Denver criminal defense lawyer / affirmative defenses

On the Denver criminal defense lawyer blog, I've already talked some about burdens of proof for different things in a criminal case. The most important one is obviously reasonable doubt which is the standard the state must prove a defendant's guilt beyond, but beyond that there are a number of others. The primary one is that a defendant must prove any affirmative defenses himself. Generally those must be proved by the preponderance of the evidence. That means your Denver criminal defense lawyer has to martial evidence so that the jury or judge in the case believes it's more likely than not the facts asserted happened. There are two major affirmative defenses I'll address here. The first is the alibi. In the case of an alibi, the burden is on the defendant to prove that he was not there. This makes sense to an extent. The prosecutor should not be asked to disprove the fact that someone was somewhere else, especially if they've already made the defendant's presence at the crime scene part of the case.

To make things more difficult for defendants and Denver criminal defense lawyers, the defendant must also provide notice of his intention to use the alibi defense. Again this makes a certain amount of sense since it really is the defendant putting the system on its head by creating a case of his own instead of just popping holes in the prosecution's case. However, it does deprive the defendant of a crucial tool that he's able to use in almost every other situation: the element of surprise. Instead of being able to ambush the state's witnesses with new information, the defendant has to open himself up to full investigation and possible manipulation of the witnesses who will be specifically on notice to disprove the alibi defense before it is even brought up. So though it makes some sense in terms of being fair to the state, the element of surprise at trial can be a key tool of other parts of the case and it might be asked why you're not allowed to use it here.