Should you hire a former prosecutor?

Speaker 1
00;00;00;01 – 00;00;01;09
Hi, everyone. Should you hire a former prosecutor as your defense attorney? This is Christina Williams with Just Criminal Law.
Speaker 2
00;00;09;14 – 00;00;10;24
And this is David Mann, Legal Storytelling Specialist. Okay, you were a former prosecutor, right?
Speaker 1
00;00;16;11 – 00;00;17;05
That’s correct. I did prosecute for several years before I went to the other side and started defending people.
Speaker 2
00;00;24;00 – 00;00;24;28
Well, all right. And so you and I started working together on some of your cases. And one of them, I remember, involved a guy that was our client that the defendant accused of strangling his girlfriend. And it looked like it was going to trial, and then all of a sudden it went away. So tells us, how did that happen?
Speaker 1
00;00;49;00 – 00;00;52;12
Sure. So I used my experience as a prosecutor to figure out how to get the case dismissed. And that’s exactly what we did. Now, in this particular case, there had been multiple contacts between the alleged victim and my client that had involved law enforcement. Now, those contacts were not provided to us. Reports were written about what happened. And the prosecutor didn’t give us those reports. What I did is, went and requested that from the police department, that they give me any reports between these two people, my client and the alleged victim. And we combed through those incidents. And what we found is that there was actually a time very similar to the facts that got my client charged, where this alleged victim actually was heard saying, by law enforcement, that she was going to tell the cops that my client tried to strangle her in order to get him in trouble.
Speaker 1
00;01;55;25 – 00;02;00;03
And so we come up with this particular golden piece of evidence and, you know, eventually the prosecutor knows what we’re doing and ends up ordering those same reports, and realizes that his alleged victim has actually lied about this exact same thing, only about a month before the new charge, and ends up having to reexamine whether or not to take the case to trial.
Speaker 2
00;02;28;13 – 00;02;29;12
Hmm. So in your capacity as a prosecutor, you must have sort of seen that there are just so many cases happening all the time, that it’s easy to kind of miss things along the way and you don’t really know what’s going to trial. Is that right?
Speaker 1
00;02;46;06 – 00;02;48;09
Right. And so, you know, the prosecutor, you know, might have 100 cases and they don’t know which one has, you know, a lot of other evidence that law enforcement didn’t uncover. And they don’t know which cases the defendant is talking to the attorney about, their defense attorney. And there just really is no good way to get out of the crime charge. And so, as a defense attorney, you can tell which cases there’s holes and we really need to just try to get the best deal possible. And the prosecutor just doesn’t take the time to look at that.
Speaker 2
00;03;26;16 – 00;03;28;02
And so you did in this case, and this could have really turned out bad for this defendant that we were representing. I think it was something like, potentially 20 years in prison or something like that, that went away.
Speaker 1
00;03;40;28 – 00;03;43;09
Right. And he even had an attorney before me that was, you know, encouraging him to take the plea offer. And so we definitely made all the difference in the world for him. And we got, you know, so that he didn’t go to prison. He got back to work. He went back to his life as that existed, prior to these charges.
Speaker 2
00;04;03;05 – 00;04;05;03
Hmm. That is a great story. So if someone finds themselves in a position where they might need an attorney that does that very thing, how do they get in touch with you?
Speaker 1
00;04;13;03 – 00;04;14;25
Sure. We’ll include a link in the description where they can call, text, or chat with a member of my team, anytime, day or night. Here at Just Criminal Law, we know you only get one shot at justice. So make yours count!