My office frequently represents people who flat out did not commit the crimes of which they are accused. This can come about by various mistakes and inefficiency on the part of law enforcement. The areas I concentrate on with regard to wrongly accused clients ranges from eyewitness misidentification, false confession / admissions, government misconduct, informant and informants.
For instance, eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing the role in nearly 75% of convictions over-turned through DNA testing.
While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge, social science research has proven that eyewitness identification is often unreliable.
It seems that time and again when we go to trial, the eyewitness testimony grows like a fish story. Once you get to the courtroom the witnesses and lawyers for their respective sides want to win at that point. This means that witnesses will often embellish, embroider and make their stories more colorful for the fact finder. This happens time and again.
Another area of concern for wrongly accused citizens is false confessions. In about 25% of DNA exoneration cases, innocent defendants made incriminating statements, and delivered outright confessions or plead guilty. These cases show that confessions are not always prompted by internal knowledge or actual guilt, but are sometimes motivated by external influences.
Many of our clients have not been arrested before. They are also good citizens and want to please law enforcement. This sometimes results of misinterpretation of what a defendant may say to law enforcement, or what law enforcement actually write down in their witness reports. Sometimes my clients will come to me and when we read the police reports, they will say “…but I didn’t say that”. If the statement is not memorialized by video or audio-tape, then we can attack those statements.
Call now for a free initial consultation for any legal issue that might be affected by wrongly accused at 407-843-9411.