How Does the Noll Law Office Win Criminal Law Cases?
By Dan Noll on July 9th, 2015 in
When a client is involved in initial consultation with us, they’re usually under significant stress. A search warrant’s been issued. An arrest was had. They want to know what defenses do I have? What’s out there? How can we limit this?
To win a case, meaning being acquitted or having such a substantial reduction of charges, can depend upon what defenses you have. The prosecutors are aggressive people. They believe you’re guilty. They believe you’re guilty with what they charge but they haven’t looked at the defense side of the ledger, the rest of the story as other people would say. It’s easy to allege offenses. It’s harder to prove them, so the number one defense that we have been successful with is what’s known as sufficiency of the evidence.
That is, an individual must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in order to be convicted. Quite frankly, juries are really good about determining is there sufficient evidence here to find that person beyond a reasonable doubt. I think that that’s a very viable defense, probably 2 to 3 times out of 5 times.
There are other what they call affirmative defenses. You can have something like an alibi; had this happen numerous times, numerous times where basically the complaining witness misidentifies the perpetrator, so they pick out this person out a photo lineup and my client was charged with murder in Springfield, Illinois, and we showed … this was actually presented in a court, and it ended up with the guy being acquitted … that he was selling crack cocaine in East St. Louis on that particular day.
I know that’s not much of a defense because he’s doing one criminal act, vis-a-vis, not having done another criminal act but that got him acquitted of first-degree murder. He was never charged from the crack cocaine sale because they didn’t have any dope, didn’t have any witnesses.
Then, especially in physical assault cases, self-defense is a very, very viable defense, be it a murder case or some type of aggravated assault case. You can have other defenses. In federal court fraud cases, quite often you have lack of intent. You can have anything where the defendant didn’t have actual knowledge of criminal activity going on by some other third party that he was allegedly involved with, maybe people conspiring with, so those are viable defenses.
If properly presented, a jury can identify what those defenses, can identify with the individual sitting there, and here you’re going to get an acquittal from those cases, so those are the types of potential defenses that can occur. The lawyers at the Noll Law Office are skilled criminal defense attorneys who emphasize communication and honesty. Our lawyers utilize their training, knowledge and skills to defend our client’s Constitutional rights. If you have been charged with a criminal offense, don’t talk to anyone until you talk to Noll.