Beat The Prosecution- Fairfax, Virginia, Criminal Defense / DUI Lawyer

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Plea deals are overrated. Talk to any excellent criminal defense lawyer, and learn about the many times they have won trials that they were not sure they would win. Talk to them about the importance of being great at cross examining opposing witnesses, and how they approach cross examination (which is part of the criminal defense lawyer's ongoing telling of the defendant's persuasive story, without needing always to destroy the cross examinee and what they say on direct examination). Ask the lawyer how much they do or do not love trials, which take longer than proceeding with a plea deal, but are invigorating to handle, when fully and well prepared for trial. 
Any former prosecutor's insistence about the need to hire a former prosecutor -- someone who used to push for convictions and incarceration -- finds that assertion dismantles when they are asked how much cross examination experience they got as a prosecutor (so often very limited). Also, ask the former prosecutor whether they favor prosecuting or defending, and how much they do or do not enjoy representing criminal defendants rather than, as a prosecutor, putting police and civilians on the witness stand (and hopefully knowing, in their heart of hearts, that not all prosecution witnesses are telling the truth). Ask your potential criminal defense lawyer what motivated them to choose criminal defense (and, with former prosecutors, what motivated them to prosecute). 
In this episode of the Beat the Prosecution podcast, Fairfax criminal defense lawyer Jon Katz discusses three trial acquittals he obtained, with one in particular not being a shoe-in by any stretch of the imagination, with another acquittal coming from a judge who said he was very skeptical of Jon's theory of defense presented in opening statement until hearing the smoking gun surreptitious audiotape, and another acquittal with a judge known to not frequently enough say "not" in front of guilty. 
If someone calls themselves a trial lawyer, hopefully that means they have great trial experience and ability, and the drive to do what it takes -- within the bounds of the law and ethics -- to obtain trial victory for their clients. 
Yes, negotiation skills and ability are essential for your criminal defense lawyer. At the same time, ask your potential criminal defense lawyer about the number of times that saying not guilty has gotten them better negotiated settlements (whether plea deals or better) and the number of times that they have actually obtained better settlements at mid-trial. Ask your potential criminal defense lawyer about the number of times they convinced the prosecutor to leave their plea offer open until the resolution of a suppression motion hearing or other specified hearing, where winning the hearing might put the brakes on the prosecution altogether. Your criminal defense lawyer should be great both with trials and settlement negotiations. 
This Beat The Prosecution podcast episode also is available in and Apple podcast format
This podcast with Fairfax, Virginia criminal / DUI lawyer Jon Katz is playable on all devices at podcast.BeatTheProsecution.com. For more information, visit https://KatzJustice.com or contact us at info@KatzJustice.com, 703-383-1100 (calling), or 571-406-7268 (text). 

If you like what you hear on our Beat the Prosecution podcast, please take a moment to post a review at our Apple podcasts page (with stars only, or else also with a comment) at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beat-the-prosecution/id1721413675

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Musical and creative genius John Coltrane was born one hundred years ago, on September 23, 2026, departing his body in 1967, when podcast host Jon Katz was four years old. 
Criminal defense lawyers and all trial lawyers can learn great lessons from Coltrane, including not to throw in the towel merely because your early efforts do not perform without a hitch, to hear even between the lines and to recognize the multitude of life possibilities that surround us, to remain true to our music and clients and to know that corner cutting is not an option, to integrate our work into our beings rather than seeking a work-life balance that separates the two, and to recognize that great improvisational jazz music is like great in-the-moment trial performance, that integrates persuasive storytelling, scene setting, role playing and reverse role playing. 
John Coltrane got hooked on heroin by the 1950's. Additional great jazz musicians who got caught up in drug abuse included Charlie Parker (Bird), Fats Navarro, Bill Evans, and Herbie Hancock. Trane emerged from that dangerous path in 1957, and his 1964 writing for his essential A Love Supreme album underlines the importance of 1957 as a major life turning point for him. Herbie Hancock's autobiography acknowledges his serious mistake in trying crack, which he recognized with his first puff, and then he had to work to break free of that mistake. 
Jon Katz met John Coltrane scholar Lewis Porter when Porter taught music and led the bands at Tufts University. Porter found and has played for musicians a recording of Trane from the 1940's, when nothing in that recording foretold the stratospheric musical breakthroughs Trane would make. Trane later said he did not see what Miles Davis saw in him to add him to his band. Miles had a great ability to sense talent, as did Dizzy Gillespie, who at one point added Trane to his own band. Porter references this as talent radar as big ears. 
Great cross examination practitioner and teacher -- and criminal defense lawyer -- Larry Pozner underlines that winning cross examination can be taught to lawyers. Maybe that is not as true in teaching musicians, but Trane's example shows that one does not need to begin as a prodigy to jump by quantum leaps later on. 
Why are women among a small minority of instrumental jazz musicians recognized as among the best? Professor Porter discusses that in this interview. 
Did some jazz greats avoid performing in the segregated South? Miles Davis would not play there. Trane grew up in North Carolina, but apparently avoided performing in the South other than a New Orleans performance as at least one exception. 
Two months after the September 1963 bombing murder of three teenage women and one eleven year old girl at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Coltrane recorded "Alabama" with his group. Lewis Porter thinks that this instrumental piece's rhythm overlaps with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s sermon after this murder. 
Twenty years after starting the project, Lewis Porter published the essential Trane read John Coltrane- His Life and Music. (finally being released this year in E-book format as well.) He has also written books on Lester Young (Prez) and David Liebman, He posts weekly and in depth with some great articles and sounds, on jazz on his Substack Playback with Lewis Porter page. 
John Coltrane had his own apt knack for adding great talent to his band, most importantly piano superhuman McCoy Tyner. As Trane's music became more avant garde, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones moved on. Trane would not sit still nor rest on his laurels, and was convinced he was in the right musical direction, and he probably was. 
With all the great music with which Trane blessed us despite his early passing at forty years old, imagine what his musical legacy would have been had he lived longer. This summonses that great scene from Walk the Line, where a music producer urges Johnny Cash to create a song that he would perform if that was his last day on this earth. That is the best way to live, to defend in court, and to create. 
“There is never any end…there are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are . . . we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.”
Deeply thanking and bowing to John William Coltrane, September 23, 1926, to July 17, 1967. 
This episode is on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDv5J7Nym3o , audio podcasting https://podcast.beattheprosecution.com/2293867/episodes/19970927 , and Apple podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/john-coltrane-scholar-with-criminal-defense-trial/id1721413675?i=1000796600770
This podcast with Fairfax, Virginia criminal / DUI lawyer Jon Katz is playable on all devices at podcast.BeatTheProsecution.com. For more information, visit https://KatzJustice.com or contact us at info@KatzJustice.com, 703-383-1100 (calling), or 571-406-7268 (text). 

