A firearm count multiplies everything.
Felon-in-possession and firearm enhancements can add years - or mandatory consecutive time - to any case. The stop and the search come first; the count often falls with them.
Netflix told the story. The defense was ours.
When Shonda Rhimes built Inventing Anna, the defense at its center was Todd Spodek’s - argued for the so-called fake heiress in a Manhattan courtroom long before Arian Moayed of Succession played him on screen. What 320 million hours of viewers watched is the method every client of this firm gets, in every federal district.
The record, dated and sourced.
How your case unfolds.
THE FULL PROCESS →Risk-free, in person or by phone. Ask anything, for as long as it takes. Strategy starts the same day.
A stop, a search, an ATF adoption - counsel engages while the priors and the charging theory are still being picked.
Suppress the stop, litigate which priors qualify, preserve the Bruen challenge - and if trial serves you, possession gets tried, not presumed.
Federal gun prosecutions have surged, and the counts stack: possession charges, enhancements tied to other offenses, mandatory consecutive sentences. Most begin with a stop or a search - which makes the 4th Amendment the first battlefield. Suppress the recovery, and the count goes with it. Where the possession theory is constructive, we make the government prove it was yours.
A traffic stop becomes a federal case.
Most §922(g) cases begin with a stop, a search, and a gun the government must connect to your hands. ATF adopts the case when priors make the federal exposure bigger. The stop, the frisk, and the statements that followed are all litigable - and usually the whole case.
Your record does the sentencing.
§2K2.1 keys the base level to prior convictions and weapon type, and ACCA turns three qualifying priors into a fifteen-year floor. Whether an old conviction qualifies is a legal fight, not a lookup - categorical-approach litigation moves these cases by a decade. We fight the priors before we fight anything else.
Possession is not proximity.
A gun in a car with four people belongs to no one until the government proves knowledge and control. Suppression wins these cases outright: bad stops, overlong detentions, consent that was never voluntary. After Bruen, the statute itself is under attack in courts nationwide - preserved properly, that issue rides with your case.
§922(g), §924(c), and ACCA - three different wars.
Felon-in-possession now carries fifteen years flat after the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act; §924(c) adds five to twenty-five consecutive years for guns during drug or violent crimes; ACCA imposes a fifteen-year minimum for three qualifying priors. Which priors “qualify” is the categorical-approach fight that fills the federal reporters - and post-Bruen challenges to §922(g) itself are dividing the circuits as we write. This corner of federal law is moving; a defense that is not current is not a defense.
After the gun is found.
The only statement worth making is none - ownership small talk convicts more people than ballistics does. Note every detail of the stop while it is fresh: the reason given, the timing, who searched what. DNA and fingerprints on a firearm are re-testable, and car cases especially turn on whose reach, whose compartment, whose prints.
Todd A. Spodek is a second-generation trial lawyer whose defense of Anna Delvey became Netflix's Inventing Anna. He appears on Fox News and CNN as a legal analyst, authored "My Advice to Diddy" in The Spectator, and is quoted by the Associated Press when the biggest federal cases break. The record behind the profile: a complete acquittal in a $26M money-laundering trial, RICO charges carrying a 10-year minimum dismissed, and 6 months on a $12M Ponzi case.
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Why this firm.
Five decades of federal courtrooms. Whatever the government has charged, this firm has defended it before.
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We decline more federal matters than we accept - and every accepted case gets the whole bench.
Know who is on the other side.
The first 72 hours decide the next 72 weeks.
No interviews, no consents, no explaining, no deleting. The words said in hour zero are the exhibits at trial. Write down what was asked and by whom - then stop.
Privilege attaches, facts get mapped while memory is fresh, documents get preserved the right way, and nobody in your orbit talks to agents unrepresented again.
We contact the government as your counsel: target, subject, or witness gets confirmed, deadlines get calendared, and the defense - not the investigation - sets the tempo.
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