Los Angeles, CA Criminal Defense Attorney News Archive

Blair Berk and Leonard Levine, defense lawyers in Los Angeles, are arguing for the release of their client, Darren Sharper, who used to play in the National Football League.

Sharper has submitted a not guilty plea to sexually assaulting two women in Los Angeles.

However, Sharper remains on indefinite custody with no bail after prosecutors pointed out that he also has an arrest warrant issued by authorities in Louisiana.

Sharper's lawyers are insisting on his release because no case has been filed yet pertaining to the Louisiana arrest warrant.

The jury returned a guilty verdict against Rudy Kurniawan, a star wine collector, for faking vintage wines, which he apparently just manufactured from his home.

Kurniawan was convicted for fraud and is looking at a massive 40-year sentence.

Kurniawan was once known as among the top five collectors of wine in the world.

Prosecutors accused Kurniawan of earning millions from selling and auctioning fake vintage wines.

Found in the home that Kurniawan shared with his mother were unlabeled bottles and labels of Burgundy and Bordeaux wines.

Suspicions against Kurniawan started during an auction in 2008 wherein he offered to sell Domaine Ponsot wines.

But it wasn't until a 2012 wine auction in London that Kurniawan was arrested.

Los Angeles criminal lawyer Jerome Mooney, defending for Kurniawan, said his client was not trying to defraud people. Instead, all he wanted was to belong.

Robert Lee Phillips was convicted of killing his two stepdaughters in a 2006 birthday celebration for one of the victims.

Jurors found the 66-year-old South Los Angeles man guilty of murder in the first degree for the shooting death of Sabrina Taylor, 30, and murder in the second degree for the death of Charlotte Johnson, 33.

Phillips was also found guilty of attempting to kill two other people during the incident.

The jury had agreed with the Prosecutors that it was clear that Phillips had the intentions of committing the murders to pay the two women for their acts towards him all those years.

This was countered by Louis Sepe, the defense attorney from Los Angeles, who questioned what was his client's motive when he never even lived with the victims.

The incident stemmed from an argument that they were having over the kind of music that was played at the party.

Phillips is looking at a life sentence with no chance of parole.