Ineffective Assistance of Counsel in Florida Drug Cases

If your parents’ employers were early adopters of email, then your parents probably came home from work sometimes with printouts of funny emails that their coworkers had forwarded to them, and sometimes your parents would read them out loud at the dinner table until long after it had stopped being funny. Incompetent members of your parents’ profession were a frequent topic of the jokes forwarded by email. If your parents were lawyers, then the jokes probably centered on infelicitous use of legalese. If you are a defendant in a criminal case, it is anything but funny if your lawyer makes a major blunder. Bear in mind, though, that 99 times out of 100 when a defendant pleads guilty or gets convicted at trial, the criminal defense lawyer did not do anything wrong. It usually means simply that the defendant and his or her lawyer agreed that the prosecution’s evidence was so strong that a plea deal was the defendant’s best chance of avoiding a long prison sentence. If your lawyer made such an egregious error that the court considers it a violation of your right to a fair trial, you can overturn your conviction on appeal. To find out more about appealing guilty verdicts where a defense lawyer’s error handed the case over to the prosecution, contact a Florida drug offenses attorney.

When a Lawyer’s Mistake Violates the Defendant’s Sixth Amendment Rights

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a fair trial, including representation by a criminal defense lawyer. The Supreme Court decision Strickland v. Washington determined that the state has violated the defendant’s right to a fair trial if the defense lawyer made a major error that prejudiced the jury or an error without which the court would have dismissed the case before the trial. These are some examples of Florida cases where defendants successfully appealed their convictions based on ineffective assistance of counsel:

• The defense lawyer failed to notice that the defendant had already been charged with the same crime and that the case had been dropped, meaning that the present case was double jeopardy
• The lawyer was absent from the defendant’s sentencing hearing
• The court tried the defendant for a more serious offense than the one listed in the original criminal complaint

In other states, the courts have overturned convictions based on ineffective assistance of counsel when the lawyer who represented the defendant had never represented a defendant in a criminal case before. In other cases, though, the courts ruled that it was not a violation of the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights when the lawyer experienced a psychotic episode during the trial or when the lawyer got a DUI on the way to the courthouse during the trial, and his blood alcohol content (BAC) was more than three times the legal limit.

Contact FL Drug Defense Group About Drug Cases

A Central Florida criminal defense lawyer can help you if you got a wrongful conviction because of an error by your previous lawyer.  Contact FL Drug Defense Group in Orlando, Florida to discuss your case.

Source:

sunethics.com/le—ineffective-assistance.html