Criminal Defense Attorney in South Pasadena, CA
A drug charge can threaten your freedom, your job, and your immigration status, but these cases are more defensible than people think. Many rise or fall on how the police found the drugs, and California offers real paths to keep a conviction off your record.
The stakes depend heavily on how the case is charged. Under Proposition 47, simple possession for personal use is usually a misdemeanor, while possession for sale, transportation, and manufacturing remain felonies with serious exposure. The cases I handle include:
Most drug cases begin with a stop and a search, and that is where I look first. If the police lacked a lawful reason for the stop, the detention, or the search, the drugs themselves can be suppressed, and without that evidence the case usually falls apart.
Prosecutors often push a possession case up to possession for sale based on thin evidence: a scale, cash, or the way something was packaged. The difference is enormous, both in the possible sentence and in eligibility for diversion, so I challenge those assumptions and the so-called expert opinions behind them.
California law recognizes that many drug cases are health issues, not crime sprees. Pretrial diversion and drug-court programs can resolve a case through education or treatment and leave you without a conviction. Where you qualify, I push for these outcomes, and where you don't, I fight the case on the evidence.
A word of caution: drug convictions carry some of the harshest immigration consequences in criminal law, so how a case resolves matters as much as whether it does. I keep that in view from the first day.