Welcome back to Attorney Paz’s rants of a criminal defense attorney. This week I want to talk about something that most people don’t really know, which is that probably 95% of everything that happens in court happens behind closed doors. Here, I will discuss what happens behind the scenes and why it happens behind the scenes.

Most people don’t understand that good criminal defense lawyers are always at work. Sometimes clients come to court and they’re thinking, “wow, I don’t see my attorney, where is she, she’s late,” when the truth is I’ve been at the court since 9 o’clock, talking to people, talking to these people behind closed doors on the client’s behalf.

There is something called a judicial pretrial, most cases go through them, and it’s essentially where the attorneys, the state attorney and the defense attorney, go and have a closed door meeting with the judge. There are other criminal defense attorneys and state attorneys in there, but long story short, the clients aren’t allowed back there. The thought behind this is essentially that, where things aren’t happening outside on the record, most people are willing to be honest about the strengths of their case, the weaknesses of their case, and put opinions on there that you wouldn’t necessarily put in open court. But this tends to get a little weird with the client, because the clients think, “you’re not fighting for me, I don’t see you fighting for me.”

It’s because I say things on the record that aren’t necessarily the same things I’m saying for you in pretrial. I’m way more open in discussing issues in pretrial then I would be necessarily on the record, and there are various reasons for this. Essentially, the discussions that are happening in pretrial are very, very in depth, and we’re going through all of the issues about evidentiary issues, whether the state can prove their case, whether there are suppression issues, whether the case is likely to go to trial, character of a defendant, if there are mental issues to be addressed, things like that, that I really don’t want to say in front of other people in the courtroom. So just because you’re not seeing your attorney physically do this in open court, does not mean it’s not happening.

That’s the rant for the day. If you have any questions about that, feel free to email me, brittany@pazlawllc.com.com, and as always take care, don’t get arrested, and see you soon.