February 1, 2012
Partner Philip Becnel was interviewed for an article by the The Washington Times about vetting potentially fraudulent grantee organizations.
January 23, 2012
Partner Philip Becnel was again interviewed on Channel 8 News to comment about the impact of the Supreme Court's decision in the case of United States v. Antoine Jones, a case that addressed whether law enforcement requires a warrant before attaching a GPS tracking device to a suspect's vehicle.
January 18, 2012
Partner Philip Becnel was interviewed about how private investigators use social media in internal employment investigations on Channel 8 News' Capital Insider.
January 1, 2012
Partner Philip Becnel published his second book, Principles of Investigative Documentation. In the book, Philip details how to document an investigation from start to finish using what he calls the Five Principles of Investigative Documentation. The book's coauthor, Scott Krischke, is a former private investigator with Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group who left to complete law school. Scott is presently a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of New York City.
October 20, 2011
Partner Philip Becnel was elected president of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia, a venerable association created in 1982 to promote ethical standards for private investigators and increase consumer awareness of the profession.
October 12, 2011
Partner Philip Becnel gave a lecture about social media investigations at the Maryland State Bar Association's 2011 Employment Law Institute .
May 4, 2011
Partner Philip Becnel published an article, called "Chasing Ghosts: Skip Tracing the Toughest to Find People," with Pursuit Magazine, a trade journal and online community for the private investigations industry.
March 23, 2011
Partner Philip Becnel lectured at George Mason University (GMU) in a presentation sponsored by the American Criminal Justice Association and National Criminal Justice Honor Society. Philip introduced some of GMU's Criminology, Law and Society majors to the field of private investigating, and he invited them to apply for the fellowship offered by Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group. Fellows are provided reimbursement for training to become registered private investigators in Virginia. Philip earlier presented an award to the firm's first fellow during the March 17 meeting of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia. More information about our fellowship program may be found here.
March 11, 2011
Partner Philip Becnel was a panelist at a discussion on social media investigations at a conference of the Maryland Employment Lawyers Association.
March 10, 2011
Partner Philip Becnel taught a class, titled "Private Investigations, Public Privacy," at the University of Maryland's College Park campus. Philip talked to students of the Honors College about some of the legal and moral pitfalls inherent in an industry that conducts investigations for a myriad of private interests and how these issues can impact public privacy. He also discussed some of the patchwork of laws that help regulate private investigators, and how some of the more controversial ethical areas are regulated only by established standards of practice among those in the industry.
February 2, 2011
Partner Philip Becnel gave a talk to an in-service class of certified Criminal Justice Act (CJA) investigators at the DC Public Defender Service in Washington, DC. CJA investigators perform criminal defense investigations on behalf of indigent criminal defendants and are paid through the court system.
December 14, 2010
Partner Philip Becnel gave a lecture on behavioral-analysis interviewing at the Maryland Investigators and Security Association in Annapolis, Maryland.
November 21, 2010
Partner Philip Becnel published an article with Pursuit Magazine, a trade journal and online community for the private investigations industry. The article, titled "A Private Investigator's Take on Social Media," can be found here. The article was later reprinted in the Winter 2011 addition of The Legal Investigator, a magazine published by the National Association of Legal Investigators.
June 3, 2010
Partner Philip Becnel was interviewed on The American P.I. podcast. He talked about cutting his teeth working criminal cases in Washington, DC, and his book, Private Investigator Entry Level (02E). In the interview, Philip discussed how writing the definitive chapter on investigative research would be an impossible task, as a list of sources would be obsolete by the time the book was published due to constant legal and technological changes in the industry. Instead, he focused primarily on research theory—how to independently find new sources of information.
May 26, 2010
Partner Philip Becnel gave a talk about his book, Private Investigator Entry Level (02E), to a meeting of the Professional Investigators and Security Association in Virginia Beach.
March 18, 2010
Partner Philip Becnel gave a lecture about how cognitive dissonance affects investigative interviews at the Private Investigators Association of Virginia in Fairfax, Virginia.
February 20, 2010
Partner Philip Becnel taught a seminar on behavioral-analysis interviewing at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, DC. Philip taught the museum’s guests (as well as some of Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group’s clients and colleagues) about recognizing behavioral symptoms of deception during investigative interviews.
February 4, 2010
Partner Philip Becnel gave a lecture about his book, Private Investigator Entry Level (02E), to a meeting of the Professional Investigators and Security Association (PISA). Philip talked to PISA’s Northern Virginia Chapter about the importance of educational standards for state-mandated private-investigator training in Virginia.
