Michael P. Hanle, Partner

03/07/2019

Congrats to my law firm partner Richard Jaffe on his induction into the B-Metro Attorney Hall of Fame!

Attorney Richard Jaffe of Jaffe, Hanle, Whisonant & Knight, P.C. in Birmingham has recently been inducted to the inaugural class of B-Metro Magazine’s Hall of Fame Attorneys.

11/05/2018

November 6th is election day. Get out and vote. It does not matter who you vote for (although I have some suggestions) just get out and vote.

12/08/2017

11/27/2017

We now have over a dozen interviews available on our YouTube page. Check them out!

09/14/2015

Great story about another exoneration involving Richard Jaffe.

https://www.aclu.org/news/montez-spradley-innocent-man-released-prison-after-95-years-35-death-row

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Montez Spradley, who was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, was released from prison on Friday. He had spent 3.5 years on Alabama’s death row and a total of 9.5 years behind bars. He is 32 years old.

08/18/2015

Missing the problem, again! When will they get it right?

The White House’s new multimillion-dollar plan to tackle he**in is missing the point of America’s opioid epidemic.In response to the quadrupling of he**in overdose deaths from 2002-2013, the White House unveiled a multi-million dollar plan Monday that will, among other things, target the black market where it is sold.It’s a great start to curbing America’s he**in epidemic, but as a plan to address the opioid epidemic as a whole, it may be missing the point.According to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health, twice as many people are addicted to prescription painkillers (1.2 million) as he**in (roughly 500,000), and twice as many die from them each year. From 1997-2011 alone, there was a 900 percent increase in people requesting treatment for opioid addiction, and it’s now the second most abused drug among teens.Legal and proven to have medical benefits, painkillers are seen as safe and effective. Yet they kill 46 people per day in the U.S.—more than two an hour. Those who can no longer afford or obtain painkillers, which run $40/a pop on the black market, turn to he**in—often $5 a bag.Until medicine finds a solution to chronic pain, crackdowns on one drug will likely serve only to increase the use of the other.In a statement released Monday, the Office of National Drug Control Policy outlined the $5 million dollar plan to target the “trafficking, distribution and use of he**in” —$2.5 million of which it will use to create a “He**in Response Team.” The program is a part of a $13.4 million dollar fund given to a division of the Drug Enforcement Administration known as the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA).If effective, the rise in he**in use nationwide may very well come to a halt. But winning that battle won’t win the war.HIDTA was launched by Congress as a part of the 1988 amendment to Ronald Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, with the goal of stopping the influx of illegal drugs. On its website, the DEA says the program “provides assistance to Federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies operating in areas determined to be critical drug-trafficking regions of the U.S.”The mission of the he**in intervention follows that model. Combining state, local, and federal law enforcement in 15 states, it aims to forge public safety and public health partnerships across 15 states. The money will be used to educate, provide medicine to prevent overdoses, and offer tools to infiltrate drug networks. If effective, the rise in …

07/29/2015

The U.S. Attorney's office is against reforming mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. Why?

In the wake of this growing bipartisan push to fix our broken federal sentencing system, the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys (NAAUSA) recently released a report titled "The Dangerous …

07/20/2015

Momentum is building. It is time to do end mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenses.

In 1992, when I was 26, I was convicted for distributing crack co***ne in Fort Worth, Texas. For this nonviolent offense, I was sentenced to life without parole. I turn 50 this year and have lived for almost a quarter-century in the Federal Correctional Institution El Reno in Oklahoma, where President Obama was stopping on Thursday – the first sitting president to visit a federal prison.He deserves praise for showing a lot of interest in criminal justice reform, and for commuting the sentences of 46 inmates on Monday, which was very much needed. But there are hundreds of other nonviolent offenders just like them, and just like me, who are serving sentences that are no longer considered fair. If I were to be granted clemency, it would be like a breath of a new life after years of incarceration.I have seen so much while here in El Reno, especially the comings and goings of a lot of inmates. I tell them that one day I will be like them — going home a free man. The most important thing to me about freedom is caring for my parents. Their health is going downhill. My mother has stage 4 breast cancer, and my father has just learned that he has prostate cancer. I am my parents’ only son, and I long to rejoin my three sisters to help care for them. Also, I haven’t been able to see my daughters grow into young ladies, and I haven’t had the benefit of assisting my sisters as a brother should – let alone just living life as a free person.With all of this going on, the day-to-day of prison is taking an even greater toll on me. But I continue to pray that one day soon I’ll look back on this and thank God for the will to keep on.I wake up every day and pray in a cell that’s white and grey with little room to move around in between me and my cellmate. On Monday through Thursday, my days begin at 4:30am as I prepare to work in the commissary as a clerk from 6am until 3:30pm. After work, I keep myself in good health by exercising from 6–7pm, and pretty much after that my day is almost over. On Saturday I head to the law library to read case law, as I have a diploma in paralegal studies.Clemency is something that I long for – not just for me, but for a lot of inmates who have served well over 20-plus years for crimes involving crack co***ne. Most of us convicted back in the early 1990s are still serving very long prison sentences because the law punished crack offenses more harshly than co***ne powder offenses. If I had been convicted for a crime involving co***ne powder, …