If you like what you hear on our Beat the Prosecution podcast, please take a moment to post a review at our Apple podcasts page (with stars only, or else also with a comment) at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beat-the-prosecution/id1721413675

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Christa Pike's botched lethal injection execution attempt and Donald Trump's recent order to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad have capital punishment front and center with the American public. Firing squad killing is visually gruesome, whereas lethal injection hides the torture suffered by the person condemned to the death chamber, except when the lethal injection gets botched, as with Christa Pike. Ms. Pike's lawyers told the authorities long ago that her narrow veins risked such a mishap. She unsuccessfully selected hanging instead. The death chamber proceedings grew so dire that she politely helped lead her executioners to workable veins. Having woken up post-lethal injection from unconsciousness in a hospital where doctors considered pulling life support, Ms. Pike now does not know whether her death sentence will be commuted or left for the next Tennessee governor to decide. 
To help people make up their own minds about capital punishment and lethal injection, Fairfax criminal lawyer Jonathan Katz this week podcast interviewed leading lethal injection authority Corinna Barrett Lain, a longtime professor at University of Richmond Law School. Professor Lain opposes executions, says that clashes with her deep Christian faith, and emphasizes that state-sponsored killing puts a period before the deity's work has concluded with the executionee. Professor Lain's 2025 book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection emerged from project abandonment when she told the deity that she would finish the book if he gave her a clear sign to complete the project. Professor Lain talks of lethal injection as hiding the torture it brings. She counters the arguments favoring making murderers suffer by saying we do not punish rapists by raping them, nor arsonists by burning down their homes. 
Why is lethal injection so often torturous when physician-assisted suicide can involve little to no pain? Lethal injection involves one-size-fits-all protocols without physician presence, whereas physician-assisted suicide has a physician involved every step of the way. The Supreme Court majority continues its green light for executions. 
Virginia is the first Southern state to join the many others that have abolished the death penalty. Federal authorities sometimes interfere with such federalism by pursuing federal capital prosecutions in states that do not have the death penalty. The practice of the death penalty has repeatedly shown itself to be racist in effect. Virginia abolished capital punishment after the commonwealth's death penalty defenders were so successful as to virtually vacate the state's death row. 
When Jon Katz asked prior podcast guest Douglas Ramseur for suggested future guests, Doug listed three people, including Professor Lain and her professorial colleague and former head indigent defense lawyer (and recent podcast guest) Dave Johnson. Read the lengthy 2021 law review article authored by Professor Lain and Mr. Ramseur entitled "Disrupting Death: How Specialized Capital Defenders Ground Virginia’s Machinery of Death to a Halt." Also see Corinna's "Every Knee Must Bend: What the Death Penalty Requires From the Rule of Law" https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1639&context=uoplawreview
Praised be the effective and devoted capital defenders, who toil away to keep their clients off of death row, and humanize and care deeply for them in the process. That is the key to both capital and non-capital criminal defense. 
This episode is also available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-5_Xci45BQ  and on Apple podcasts  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/christa-pike-and-removing-the-lethal-injection/id1721413675?i=1000793910401
This podcast with Fairfax, Virginia criminal / DUI lawyer Jon Katz is playable on all devices at podcast.BeatTheProsecution.com. For more information, visit https://KatzJustice.com or contact us at info@KatzJustice.com, 703-383-1100 (calling), or 571-406-7268 (text). 