January 5, 2010
Partner Pierre-Alexandre Russell gave a talk, titled “Getting Gold from Your Private Investigator,” to the Boulder Chapter of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar.
December 2009
Partner Philip Becnel published a book, Private Investigator Entry Level (02E). The book, which covers a myriad of different investigative topics, from serving process to obtaining sworn declarations from witnesses, is currently the only existing textbook for the entry course required of all private investigators in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
August 31, 2009
Associate Scott Krischke was featured on Forensics:You Decide. The episode featured the defense investigation that led to the acquittal of Zukael Stephens in the 2006 Baltimore murder of transvestite Marcus Rogers, despite that the prosecutor had what they thought was a surveillance video of Stephens leaving Rogers’ apartment within minutes after the murder. Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group was hired by the law firm Clifford Chance to conduct an investigation in preparation for Stephen’s parole-revocation hearing, and Scott was the assigned private investigator on the case. The program, which aired on the Investigation Discovery Channel, featured Scott talking about his investigation and about the defense theory that led to Stephens’ exoneration. Both defense counsel with Clifford Chance and Stephens gave explicit permission for Scott to discuss the case on television. You can find a description of the episode here.
April 8, 2009
Partner Philip Becnel taught a two-hour seminar on behavioral-analysis interviewing to the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and the Equal Rights Center in Washington, DC. These two organizations provide very important legal assistance to individuals in various criminal and civil matters in the District and elsewhere. Philip gave the employees of both organizations an overview of how to differentiate truth from lies in clients’ accounts of criminal, discrimination and other claims. It was Philip’s contention that even organizations dedicated to supporting civil rights have a vested interest in avoiding involvement with bogus claims.
June 5, 2008
Partner Pierre-Alexandre Russell gave a lecture to a class of investigative interns for the Office of the Public Defender, Montgomery County, Maryland. Pierre’s talk was an introduction to criminal-defense investigations.
April 11, 2008
Partner Philip Becnel was a presenter at a panel discussion held in Washington, DC at the annual meeting of the Metropolitan Washington Employment Lawyers Association. Philip’s lecture, titled “Convictions and Lies: Conducting Background Investigations on Your Clients,” discussed how plaintiff employment attorneys could better vet their clients prior to initiating costly lawsuits without having all of the facts. Philip recommended background checks using open-source records and having a private investigator conduct behavioral-analysis interviews of potential clients prior to filing the complaint.
April 6, 2007
Partner Philip Becnel was featured on Channel 6 News in the Metropolitan Washington, DC region regarding speculation about the final episode of The Sopranos to air on HBO that evening. The news crew interviewed Philip at Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group’s Arlington, Virginia office, and he discussed the general (read, non-privileged) details of some of the gang-related investigations he had done. His conclusion: The Sopranos is not very accurate from a private investigator’s standpoint, although it is highly entertaining.
August 4, 2006
Partners Brendan Wells and Philip Becnel gave a lecture in Baltimore to the National Alliance of Sentencing and Mitigation Specialists at the University of Maryland, School of Social Work. During the lecture, titled “Defense Investigation: The Work of the Investigator on the Team,” Brendan and Philip discussed the use of private investigators to support mitigation in capital defense cases.
February 19, 2006
Partner Philip Becnel was quoted in The Washington Post regarding the way that credit bureaus use information about consumers. In the article, titled “Good Numbers, Bad Names,” Philip explained why credit bureaus, the main source of information from investigative databases, do not cross-reference their data with government agencies. You can find the article here.
January 13, 2006
Partner Philip Becnel was featured on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 regarding the practice of some private investigators unethically pretexting confidential telephone records. Philip discussed how Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group had never engaged in pretexting for such records and how the practice gave ethical, law-abiding investigators a bad name. He also gave his expert opinion about the potential nefarious uses of cell-phone pretexting. On the same day, President George W. Bush signed into law the Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act of 2006, banning pretexting for confidential telephone records.
November 27, 2005
Associate Ronald Sandoval was named in the Richmond Times Dispatch after taking a statement from the only eye witness in a capital appellate case. The witness told Ronald that he could not endorse the impending execution of Robin Lovitt because he was unsure if his identification of the killer was accurate. Lovitt’s death sentence was later commuted to a sentence of life without parole by Governor Mark Warner. You can find an abstract of the article here.