The Criminal Defense Process Part 2- Charging
the Defendant with a Crime
Hello, my name is Brandan
Davies. I am a criminal defense lawyer with the law firm Copley Roth &
Davies here in Overland Park, Kansas. In this series of videos I am going to be
walking you through a criminal defense case from start to finish. In this video
we are going to be talking about the charging decision or when charges or going
to be brought. Once the investigation stage is concluded, the police have done
their investigation, they are going to turn over the products of their
investigation to the prosecutor. Now, there is a couple of different
prosecutors that they may turn that over to depending on the allegations or the
crime they believe has been committed. It may be a city prosecutor or it may be
a state prosecutor. This will be the first time that a lawyer gets to look at
the product of the police investigation and start determining what they want to
charge the person with, or what crime has been committed. Now, prosecutors have
a very wide latitude of what they can decide to charge a person with based on
the investigation. They have, what they call, prosecutorial discretion. After
the prosecutor has looked at the fruits of the investigation, and determined
what charges are appropriate for this person to be charged with, they will try
to seek out an arrest warrant and contemporaneously file a complaint. That
complaint will have listed out the charges which the prosecutor thinks that
they can prove and they will seek to go get an arrest warrant from a judge.
Now, remember that the prosecutor alone does not have the power to issue an
arrest warrant. At this stage, the charging stage, a criminal defense lawyer is
usually not involved because either the person does not know they are going to
be charged with a crime, or does not know that their charges are forthcoming.
For more information on the progress of a criminal defense case, please watch
our next video about arrests.
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