Suppressing evidence may be crucial to your case

Drug crime allegations can quickly derail your life. They can damage your reputation, sure, but they can also threaten you with jail or prison time and fines that can be ruinous to your financial standing. That’s why if you’ve been accused of a drug crime, then you need to think about what you can do to aggressively defend yourself. This includes determining if you can suppress the prosecution’s evidence.

How to suppress evidence

To suppress evidence, meaning that the court rules that the prosecution can’t use certain evidence against you, you’ll have to make certain showings. Here are some of the ways that you can go about doing that:

• Prove illegality: If evidence has been seized illegally or subsequent to an illegal search, then your rights have been violated and you can probably suppress the evidence that was collected. This is often seen in the traffic stop context where law enforcement stops a vehicle without the requisite reasonable suspicion. Any evidence gathered after that point may be deemed tainted under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.
• Prove unfairness: If you can show that admitting certain evidence would be fundamentally unfair, then you may be able to convince a court to disallow it from being used against you. This is the case when you subpoena the prosecution’s witnesses for depositions and they fail to appear. It would be unfair to allow the prosecution to use witnesses that you didn’t have the opportunity to question before trial.
• Prove unreliability: In some circumstances, you may be able to demonstrate that evidence being presented against you lacks the reliability necessary to be admissible. This often occurs when there are chain of custody errors and other mishandlings of evidence.

Protect your rights in your criminal case

There are a lot of moving parts to your criminal case, and each of them has to be properly addressed if you hope to protect your rights and maximize your chances of beating the prosecution. That’s why you may find it beneficial to be represented by an experienced criminal defense attorney who will know where to look to find weaknesses in the prosecution’s case.