Criminal defense at the technical edge.

Engage for Sentencing memoranda · Sentencing strategy · Judge-specific variance research

Most federal criminal cases end in a plea, and most pleas expose the defendant to a recommended range calculated under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. Judges anchor their sentences to that range and then almost always vary downward for reasons specific to the case and to the judge's own sentencing philosophy. The question every defense lawyer faces at sentencing is the same: how much variance can I argue for, and on what grounds will it land?

Most lawyers answer that question by gut. The U.S. Sentencing Commission publishes some statistics, but the data is deliberately coarsened. Judge- and district-level patterns are not available in any usable form, even though those are the patterns that matter most at sentencing.

JustMetrics, the analytics platform I built and run, was the answer to that gap. It lets me and the defense lawyers I consult with see what the assigned judge has actually done in cases like the one in front of us and what reasons that judge has relied on in granting prior variances.

A small preview of that dataset is public. Pick any federal district judge to see top-line sentencing patterns and the most common reasons that judge has granted downward variances.

Just Metrics — Federal Sentencing Intelligence

Judge-level sentencing data and variance patterns, surfaced in seconds.

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Engage for Forensic-report review · Forensic expert direct and cross examination preparation · Mitigation-focused discovery · Digital forensic fact development

Most criminal defense lawyers know that collecting facts isn't enough. Digital forensic analysts, regardless of their credentials, rarely take the initiative to probe areas where mitigating facts might be developed. And the reports they do produce are typically dense, comprehensive, and unfocused. The mitigation, if it's there at all, is buried under everything else.

The work in this practice is solving both problems. It means knowing in advance where to look, or where to direct an expert to look, so that mitigating facts get developed in the first place. And it means knowing, when the report lands, which facts in it can be brought forward into a mitigation argument.

Mitigation hooks I look for:

• Degree of involvement in the offense. Was the defendant a primary actor, a peripheral participant, or somewhere in between?
• Distribution of culpability among co-conspirators. What does the data show about who actually drove what?
• Foreseeable versus unintended loss in a computer-crime or financial case. This question goes directly to Guidelines §2B1.1 loss calculations.
• Frequency of access or interaction with illicit files or with the conspiracy itself, often a question of dozens of touches versus thousands.

Engage for Suppression briefing · Appellate work · Amicus coordination

The collaboration between the federal government and Silicon Valley has produced extraordinary tools of surveillance. The Supreme Court has responded with precedent that invites thoughtful practitioners to challenge those tools as they are deployed in new fact patterns.

In Kyllo v. United States, Justice Scalia warned against any "mechanical interpretation of the Fourth Amendment" that would leave Americans "at the mercy of advancing technology." 533 U.S. 27 (2001). The Court has reaffirmed that warning in every major digital-search case since. In Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014), it declined to extend the search-incident-to-arrest doctrine to the contents of a smartphone. In Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018), it instructed courts confronting "new concerns wrought by digital technology" not to "uncritically extend existing precedents." And most recently, in Chatrie v. United States, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), the Court held that obtaining location history through a geofence warrant is a Fourth Amendment search, rejected the Government's narrow reading of Carpenter, and reaffirmed that the Amendment protects against "free access to the most closely kept aspects" of Americans' lives, "whatever the form of an attempted incursion."

Criminal defense practitioners should heed this call and push back on novel Government searches.

Suppression issues I have personally litigated, in district courts and on appeal:

• Border searches of electronic devices
• Government malware (Network Investigative Techniques) deployed against suspects' devices
• Compelled decryption and biometric unlock
• Subpoenas and warrants for location data
• Cell-tower dumps
• Expansive searches of social media accounts, cell phones, and other electronic devices

Some of these cases have drawn amicus support from organizations whose interests align with the defense theory, including the ACLU's Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Soliciting that support where appropriate is part of the practice.