When you are talking to the police about your criminal case, anything you say can and will be used against you, but when you are talking one-on-one with your criminal defense lawyer, the opposite is true. You can say anything, no matter how incriminating, up to and including an outright confession, and your lawyer is not allowed to reveal the content of your conversation to anyone. This is called attorney-client privilege. If you say, “I didn’t do it,” your lawyer might say, “There is no way the jury will believe that.” This does not mean that pleading guilty is your only option. “I didn’t do it” is only one of many defenses that defendants can use to cast doubt about their guilt. In some cases, it makes more sense to say, “I didn’t do it on purpose.” This defense is called a lack of criminal intent. A Tulsa criminal defense lawyer can help you choose the most effective defense strategy for your case.

Examples of Lack of Criminal Intent Defenses

Some actions require criminal intent to meet the definition of a certain criminal offense or even to be crimes at all. Killing someone on purpose is murder, but killing someone by accident is manslaughter, and killing someone in self-defense because the person had a weapon pointed at you is perfectly legal. When you withdraw money from your employer’s bank account without your employer’s knowledge, it is embezzlement, but if you withdraw the money according to your employer’s instructions, you are just doing your job. These are some other examples of a lack of criminal intent defenses:

• If police find prescription drugs in your car, you can argue that they were prescribed to you. If you do not have a prescription for the drugs, you can argue that someone else who rode in your car left the drugs there without your knowledge.
• If the police catch you with a pocketful of snack-sized candy bars that you took from the front of a store and accuse you of shoplifting, you can argue that you reasonably believed that the candies were free samples.
• If police find a baggie of white powder in your car and it tests positive for drugs, you can argue that your cousin, who gave you the baggie of powder, told you that it was laundry detergent, and you only asked your cousin to give it to you so that you could wash your clothes.

For criminal charges that are related to recklessness rather than criminal intent, the lack of criminal intent does not work. You can still be guilty of child endangerment if you leave a toddler home alone for two hours, even if you argue that you walked to the gas station to buy milk, intending to be gone for 15 minutes, but you ran into a long-winded friend who delayed you for two hours.

Contact Tracy Tiernan About Criminal Defense Cases

A criminal defense lawyer can help you present the lack of criminal intent defense if it is applicable to your case. Contact Tracy Tiernan in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to discuss your case.