Charged With Burglary? How A Criminal Defense Attorney Can Assist You
If you have been charged with burglary, this will likely end in some type of prison sentence. No matter if you are guilty or not, you should hire a criminal defense attorney. They can assist you in many ways, two of which are listed below.
Prove Your Innocence
If you were unfairly charged with burglary, your criminal defense attorney will do all they can to prove your innocence. This may be by interviewing witnesses or determining if there is someone else that may be guilty of the crime. There may be witnesses in the area that actually saw the burglary happen.
The attorney will speak to the arresting officers to determine what grounds they had to arrest you. Obviously, if you are not guilty, the arresting officers did not find you at the scene of the crime. Because of this, the attorney will need to know specifics on why they think you are guilty. The attorney can then take all this information and help prove you are innocent.
The attorney may also ask police officers if they have taken any kind of fingerprints to place you in the building or home where they think you committed the burglary. Of course, there will be times that proving you are innocent will not work out.
Assist You If You Are Guilty
If you are guilty of this crime, then you definitely want to hire a criminal defense attorney. Even if the attorney cannot get the charges thrown out of court, they can help lessen your prison sentence. This can be beneficial even if they lessen the sentence a few years.
In many cases, if the attorney thinks there is no way they can win your case in court, they will try to meet with the prosecuting attorney to see if they will settle this matter out of court. If they agree to this, you may be offered a lower prison sentence than what you will receive if you go to court and have a sentence handed down to you by a judge.
If the prisons in your area are known to be bad, your attorney may be able to have you moved to another area where the prisons are much better. This will improve your chances of being treated better while you are in prison.
If you have not been charged for anything in the past and what you stole was not worth a lot of money, the criminal defense attorney may be able to get charged reduced to a misdemeanor instead. With this, you may not have to spend any time in jail but only pay court costs and other fees and doing some community service.
Talk with a criminal defense attorney in your area as soon as you can so they can get started on your defense.