Drugs, or the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time?
By Clark Adams | Published on July 28, 2011 | 0 Comments
Of all the illegal drugs people are using these days, which would you say carry the worst consequences during prosecution for criminal charges? According to Clark Adams, Attorney at Law, a Columbus, GA, drug crime defense lawyer, cocaine and methamphetamines are the hardest punished drugs around. Many people might answer heroine, says Adams, but he doesn’t see much of that anymore by comparison (although it made a comeback in the mid-90s). However, it’s not which drugs carry the toughest treatment, but how that treatment plays out, that’s worth an attorney’s attention.
The minimum jail time faced by somebody who was found with methamphetamines is a mandatory ten years in many cases. That’s for the conviction of “possession with intent to distribute” the methamphetamines. And when the law states “distribute,” it means either selling or giving. Adams makes that distinction because somebody couldn’t argue that they had left the drugs for pickup, but never received payment. The law still applies: Intent to distribute has nothing to do with whether money actually changed hands. What matters is that the methamphetamines were distributed, says the Columbus, GA, drug crime defense lawyer. Additionally, a large quantity of the drug, although never distributed, could lead to the assumption that it was possessed with the intent to distribute, as opposed to simple possession (for personal use).
When working on these cases, Adams adopts a hierarchical approach. He operates in a very methodical way because he has to be sure of everything he discovers in order to serve his client’s best interests. First, Adams scrutinizes the legality of the search and seizure activities that led to the client being intercepted in the first place. Did the policemen have a warrant? If they did, was it valid?—did it have legal support? Did the police officers have probable cause to conduct their activities against Adams’s client?
Recently, the Columbus, GA, drug crime defense lawyer was at a hearing with his client in which the police officers claimed they received a warrant because a confidential informant of theirs attested to the client’s involvement in drugs. When this happens, Adams tries to find out if the same informant has delivered similar or verifiable evidence in the past. He does this to gauge the informant’s credibility. If the informant is indeed unreliable, Adams will expose that fact in court. The process of exposure will show to the judge (and potentially the jury), that the police were using a disingenuous source. The police officers will almost certainly be claiming that the same informant provided leads to massive seizures of caches of drugs in the past. But if they’re stretching the truth, then their case could erode, and shift in favor of Adams’s client.
The next step is to ascertain how the client came in contact with the drugs. If the drugs were in the client’s pocket at the time of arrest, then that’s that, says Adams—it will doubtless look really bad, and the law stipulates a boatload of onus for the client in that situation. But if the client was in the car with other people who were found in possession of illegal substances, then the “equal access rule” applies. That means that if the owner of the car was found with the drugs, law enforcement cannot infer that the passenger is responsible for the drugs. They have to entertain the possibility that the passenger may even have been wholly ignorant of the drugs, says the drug crime defense lawyer in Columbus, GA.
The lesson is that a drug crime cannot simply be accepted at face value alone. There’s some delving to be done to get to the heart of the matter, to interpret events accurately so that the client can best be served.
*Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. You should not rely on this article as a legal opinion on any specific facts or circumstances, and you should not act upon this information without seeking professional counsel. Publication of this article and your receipt of this article does not create an attorney-client relationship.