Common Mistakes Made By Criminal Law Clients

The most common mistake people make is to not recognize and enforce their right to silence. You have that right, but the police aren’t going to insist you exercise it. You must have the fortitude to stay silent even though you know you are innocent and you desperately want to explain what happened. You have been raised since childhood to respect the local policemen and to listen to them and to do what they tell you. You have an overwhelming urge just to spill your guts and explain your story. Only afterwards, when you sit down and talk to a lawyer, do you realize that while you may not be guilty of the offense, the kinds of things you said have created all sorts of problems for you. Also, your explanation is likely one that the police are not going to accept, if they are already on your doorstep. They have already made the decision to arrest you, in which case nothing you say is going to change their minds. Or, they are doing this because they don’t have enough information on the situation in order to lay a charge in the first place, and they are hoping that you are going to do something silly and give them that information. There really is no upside in talking to the police. I can think of almost no situations where a person has successfully talked himself out of a charge that was coming

Hiring the cheapest lawyer may not be a bargain.
Another very common mistake is hiring the cheapest lawyer. There is a habit among some clients to simply shop around and we don’t oppose that at all. We are happy to have people speak to two or three different lawyers and make those kinds of comparisons. But when somebody calls and simply wants to find whoever happens to be the cheapest lawyer, they need to remember that the maxim, “You get what you pay for,” applies to criminal law as much as it does to shopping in the marketplace. There is a quality difference and that quality comes with a cost. If cost is your primary concern, you may want to speak to reputable firms and talk about hiring their more junior lawyers, which can be a good option.

Don’t try to fix things yourself.
If you found out that you required surgery, you would never in a million years think that you could save some money by cutting yourself open. On the other hand, when it comes to a legal disease–a legal problem–there is this perception that people can do it themselves. If the legal system were simple enough and risk free enough for people to do it themselves, everybody would be doing it. The reality is that the system is very complicated, sophisticated, and overwhelming. When you try to do things yourself, you may make a bad situation worse.

A huge part of our business is the relationship that we build with the people in the industry. Remember, you are the person charged with the offense, so when you walk into a pre-trial and sit down to talk with the Crown, you are at a huge disadvantage right away. The Crown looks at you and thinks, this is the person my police officer said did this horrible thing. I am not going to believe a word that he or she says.

When we walk in, that same Crown Attorney is somebody whom we dealt with six times the day before, ten times the week before and a hundred times in the past number of months. Our starting point is entirely reversed. We bring our reputation into the courtroom; we cloak our clients in that reputation and that makes the Crown Attorney think, “I know this firm. I know how they act and how they represent themselves. If they tell me something, I know they can back it up. If they tell me that my police officer has made three mistakes, I’d better be worried about it because they wouldn’t make that up. I’d better take a close look at this case and see whether it’s the kind of thing that I should or shouldn’t prosecute.”

That’s the kind of benefit you only gain with experience. We all had to do it the hard way. The first day I was in court, I didn’t get that benefit, but now I do. We have to look at every case as just one more step in that reputation building, and so the longer we do this, the easier it becomes.

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If you, or someone you care about, is dealing with criminal law issues in the Toronto,Ontario Region, contact Adler Bytensky Prutschi for a consultation.