If your life is in crisis: 3 reasons to hire a criminal lawyer

You lead a quiet life, without excess or folly. Then one day the unthinkable occurs and your life is in a crisis. Here are three reasons to hire a criminal lawyer.

You've heard it before, and maybe said it yourself a few times: it always happens to other people and won't happen to me. The truth? It doesn't always work that way. Here are some scenarios that unfortunately occur all too often to people from all circles of life:

• Everything was fine until your daughter reveals she was a victim of assault. What should you do?
• You're an upstanding citizen participating in a peaceful demonstration for a cause close to your heart. But the crowd heats up and things go wrong. You are charged with obstructing or resisting a police officer, even though you only had the best of intentions. What should you do?
• Your teenager, influenced by a gang of questionable repute, taunts a neighbour’s dog on the pretext of being bored. The owner of the dog is suing for cruelty to an animal.What should you do?
• The stress of the last few days at work and accumulated fatigue affect your driving. Pressed for time, you get impatient while following a pokey driver. You pass him illegally, causing an accident with injuries. You are charged with dangerous driving causing injury.What should you do?

With their expertise in criminal and penal law, criminal lawyers provide their clients with valuable and strategic legal advice. They are also good litigants. So, if you or a loved one is charged with a criminal offence or is the victim of a criminal act, whether for one of the scenarios above or for any other reason, contact a criminal lawyer before doing anything else. He or she will take your case in hand and guide you throughout the process.

While it may be tempting to explain the circumstances of the event, which may seem to you to be in your favour, you should never make any kind of statement when arrested, at least until you have received counsel from a criminal lawyer. If you do, you may live to regret it; it is the nature of police investigation to seek incriminating statements. Remember that you are always presumed innocent until judgement is pronounced.

A criminal lawyer can help you for any degree of crisis. Your situation doesn’t need to be an extreme case, involving murder or a heist, such as we see all the time in the movies. You might have been arrested for impaired driving because you neglected to call a taxi after a couple of beers after work, or your teenager might have fallen in with a trouble-making crowd. Don’t forget that young people between the ages of 12 and 17 can also be charged with criminal acts.

Whatever your legal troubles, a criminal lawyer could help ensure a full and complete defence, because reasonable doubt really does exist.