If you like what you hear on our Beat the Prosecution podcast, please take a moment to post a review at our Apple podcasts page (with stars only, or else also with a comment) at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beat-the-prosecution/id1721413675

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The Constitution's Sixth Amendment and its appellate interpretations provide for effective assistance of counsel against criminal prosecutions, regardless of the defendant's ability to pay. Virginia's public defender system delivers beneficial service, but the state's indigent defense system is broken when it comes to the significant percentage of court-appointed private-practicing lawyers, who are ordinarily paid too little to give full meaning to the Sixth Amendment, leaving a devotion to clients and not pay as the motivator for delivering quality defense to indigent defendants. 
Former decades-long chief public defender lawyer (at the local and then state level) David Johnson for the past several years has been a law professor at the University of Richmond. In this Beat the Prosecution episode with Fairfax, Virginia, criminal defense lawyer Jonathan Katz, Dave tells it like it is, from how he provided great service to his clients (and then became a law professor) despite his far from stellar academic performance, to how nothing leads to beneficial settlement negotiations like being known to perform successfully at trial, and how to deal with challenging judges, hostile cross examinees, and prosecutors who do not agree to sensible plea deals. 
Dave also discusses the importance for law students to obtain practical experience and learning while in law school, and the impediment to a better law school system that is caused by the focus to prepare law students for passing the bar rather than focusing better on preparing them to perform well as lawyers. 
Dave discusses preserving the appellate record, avoiding getting consumed by anger at injustice in the courtroom, talking with criminal defendants about the advisability of going to trial when settlement negotiations do not justify doing otherwise, and persuading in court. 
This episode is also available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAuydXKfgLY and in podcast format https://podcast.beattheprosecution.com/2293867/episodes/19892065
This podcast with Fairfax, Virginia criminal / DUI lawyer Jon Katz is playable on all devices at podcast.BeatTheProsecution.com. For more information, visit https://KatzJustice.com or contact us at info@KatzJustice.com, 703-383-1100 (calling), or 571-406-7268 (text). 

If you like what you hear on our Beat the Prosecution podcast, please take a moment to post a review at our Apple podcasts page (with stars only, or else also with a comment) at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beat-the-prosecution/id1721413675

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When Fairfax, Virginia, criminal defense lawyer Jonathan Katz first attended taijiquan sparring / sensing hands / push hands summer weekend gatherings of students of great t'ai chi ch'uan teacher Julian Chu (a prior Beat the Prosecution podcast interviewee), he met today's guest Shyh-Ching Lo, M.D. Without an ounce of ego -- as it should be -- and full of generosity in teaching and sharing, Dr. Lo has taught and reminded Jon about the importance in sensing hands of timing, sensing, sensitivity, zhong ting (central equliibrium), and ward off/roll back/press/push (including an emphasis on roll back). Starting from Jon's first sensing hands round with him, Dr. Lo would point out "too late" when Jon would yield too late. Today, Dr. Lo very commonly advises to "give it away" so that the opponent has nothing to push against in the first place. Dr. Lo also points out to have one's hands and arms be powerfully light and soft. 
How does taijiquan tie in with Jon Katz's criminal defense practice? Taijquan sparring/push hands is like sparring in court many ways, to harmonize imbalanced situations, to use internal powerful energy rather than brute force, to uproot the opponent, and to be non-angry, for instance. 
The imporance of taijiquan to criminal defense and life is vital for Jon Katz. Practicing push hands on the weekends connects naturally to the push hands of courtroom battle and life itself. The week's courthouse push hands connects well with the following weekend's sensing hands practice. Vital to push hands is applying the taijiquan principles of relaxing and sinking one's body into the ground (and relaxing and emptying the mind of clutter), separating the weight, turning from the waist, keeping one's body upright, and keeping the wrists softly unbent. Practicing push hands checks how well our taijiquan form practice is developing. Practicing taijquan form prepares us for sensing hands practice. 
With light movements, Dr. Lo is able to put other practitioners, including Jon, off balance if their form is not more well developed. Taijiquan involves never-ending self development. 
In this discussion, Dr. Lo includes addressing not only his daily taijiquan practice, but also his overall health practice as a retired medical doctor. He immediately took to martial arts practice while in the Taiwanese army, then for many years practiced no martial arts, and finally in his fifties became a taijiquan practitioner learning from such teachers as Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Ben's student Julian Chu, and Ben's students the late David Chen and his wife Joanne Cheng. One can find Dr. Lo practicing taijiquan at the weekly Saturday 10:30 a.m. gatherings at the David Chen memorial tai chi court at Cabin John Park in Potomac, Maryland. 
This podcast with Fairfax, Virginia criminal / DUI lawyer Jon Katz is playable on all devices at podcast.BeatTheProsecution.com. For more information, visit https://KatzJustice.com or contact us at info@KatzJustice.com, 703-383-1100 (calling), or 571-406-7268 (text). 

If you like what you hear on our Beat the Prosecution podcast, please take a moment to post a review at our Apple podcasts page (with stars only, or else also with a comment) at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beat-the-prosecution/id1721413675