07/18/2015

I need one of these for my next camping trip. I always forget to bring the chair.

The lightest chair in our furniture family, the Monarch Chair is the original tent-pole seat that brought Alite to fame. Balancing on two legs allows you to rock forward and back. The innovative base …

07/05/2015

Who is going to get the job of cleaning up this mess?

Years ago, the Inquisitr reported on a drug lab chemist named Sonja Farak who was charged for tampering with evidence important to a few drug-related crimes. But newly released records from the …

06/19/2015

There is no question the shootings in Charleston are tragic, but are they an act of terrorism. I don't think so. What makes this heinous event an act of terrorism?

Is it the simple fact that a white man shot and killed a group of black men and women? Would we reach the same result if a black man had shot and killed a group of white men and women? Would we reach the same result if members of a white motorcycle gangs shot and killed a group of white men in a rival motorcycle gang? Would we reach the same result if a group of young black men shot and killed a rival group of young men in the City of Chicago this weekend.

Clearly these acts can be characterized as "hate crimes" but not an act of terrorism. This terrible event was not, in my opinion, committed to create fear for the purpose of achieving an economic, political, or ideological goal.

What do you think?

06/10/2015

America's largest mental health facility is the Cook County Jail. Sad reality, but at least they are trying to make things better. Great article.

At Cook County, where a third of those incarcerated suffer from psychological disorders, officials are looking for ways to treat inmates less like prisoners and more like patients.It was 9 o’clock in the morning at Cook County Jail, but in the subterranean holding cells where dozens await their turn before a judge, you wouldn't be able to tell. Pre-bail processing here takes place entirely underground. A labyrinth of tunnels connects the jail’s buildings to one another and to the Cook County Criminal Court. Signs and directions are intentionally left off the smooth concrete corridors to hinder escape attempts. Even those who run the jail get lost down here from time to time, they told me.No natural light reaches the tunnels. Human voices echoed off the featureless walls, creating an omnipresent din. On this Monday, when those arrested over the weekend in Chicago and its suburbs filled the fenced cages, that din became a roar. Many inmates were standing, sitting, or milling around. But some—perhaps two or three per holding pen—were lying on the floor, asleep.If you can sleep through this, you’re fighting far greater demons than the commotion outside. And the doctors here want to know what they are.At Cook County Jail, an estimated one in three inmates has some form of mental illness. At least 400,000 inmates currently behind bars in the United States suffer from some type of mental illness—a population larger than the cities of Cleveland, New Orleans, or St. Louis—according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI estimates that between 25 and 40 percent of all mentally ill Americans will be jailed or incarcerated at some point in their lives.“This is typically what I see everyday,” said Elli Petacque-Montgomery, a psychologist and the deputy director of mental health policy for the sheriff’s department. She showed me a medical intake form filled with blue pen scribbles. Small boxes listed possible illnesses: manic depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia, and so on. The forms are designed to help jail officials identify which inmates have mental illnesses as early as possible. Details from four new inmates could fit on a single sheet. She showed me a completed one. “Of those four,” she said, pointing to the descriptors, “I have three mentally ill people.”The overwhelming majority had been arrested for “crimes of survival” such as retail theft (to find food or supplies) or breaking and entering (to find a place to sleep).On a nearby …