Every criminal defendant who decides to play lawyer walks into court with the same cheerful fantasy. The truth will set them free. Justice will prevail. The jury will hear the facts and nod wisely. That fantasy lasts about five minutes. Courtrooms do not run on truth. They run on rules of evidence, procedure, and a jungle of objections that can strangle your case before the jury ever hears a single word of it. Here is the ugly reality. You might have iron-clad evidence that proves you are innocent. A rock-solid alibi. Scientific evidence. Witnesses who point to the real offender. Maybe even records showing the prosecution’s star witness is a career criminal and a professional liar.  None of that matters! Because before the jury ever hears a whisper of that evidence, you must get it admitted into evidence.  Simple, right?  Not exactly. Across the aisle sits a seasoned prosecutor who has spent years learning how to keep evidence out of the courtroom. He or...

I have been spending a great deal of time in downtown Los Angeles lately, moving back and forth between the Central Criminal Courts Building and the Men’s Central Jail. If you keep your eyes open in that neighborhood, you start noticing something everywhere. Young people, mostly Hispanic kids, walking around with backpacks full of spray paint like painters carrying their brushes. Look closely and you realize graffiti is not just one thing. There are really two kinds. One kind is careful, deliberate, and surprisingly beautiful. Real artwork. Colors layered on top of colors. Shapes and lettering that clearly took time, patience, and skill. The other kind is the territorial kind. The quick tags that mark the invisible borders of street gangs. That type is less about beauty and more about staking a claim. But the artists. The real ones. They treat the city like a canvas. Any blank wall, bridge column, or stretch of fence becomes an invitation. And sometimes they place their work in pla...

It is long past time for President Trump to pardon three people who told the American people the truth. Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning. Let us remember the scandal they exposed. Our own government quietly built a surveillance machine that vacuumed up the phone calls, emails, and digital communications of millions of Americans. No warrants. No probable cause. Just a sweeping dragnet that stomped all over the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Apparently the Bill of Rights had become optional. This is the sort of mass spying Americans used to associate with regimes we congratulated ourselves for defeating. East Germany did it. The Soviet Union did it. Police states do it. But when Washington does it, suddenly we are supposed to nod politely and call it “national security.” Then along came three people who refused to play along. Snowden revealed the machinery. Manning exposed the inner workings of the war machine. Assange published the documents ...

  Yesterday before my LA criminal trial I’m working resumed, there was a violation of probation hearing for a black 19 year-old offender who was represented by the public defender.  He  was out of jail on his own recognizance     He was 6 foot four 260 pounds of failure and violence.     I don’t know what his original crime was other than it was violent.     He had a long rap sheet for other crimes.     He had failed recent drug test after drug test.     His appearance was that of a big bully. The judge read from social service and psychiatric reports that disclosed the following.     He had graduated from a Los Angeles public high school.     However, actual testing revealed that he only had a reading comprehension at a third grade level.     What’s the shocking?     No, it was another solid indictment of our teachers union and the public schools in Los Angeles.     Adding...

I  have to admit, it’s almost entertaining watching today’s Democrats twist themselves into knots trying to condemn Trump for finally taking out Iran’s ruling regime. For 47 years that government has trafficked in threats, proxies, bombings, kidnappings, and never ending open chants of “Death to America.” And what did we do? Press conferences. Negotiations. Pallets of cash. Diplomatic yoga. Since every administration since Jimmy Carter’s treated Tehran like a misunderstood exchange student instead of a regime that seized our embassy brutalized and held American embassy workers hostage for 444 days. 444 days.  That was an act of war. Yet instead of responding with force, decade after decade we tried to bribe, flatter, and “engage” people who murdered our citizens and burned our flag for sport. We wasted years in diplomatic circles while they funded terror networks, expanded influence, and played the long game. Meanwhile, their sympathizers our Democrats and apologists found...

Watch Iran. Really watch it. Millions are in the streets begging for basic liberty. Facing them is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with rifles loaded and consciences unplugged. They have already killed thousands of protesters. They will do it again tomorrow if ordered. That is what regimes do when cornered. Gun control did not begin as a public safety seminar. It was a tool. The Nazis used it. Communist regimes used it.  Fascist governments everywhere understood one thing very clearly. Disarmed citizens are much easier to rule. The American Bill of Rights is not self executing. It is not magic parchment. It works because there is a final check behind it. The Second Amendment is that check. Remove it and the rest becomes decorative. Iran’s protesters can chant all night, but unless the Revolutionary Guard splinters or refuses orders, the math does not change. The side with the guns writes the ending. Here in the United States, we are told that more restrictions are common ...

  The current war against Iran was totally unnecessary. WAS. Past tense. This disaster was born in 1979 when the so called Islamic Revolution rolled in and the mullahs decided kidnapping American diplomats was a smart opening move. They terrorized and held our embassy staff hostage for 444 days.  They turned the United States into a global punchline. President Jimmy Carter had a choice. Crush a fragile regime that had just shown its fangs, or sit at a table and beg for cooperation. He chose the table. Endless negotiations. A rescue attempt that collapsed in the desert. The message to Tehran was simple. America hesitates. America negotiates. America bleeds slowly. Tehran learned the lesson. For nearly five decades the regime metastasized. Terror proxies. Assassination plots. Missiles. “Death to America” as a slogan repeated like a national anthem. Then along comes Joe Biden, who decided that handing billions to the same regime was somehow strategic genius. I lot of the ...

