One of the worst ways you can hurt your criminal case once you have been arrested and taken into custody is to give a confession. If you confess to anything, even inadvertently, it becomes much more difficult for your St. Augustine lawyer to defend you. An unrecorded confession is slightly easier to contest, but the law is gradually changing to require that all confessions be recorded, so this might not be an option in your case.
If the police have a recorded confession from you, your Jacksonville misdemeanor lawyer may try two lines of attack:
The Confession Is Provably False
If your lawyer is able to prove with an independent investigation that the confession is contradictory to physical evidence, credible testimony from witnesses or unimpeachable documents, he may be able to make the argument that the police were so coercive and overbearing in the interrogation that they broke down the defendant and pushed him or her into agreeing to the fiction. In this situation, a skilled St. Augustine lawyer will argue that the confession should not only be disregarded as evidence but that the police have so disregarded the facts that the jury cannot believe the prosecution’s case or what the police say.
The Interviewer Ascribed Words to the Defendant That He Did Not Say
Your Jacksonville misdemeanor lawyer can argue that the police did not record what happened immediately leading up to your confession, such as your insistence that you were innocent, and that you were coerced into eventually making a confession. If your attorney can show a significant passage of time from the start of the interrogation to the time the police began recording it, this can be an especially successful strategy. The police are known to elicit confessions through leading questions and falsely representing what the suspect actually knows.
A Jacksonville misdemeanor attorney can also try to suggest that the defendant only repeated exactly the story the police suggested to him, guilty or not. The attorney may be able to do this by demonstrating that the police were already aware of each fact mentioned in the confession before the defendant confessed to it.
Contact Us
For more information about how to fight a confession in your criminal case, contact a St. Augustine lawyer at the Attorneys at Canan Law by calling (904) 849-2266.
