General Info:
My primary areas of practice have been traffic, criminal, and domestic.
When you know you will be headed to court, you need to have an attorney review the facts of your case with you and give you an idea of where those facts place you with regard to the law. You can then make an informed decision on what you should do. Regularly, I witness defendants pleading guilty to traffic offenses that could easily be reduced to a lesser offense, if only the defendant understood subtleties in how a violation is routinely handled by the prosecutors and the courts. In any case that begins with the police stopping a vehicle, the circumstances that led to that stop are often the most important facts bearing upon you winning or losing in court. That is true whether the charges that result from the stop are traffic and/or criminal.
Your best course of action is to write down in chronological order, as soon as possible, never think that happened and every statement that anyone made concerning the events of the arrest. Writing organizes your thoughts better than reciting them. It is a slower process and gives your mind more time to recall details that you overlook when retelling an avert orally. Your memory becomes less precise with every minute passing after the event. You should see an attorney promptly.
With all the facts at my disposal, my next job is to determine where the potential weaknesses are in the case against you. I then formulate a plan to bring out the weaknesses and present them as evidence at trial. Often, what I believe to be good, helpful facts will be objectionable by the prosecutor as useable evidence at trial. It is my job to make sure that evidence is heard or seen despite the rules of evidence.
Even if the evidence against you is clear, often there are factors in your case that the police have not fully considered or cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Those are the areas that need to be exploited if at all possible. If our attorney does not have all the facts available, often these exploitable factors are missed. Your interview with your attorney needs to be thorough and in as much detail as can be pulled from your memory. Do not rush it. It does you no good to deliberately misinform a good defense attorney. He needs to know the real facts in order to formulate a defense that can win. Many times, the known facts of a case can appear to support a guilty verdict if interpreted in one manner but also an acquittal when viewed in a different manner.
You should look for an attorney that sees both conclusions but is willing to and capable of logically and methodically attaching the prosecutor’s facts as being open to more than one interpretation, an interpretation that supports a not guilty verdict.