John Wesley Hall

    John Wesley Hall is a criminal defense lawyer who practices in Little Rock, Arkansas. His criminal practice includes trials, appeals, and post-conviction litigation. He also handles a limited number of civil constitutional cases.

    A student of the law of search and seizure for over 35 years, he has argued twice in the U.S. Supreme Court, including the 1995 knock-and-announce case of Wilson v. Arkansas (Oyez site with oral argument), authored numerous amicus briefs in the Supreme Court for NACDL and others, and he has appeared in four federal circuit courts. He also persuaded the Arkansas Supreme Court to reject Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996) (pretextual stops permissible as long as there is probable cause for the stop) under Art. 2, § 15 of the Arkansas Constitution in State v. Sullivan, 348 Ark. 647, 74 S.W.3d 215 (2002), on remand from Arkansas v. Sanders, 532 U.S. 769 (2001), holding that the Arkansas Constitution prohibits pretextual traffic stops.

    Licensed to practice law for nearly 40 years, he has handled over 300 jury trials and over 250 appeals, having made at least 85 appellate oral arguments, two in the U.S. Supreme Court. He concentrates on cases involving search and seizure issues, particularly drug offenses and computer crime. He also handles street crime, white collar crime, and homicide, war crimes, and death penalty cases. Search and Seizure was first published in 1982, with the second edition published in 1991 and the third edition in 2000. A student of the Fourth Amendment, he annually attends oral arguments of Fourth Amendment cases in the U.S. Supreme Court.

      He received his law degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1973. Before beginning his criminal defense practice, Mr. Hall was a deputy prosecuting attorney in Little Rock, and was head of the office's Career Criminal Division at the time he entered private practice in 1979. He also is licensed to practice in New York, Nevada, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia, seven federal district courts, as well as seven of the thirteen federal appellate circuits.

    When not practicing law and working for his clients, he is involved in the reform of criminal justice:

    He is a Past President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), served in all major positions, and was Chair of NACDL's Ethics Advisory Commitee 1990-2005. He received the prestigious Robert C. Heeney Memorial Award in 2002, NACDL's highest honor for service to the criminal defense bar and NACDL.

    He is a Fellow of the American Board of Criminal Lawyers, and a Past President of the Arkansas Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers receiving its Champion of Justice Award in 2003. He is also on the 2003 Arkansas Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

    He has been an occasional Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law and a lecturer at UALR's Graduate School of Criminal Justice. He is also a regular CLE speaker on search and seizure and lawyers' ethics in criminal cases, having done at least 100 CLEs in about 35 states, Québec and The Hague. He has also appeared as an expert witness on the question of legal ethics of criminal defense lawyers and ineffective assistance of counsel.

    He is also the author of Professional Responsibility of the Criminal Lawyer (3d ed. 2005), Trial Handbook for Arkansas Lawyers (5th ed. 2004), and numerous law review and lawyer magazine articles, including columns in NACDL's Champion.

    He is one of the principal draftsmen of the Code of Conduct for Defence Counsel appearing before the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted by the International Criminal Bar (ICB) in Berlin in 2003. He is an alternate ABA representative for the ICB, attending the Federation of European Bars meeting in Barcelona in February 2004 to explain the ICC Registrar's proposed ethics code. In addition to being a member of the ICB, he is also a member of the International Criminal Defence Attorneys Association.

    He will be involved in ICC war crimes defense lawyer training through NACDL on the final ICC ethics code, expected in April 2004. The ICC will start hearing cases in late 2004; the ICC prosecutor is already screening cases.

    His associate, Patrick J. Benca, is an accomplished Fourth Amendment litigator, too. One of his cases, Bennett v. State, 345 Ark. 48, 44 S.W.3d 310, 106 A.L.R.5th 793 (2001), is the subject of an ALR annotation: Odor Detectable by Unaided Person as Furnishing Probable Cause for Search Warrant, 106 A.L.R.5th 397 (2003).