Denver criminal defense lawyer / bench warrants

Having talked yesterday about arrest warrants and how a Denver criminal defense lawyer can help deal you deal with one, today I'm going to talk about a different kind of warrant: a bench warrant. Generally a bench warrant is pretty similar to an arrest warrant. It is an order telling police officers or sheriff's deputies to bring you in if they come across you. The only difference is that a bench warrant is not for an active investigation, it is for a case where a court is already exercising jurisdiction over the defendant. Generally a bench warrant arises simply because the defendant does not come to court.

Unlike an arrest warrant the sheriff will not actively be looking for the defendant where there is an outstanding bench warrant. Still, bench warrants matter. Many times the court will assess a fee that you have to pay when the defendant does get around to dealing with the case. A bench warrant can also put limitations on a defendant's passport until it is cleaned up, so travel is either restricted or prohibited. Finally, any time the defendant gets picked up he can be hauled in front of a judge. Fortunately, in contrast to arrest warrants, bench warrants are fairly easy to deal with.

If you want to deal with a bench warrant without a Denver criminal defense lawyer, going pro se is generally fairly easy. Every jurisdiction has slightly different procedures, so the best thing to do is generally to call the clerk of the court. In most cases they will have you come in person to the courthouse and then calendar your case for a hearing. At that time the case will be dealt with as if it were starting over, though there could be penalties for issuing the bench warrant and so on. You'll go through plea bargaining and possibly a trial or hearing (if the right to a jury trial hasn't been waived by your failure to request one within a certain time frame).

A Denver criminal defense lawyer can also help deal with bench warrants, sometimes without your appearance. He will file a motion to quash and calendar the case for hearing. Depending on whether the judge consents, he can help plead your case out without an appearance. In any case, once the case is filed for hearing, the warrant is gone and you just have to deal with the proceeding.

Finally, it's important to note a bench warrant (or an arrest warrant for that matter) never goes away. They just sit on your record and probably pop up at the most inconvenient time. The best course of action is to deal with it right away, either on your own or with a lawyer.

Denver criminal defense lawyer / arrest warrants

I've already talked fairly extensively on this blog about search warrants, which the police will need to get to search your person or your property unless the search falls into one of a number of different exceptions. If a warrantless search does not fall into one of those exceptions, the evidence can be thrown out of court by the judge depending on the argument made by your Denver criminal defense lawyer. It also may not be thrown out, but that's a totally different story. Of course, these aren't the kind of warrants that most defendants are likely to be terribly afraid of. Most people care more about their freedom than the integrity of their property, so an arrest warrant is what really scares people.

In many cases, you won't be able to have a Denver criminal defense lawyer help with an arrest warrant. That's because the warrant will have been issued without you even knowing it, and the sheriff will simply show up at the door to "serve" the warrant. Serving a warrant is just a nice way of saying arresting the charged defendant. At that moment a defendant will want to call a Denver criminal defense lawyer to help with the underlying case. Of course it will be pretty inconvenient, since the police can haul a defendant out of his or her house or workplace or wherever they can find that person.

That said, sometimes a defendant will find out that there is an outstanding warrant before it is served and the defendant is arrested. In this case an attorney can help a ton. A lawyer can work with the court to get rid of the warrant (a process known as "quashing") and schedule the case for a hearing. Sometimes the court will work with this, knowing that the defendant is not going to skip out having already voluntarily consented to jurisdiction. Then the case is set for an arraignment where bail is set and some other conditions might be imposed to make sure the defendant behaves while the case is pending, and make sure he makes all the court dates. Other times this won't work and the defendant will have to negotiate a surrender. This is something for a later post.

