anything is never a good thing. But, is sometimes being arrested for drug paraphernalia can provide a partial defense to more serious charges. For example, is not uncommon for people to be charged with possession of marijuana for other than personal use. Lets say ...

 The answer to this, like most legal questions, is, it depends. There are some circumstances under which the loss or destruction of evidence may result in a criminal case being dismissed by the court or abandoned by the prosecution. However, the fact that certain evidence no longer exists does...

 The real question is whether one witness can prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that someone committed the crime.  The answer is yes.   To give an unpleasant (but true) example, when I was in the District Attorneys office we had a rape case. The evidence consisted solely of the testimony of th...

 In Alabama, you can go to jail for carrying a concealed slingshot.  Thats right. Under Alabama law, f youre carrying a slingshot ” concealed about your person” you must be fined no less than $50 or more than $500 and you can be imprisoned in the county jail and sentenced to hard labor for the...