It is a command to government: you will not disarm the people. You will not control their arms. You will not regulate them into submission. The right was not written for hunting. It was not written for sport. It was written so citizens could defend themselves, not only from criminals, but from the very government under which they live. History is clear. Governments drift. Governments expand. Governments corrupt. The Founders studied that history. They had lived it. They refused to build a nation where the people would be helpless in the face of superior force. They did not intend for citizens to be armed with symbolic tools while the state held overwhelming power. They understood that a free people must never be reduced to inferiority in their own defense. The Second Amendment is not a suggestion. It is a structural safeguard against tyranny.

  Gun control. The gift that keeps on giving — mostly to criminals. Ignorance must be bliss when you are a politician rubber-stamping every gun restriction that crosses your desk. Ban this. Ban that. Ban anything that sounds scary in a thirty-second sound bite. Take handgun shoulder stabilizing devices. Take laser sights. Tools designed for one simple purpose: accuracy. Stability. Control. But apparently accuracy is the problem. When lawmakers outlaw devices that help a lawful gun owner hit what they aim at, they are not reducing danger. They are increasing it. Missed shots do not disappear. They land somewhere. Into a wall. Into a car. Into someone’s grandmother who just happened to be standing in the wrong place. The irony is thick. These laws are inspired by street gang chaos. Yet the very people driving that chaos are the least disciplined shooters on the planet. They spray and pray. They target each other. And when they miss, innocent people pay. Meanwhile, an elderly cit...

    The bloodletting at Nexstar, gutting anchors and reporters at WGN and KTLA, is not a shock. It is a symptom. The patient has been terminal for years. There was a time when you could switch on the evening news and actually learn something. Facts. Context. Accountability. Now you get sermons. Viewers are no longer informed. They are managed. Spoon-fed political orthodoxy and campaign messaging dressed up as journalism. Subtle as a brick through a window. TV news did not die in a blaze of glory. It suffocated in a cloud of hairspray, banter, and manufactured charm. Personality replaced substance. Chit-chat replaced journalism. The audience noticed. They left. They fled to podcasters and bloggers who, flaws and all, at least pretend to chase facts instead of cocktail party approval. News breaks on weekends. News happens on holidays. But if you rely on local TV, you wait until Monday, when the hair is perfect and the teleprompter is warm. Two anchors per broadcast, grinnin...

   I have poured every ounce of experience, instinct, and hard-earned judgment into this mystery, working only with the scraps of information law enforcement has chosen to release. And after watching the circus of half-baked theories roll by, I reject them all. This is not complicated, Nancy Guthrie was murdered. This was not some ransom plot. Not some bizarre kidnapping fantasy. This was a murder, plain and simple, followed by a calculated plan to erase her from the earth. The intent was never negotiation. The intent was removal. Her killer did not improvise, had a destination in mind: one of the over 300 deep, abandoned, foreboding mines, the kind of place that swallows evidence forever. And the reason is obvious. Without a body, authorities can only struggle to establish the corpus delicti. No body, no confirmed cause of death, no clean homicide case. That is not an accident. That is strategy. Someone wanted Nancy Guthrie dead for one of two reasons. Rage, or money....

  Make no mistake: corporations and bean counters have invaded local mainstream media like termites in a wooden house. The result has been a slow-motion disaster, especially for investigative reporting. Instead of hard news, we get endless fluff, chirpy banter, and the kind of “breaking story” that turns out to be a weather tease and a celebrity haircut. So what are reporters doing?  They’re walking.They’re quitting. They’re realizing they don’t need a corporate leash to do journalism.  They can launch a podcast, a vlog, a blog, and suddenly the editorial direction belongs to them, not some executive in a glass tower who thinks “investigative reporting” means a feel-good piece about a rescue dog. The audience? They’re not sitting there hypnotized by the 6 o’clock news anymore. People watch TV with an iPad in their lap, a phone in their hand, and a laptop open. Television news is background noise. The only things still reliably grabbing attention are severe weather, spo...

The sheriff of Pima County, Arizona has now publicly “cleared” the Guthrie family and spouses of any involvement in the abduction of Nancy Guthrie.   Cleared? Really?   Cleared based on what? Evidence? Facts? Or the kind of political pressure that makes uncomfortable questions disappear on cue? Sure, you might be able to clear someone of direct, hands-on involvement if they have an airtight alibi. If they were on camera, in another state, surrounded by witnesses, fine.  But cleared of involvement entirely? That is a much bigger claim. Because here is the obvious question nobody wants to say out loud:  Can someone be physically absent and still be responsible?  Of course they can. People hire others to do dirty work every day. A person does not need to personally grab a victim to be part of the chain. So what exactly does “cleared” even mean at this stage?  Where is Nancy Guthrie?  Who benefits?  Who had motive?  Who had opportunity?  ...

Tommaso Cioni is Nancy Guthrie’s son-in-law. He is married to Annie Guthrie. By all accounts, he was reportedly the last known person to see Nancy alive. It has been reported that Tommaso and Annie had dinner with Nancy and then he drove her home. That detail alone places him squarely inside the timeline, whether anyone likes it or not. I looked into Tommaso’s background. Other than a minor speeding conviction in 2021, he appears to have a clean record. He has worked as a teacher with Basis Schools, Inc., which generally suggests a stable and respectable background. Public records reveal nothing substantial pointing to misconduct or any history of bad behavior. But then something strange happened. When the media storm hit, both Tommaso and Annie seemed determined to hide their faces. That was striking. Innocent people do not usually behave like fugitives from a camera lens. It looked like fear. It looked like shame. And yes, it looked like possible guilt. Law enforcement has repe...