Opening Closed Doors...

Picture a room. Picture a large room and in the center of this room there exists your dreams and aspirations. In the room is your future. It’s the career and success you always wanted. In this room there exists success and endless possibilities. And imagine that there is a door to this room and that all you need to do to access what you have always wanted is to enter the room. Now imagine that the door is closed and locked. What would you do to unlock this door? What would you do to open the door and grasp your future?

To be sure, there is a ripple effect that occurs when you are arrested and  facing criminal charges. If convicted of a crime, particularly a felony conviction, doors become closed and sometimes locked. Whether it is a possession of an illegal drug or a DWI, arrests and convictions can dismantle and destroy dreams. 

The biggest priority in a criminal case, besides avoiding imprisonment, is to avoid a conviction. Convictions can be absolutely devastating. How is this accomplished? It happens in a few ways: 

Mitigation: Clients that are facing arrests must show the criminal justice system that they are not defined by the arrest. They must change the landscape of what they look like. This can mean treatment, proof of employment, community service, or showing enrollment in school. This means humanizing you. You want to be able to show that the criminal act is not an emblem of who you are and does not define you. 

Prosecuting a criminal defense: The government has the burden of proof to prove your guilt, but exceptionally good criminal defense attorneys will approach your case as if they were “prosecuting a defense.” This means aggressively searching for evidence that shows you are innocent and that, perhaps, someone else committed crime. This aggressive search for reasonable doubt provides the criminal justice system with an acceptable reason to decline prosecution of your case. 

Legal analysis: Sometimes a good reason for declining prosecuting or dismissing charges is finding legal reasons and arguments that support a motion that would favorably dispose your case. This might mean challenging the constitutionality of a search and seizure. This may mean suppressing a confession. This may mean challenging the statute of limitations of instituting prosecution. This may mean blending creativity with legal analysis to provide the criminal justice system a legally justified mechanism to dismiss your charges.  

Trying your case: Sometimes avoiding a conviction means trying your case and showing a judge or a jury that there exists reasonable doubt. Sometimes preserving your future means going to war and fighting to get to a “not guilty” verdict. You don’t want to go to war unprepared and uninitiated. You want someone who has trial experience and knows how to prepare and present evidence to give you the best chance at a favorable verdict. 

Opening locked doors that lead to your future is about finding justice. Justice manifests itself in many ways. Sometimes it’s a small win. Sometimes it’s taking a risk on someone and allowing them to have a future. Sometimes it’s about forgiveness. Sometimes it’s about closure. Sometimes it’s quiet and subtle. Sometimes it’s about a ripple effect that isn’t measured in days, months, or years, but instead generations. Sometimes it’s delayed and sometimes it’s swift. Regardless of how it manifests itself, justice is always about human beings and opening doors.

Contact the Borghardt Law Firm today to have us help secure your future and open doors that have been locked because of an arrest and criminal charges.