You’ve been fighting to get ahead, but society keeps throwing up barriers to the life that you want. And now you’re being threatened more than ever after being charged with a drug offense. As a result, you might feel defeated, uncertain about the future, and scared. Those are normal emotions to experience after being pegged for a drug crime, but you can’t let your stress and anxiety paralyze you into inaction. Now is the time to start building an aggressive criminal defense that seeks to protect your rights and your interests.
Even when the evidence stacked against you seems insurmountable, there may be effective criminal defense strategies that you can utilize in your case. So, before taking a plea deal or making any admissions, consider your options, including evidence suppression.
How can you block the prosecution’s evidence in your drug case?
Evidence suppression is the process through which you block the prosecution from using certain evidence against you. If you successfully suppress evidence, then you can crater the prosecution’s case, typically leading to reduced charges or complete dismissal of your case. It’s therefore an effective criminal defense strategy.
But when can you suppress evidence? Here are some arguments that you can make in your case:
- Illegal traffic stop: The police can’t stop you without reason. Instead, they need articulable evidence that gives them reasonable suspicion that you’ve committed or are committing a crime, or probable cause that you’ve committed some sort of traffic infraction. If they lack this pre-requisite evidence, then any traffic stop that’s conduced is illegal in nature.This illegality taints any subsequent search, too, rendering any collected evidence fruit of the poisonous tree. So, in these instances, you can block that tainted evidence from being used against you since your Constitutional rights protecting you from unreasonable search and seizure were violated.
- Failure to appear at a deposition: The prosecution’s witness testimony can put you in a bad position. To learn how those witnesses are going to testify, you should depose them, where you take testimony under oath prior to trial. But if those witnesses fail to appear to a deposition despite being subpoenaed to do so, then you’re left at an unfair disadvantage. That’s why their failure to appear could justify a request to block those witnesses from appearing to testify against you at trial.
- Failure to disclose evidence: Before you get to trial, you and the prosecution should engage in the discovery process, where information between the two sides is shared. But if the prosecution fails to provide you with information that they then try to use at trial, you can block it from being submitted into evidence.
- Chain of custody errors: Evidence must be handled and stored properly to maintain its integrity. If it isn’t, then you can bring those issues to the court’s attention. If the prosecution has major chain of custody errors where it can’t account for the evidence’s location at a given time or where the evidence was mishandled, then you can minimize its power or even prevent it from being presented in your case.
Don’t let the prosecution take advantage of you in your drug case
The prosecution is going to come across as confident in presenting its drug case against you. Don’t be intimidated. They’re not going to show the weaknesses in their case, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t weaknesses. It’s up to draw those weaknesses out and work to exploit them to your advantage. Only then can you rest assured that you’ve done everything to protect yourself in your case.