Montgomery County Post-Arrest Investigations

The authorities will continue to investigate after your arrest because at the time of the arrest the officers will only need probable cause to arrest you. After you are arrested the officers will have an opportunity to have conversations with witnesses and determine if there is enough information to support further criminal prosecution or potentially adding charges to your case. It can impact your case negatively if an officer continues to investigate it.

While the investigations process can be very stressful and difficult to deal with, having an experienced Montgomery County criminal lawyer by your side will help ease your mind during the process. Your attorney will act as your advocate and defender, making sure your concerns are taken care of.

Impact of Post-Arrest Investigations

It will impact your case positively if officers continue to investigate after your arrest because an officer might uncover evidence that is consistent with your innocence, as opposed to your guilt, or is at least consistent with the weakness in the prosecution’s case. In those circumstances an officer might determine that it is appropriate to dismiss the criminal charges or reduce them to something less serious, and make those recommendations to the prosecutor based on that continued investigation.

Investigations While Case at Trial in Montgomery County

They can investigate while you go through a trial or at court, however, there are discovery deadlines by which the prosecutors have to abide. Therefore, their investigation should be completed within a certain period of time before the court date. More pieces of information will continue to come in due to the continuing obligation that the government has to turn over materials to the defense at or before trial.
Depending on the kind of information provided, it will be up to the defense attorney in Montgomery County to make a motion to exclude evidence that was provided too late in the trial. The prosecution will have to argue why it was provided so late in trial and why it should still be admissible, even though it violated discovery rules.

Protecting Your Assets

If you are in jail there is not a lot that you personally can do, however, your attorney can make the appropriate motions to keep evidence of the search out of the trial if the search was not properly conducted with a warrant, or from being seized if it was not properly seized in accordance with seizure procedures. Those are all things that would be handled by your attorney and litigated in the courtroom, with either the County Attorney or the State’s Attorney who is responsible for searching and seizing the property in question.

Role of An Attorney

A criminal defense attorney’s role is to make sure that if there is an investigation being conducted it is being conducted in accordance with the law. For example, making sure your premises are not being searched in violation of the Fourth Amendment, making sure people are not being spoken to in violation of their rights, ensuring nobody is coming to you at the jail or where you are being held in custody and asking you for statements on your case without your attorney being present.
An attorney can be of great help in making sure that you are not responding to questions which will in some way negatively impact your criminal case. They can also help make sure evidence which will in some way negatively affect you is not being gathered in violation of the law.