Denver criminal defense lawyer / things you won't go to jail for

An ordinance up for consideration in Boulder County demonstrates one of the great perils of attempting to defend yourself without a Denver criminal defense lawyer. Under the new ordinance, about 60 different ordinance violations would have their maximum penalties changed. Namely defendants would no longer face jail time for committing any of these offenses. While the ACLU supports it and it's a good idea, really it points to a larger farce in the system. People who commit these crimes will rarely face jail time in Boulder or in any other county in Colorado. Those maximum penalties are simply a sticker price. And like a sticker price on a car, it's basically used by the prosecutor to negotiate a more favorable outcome for him, and not to have to go to trial.

In many circumstances, even if the defendant does go to trial and is convicted of one of these relatively minor offenses, he will not even go to jail. At that point the judge has sentencing power. Judges know state and county budgets are strained right now and jails are overflowing. Defendants do not know that so they think they will automatically face the harshest penalty if they proceed to trial an are convicted. Denver criminal defense lawyers know that the actual maximum penalty frequently is not even close to the ones in the rule book. Basically if Boulder County passes this reform it would be a good thing. But it would not really make the criminal justice system any more lenient. When is the last time you heard of someone going to jail for littering? Me neither, people aren't even scared enough about littering charges to call me. That said this basically just makes things a little bit simpler and cheaper, but is no significant change. Significant change would be for more significant crimes than littering or public urination.

Denver criminal defense lawyer / going on your own

Paying the fee for a Denver criminal defense lawyer will cost money. Depending on the crime you're accused of, it might cost quite a lot of money. In some cases, a public defender will be appointed for you. However, even those of very, very modest means will not be eligible. Basically a defendant needs to be completely indigent to be eligible for an attorney free of charge. If you've got a house you can borrow against, the county assumes you can hire a Denver criminal defense lawyer. Same if you have anything resembling a steady job. That raises the question for a someone barely above the guideline: can you do it without a Denver criminal defense lawyer?

In every court in America, you have the right to represent yourself. This is called acting pro se. In fact, a good number of defendants choose to do that every single day. The court will give a pro se defendant some amount of guidance on the procedural issues. The prosecutor will do their best to explain any plea offers in a way you can understand it as a lay person. Nobody is going to actively try to fleece a defendant in this process.

That said, none of these people will offer you legal advice. They'll help you understand the process and when to be where, but they can't explain the law. They can't explain what the law means to your case. And they won't really explain what the different plea agreements mean to you. Sure they can tell you what the sentence is. But they won't be able to tell you what your different defenses to the case are, and what your chances of winning at trial are. And if you choose to plead not guilty and go to trial, you'll be up against an experienced prosecutor who knows the rules of evidence and the ins and outs of the rules. You need your own lawyer to combat this.

Denver criminal defense lawyer / the importance of currency

No, not money. The reason it's important for a Denver criminal defense lawyer to stay on top of stuff is because things change. Murder more or less stays the same. The rules of evidence don't really change that much, and speeding is still going over the speed limit. Where Denver criminal defense lawyers need to do their work is on more complex evidentiary issues in bigger cases, like arson:

Innocence Projects founded to exonerate inmates through DNA testing have begun accepting arson cases, the AP story says. Experts say research is challenging assumptions about how fires spread and what kind of evidence signals arson. One example: Experts used to conclude that hot-burning fires were the result of arson. New research, however, finds no correlation. Another example: A V-shaped pattern on the wall was once thought to be proof of arson. It’s now thought to indicate only where the fire started.

These clues were once tell-tale evidence, considered by experts to be as foolproof in figuring out whether a fire was simply a furnace issue gone bad or murder. And these arson cases are relatively common and almost always murders. The insurance fraud cases do not get innocence project attention. They are also incredibly hard to prove by direct evidence, since anything that was used to start the fire probably burned right up, and the cause of death is always smoke inhalation or burns. That means basically the only evidence available is circumstantial evidence of motive and scientific evidence of whether the fire was started intentionally or not. And even much evidence of motive is likely to be excluded as prejudicial. At any rate, the scientific evidence ends up being an important, and often fatal, component of the trial. That's why it's important to have a Denver criminal defense lawyer who knows the new developments.