Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media
Another area about your website is violent crime. And I’m really sorry to say, I find, just as a third party, looking at the news, talking to attorneys and paying attention to the criminal justice system, violent crime has increased a lot over the last decade, two decades. And how do you handle that? You know, as a defense attorney.
Darryl Stallworth – Criminal Defense Attorney – Alameda County, CA
Where if the basic premise is in law school, they teach you there’s two things you have to have in order to prove a case, the act and the mental state. Act of violence, is still consistent, it’s still bad. What I’ve been able to do over the years is to help prosecutors understand my clients’ mental state. I’ve had a lot of cases where there’s been a legitimate, lawful defense. I’ve had cases where there’s been legitimate provocation. Provocation takes a murder one… and a murder two…down to manslaughter. Recklessness…negligence.
Everything is not as easy as it’s portrayed in the media. And one thing about doing this type of work is that I understand… like there’s many, many layers…and that your perception of something in which you think is blue, may very well be red to someone else.
And that doesn’t mean that either one of you are wrong, this just means that there’s two perceptions. My job is to find something in the middle, something that makes sense and something that’s reasonable. Although we’ve got this…horrible event, we have to pull back and look at what’s going on in the person’s mental state.
What are the surrounding circumstances? What if anything, the other person that was injured, do to provoke? It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but it helps us to do a better job of getting to that area that you talked about before, which is plea bargain.
Because you can’t go to trial in all these cases, we’ve got to find some type of place where we can get a reasonable settlement.
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