Most criminal cases do not go to trial; a far more likely scenario is that the defendant will plead guilty before the prosecution starts its opening arguments. Some defendants plead guilty as soon as the judge asks them to enter a plea at the arraignment, while others start out with a not-guilty plea but change their plea to guilty as the preparations for the trial progress. Some of these convictions are preventable. Prosecutors may make it sound like the jury will be completely sure that you are guilty after they see the evidence exhibits or hear the witness testimony, but there is more than one interpretation of every piece of evidence. Instead of assuming that pleading guilty is your only option, you should contact a Tulsa criminal defense lawyer and thoroughly discuss your defense strategies in light of the evidence that the prosecution intends to present.

So What if Someone Says They Saw You Do it?

Some criminal charges are much easier to prove if there is eyewitness testimony. For example, if police find a stolen item in your possession, this does not, by itself, prove that you stole it. Your possession of the item more strongly indicates your guilt if a witness also claims to have seen you remove the item from the legal owner’s house or yard. It is difficult to prove accusations of robbery charges without the testimony of one or more witnesses.

The statements of an eyewitness do not carry as much weight as you might expect, though. The human memory is selective, remembering the important parts and relying on patterns to reconstruct the rest. Perhaps you have done activities in school that demonstrate this. In one version of this experiment, the teacher shows a video without telling the students that they will be asked to remember it. Later that day, or perhaps the next day, the teacher asks the students to report what they saw in the video; inevitably, they all give slightly different versions.

Technology Does Not Lie, But it Does Not Understand Reasonable Doubt, Either

Surveillance camera footage, screenshots, and DNA tests are not subject to the fallibility of human memory, but they, too, can leave room for reasonable doubt. A DNA test can accurately show whether the DNA in a tested sample matches yours, but it cannot say why your DNA was there. If your DNA was on the strap of a backpack later found in a drug dealer’s house, it does not mean that you were involved in the drug deal. It might mean that you once moved the backpack to make room on the couch to sit down at a mutual friend’s house. Small amounts of DNA can hang around on personal possessions for a long time.

Contact Tracy Tiernan About Criminal Defense Cases

A criminal defense lawyer can help you understand the types of evidence the prosecution might use and how this evidence may not prove your guilt. Contact Tracy Tiernan in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to discuss your case.