Criminal defence is one of the many areas of law that requires a good strategy to ensure that the client does not end up behind bars. Criminal law is just one of the various areas of law; other branches of law include environmental law, fraud law and family law among other areas. Lawyers who specialise in criminal defence are known as criminal lawyers or attorneys.
The criminal defence attorney usually has the role of ensuring that the accused is freed or given minimum penalties and punishments. Therefore, the criminal lawyer has to come up with a good defence strategy to get the client off the hook. One of the ways of defence in the court of law is regarding the intent of committing the crime. The criminal defence attorney usually tries to prove that there was no malicious intention to commit the crime through the following strategies:
1. Pleading insanity is one of the strategies that can be used in the court of law to negate the intention of committing a crime. There are various laws that have been set concerning the conviction of an insane person who commits a crime. Generally, the court will keep them out of jail but send them to a mental or psychiatric hospital for help. The criminal defence strategy in this case will be to prove that the client committed the crime without understanding that it was wrong due to a mental condition.
2. Intoxication is also another commonly used criminal defence strategy. However, intoxication will not completely get one off the hook, especially if the accused committed the crime while intoxicated and operating machinery that they shouldn’t have. Pleading for a reduce penalty due to intoxication makes it possible to reduce charges from murder to manslaughter. You need to have a very good criminal defence attorney to be able to use intoxication as a defence strategy since it is a very volatile strategy to use.
3. Another criminal defence strategy that can be used in the defence of the accused is ‘automatism’. Automatism refers to a case where the individual loses complete voluntary control of their muscles leading them to commit a crime. The loss of control can be due to various reasons for instance being attacked by a swarm of bees. The criminal defence Baltimore will have to prove that the conditions under which the crime was committed was truly caused by automatism.
4. Self defence and legal duty are, also, other examples of strategies used by criminal defence Baltimore. Self defence refers to a case where the accused committed a crime when they were convinced that their lives were in danger if they did not do what they did. Legal duty usually applies to officers of the law who have been accused of committing a crime.
