SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the prosecution, presented by Virginia Criminal Defense Lawyer, John Katz, where we are here to regularly present to you information and ideas for beating your prosecution as best as possible. Now your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz. I'm a criminal defense lawyer and DWI defense lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. Here as always so far with our podcast master, Abigail Sweigart. Abby, what's our topic for today?

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Uh alleged alleged drug offenses and defending those drug def offenses.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

What do you think that our listeners would like to know?

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Well, I think off the bat, why did you get into drug defense and you know how much experience do you have with trying these kinds of cases?

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Abby, did you know that the drug war is what spurred me heavily to switch from being at a corporate law firm in DC decades ago to doing criminal defense?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

I did not know that.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

My view is that the drug war brings too many civil liberties violations, too many violations of people's rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, and against uh all sorts of things like not being racially profiled, which goes on too rampantly. And so what happened was within two years of graduating law school, I got my dream job doing criminal defense as a public defender lawyer, which I did for five years, and I know I'm still doing my dream job, and this time for people who are paying me. As a public defender lawyer, I was representing people who were had too low income to be able to hire a lawyer, and now I represent people primarily who pay me for the work. Uh I do a lot of drug defense. I have defended hundreds of drug defendants, including over one or two hundred felony drug defendants alone. I love doing this work, and I know I'm on the side of the angels. I don't like things like fentanyl, heroin. Yes, those can be very dangerous. But let's be real. Some drugs that are illegal aren't really that bad. Cocaine, okay, addictive can make a person stupid. Amphetamines alright, they can speed up stuff, but you know, amphetamines are used in anerol. Amphetamines are used in um in medicines or whatever you call diet pills. So that's why I do it. What else do you think that our listeners wish to know?

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Well, with your extensive experience of defending such cases, you probably have a good knowledge about, you know, police stings and how that their investigation works.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Oh my gosh. The drug war is a multimillion, if not a multi-billion dollar, industry. There are grants, galore, a whole bunch of people have pieces uh of their interest in the pie. You've got the private prisons, the prison system, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, all of them are making money off the drug war. I'm not saying this is causing them to be corrupt, but what I'm saying is this is an entrenched drug war here. So don't expect that if you want to test yourself out to make a little extra side money to deal drugs, that you're not going to be monitored by police and caught by police. And then there's this whole web of snitches. So let's say that you're uh dealing drugs and you get a call from Jim. And Jim says, Joe wants to buy three grams of cocaine. How do you know that Joe is not an undercover cop? Because what is going to happen is if Jim gets arrested by the cops for doing a drug deal, Jim is going to be one to wear diapers about doing a lot of time in jail if he gets convicted. So even your best friend might sail you down the river to save their skins by telling the cops about all the crimes they had committed, all the crimes other people have committed, helping to set up other people for drug deals, to testify against them. Don't trust anyone. You can't trust your customers, you can't trust your partners, you can't even trust your best friend often. So, you know, I can't tell people as a lawyer that it's okay to violate the law. What I can say is that I know the most wise and sophisticated uh drug dealers, if that's not an oxymoron, are doing this as an investment, and I say to a lot of my clients, okay, you did it as an investment, you got busted, and now it's time to find other kinds of work. So I was just talking about drug dealing. Let's talk about drug usage. The demand is always going to fuel the supply. There's always going to be a demand for powder and crack cocaine, heroin, LSD. There's a high demand for fentanyl, it's cheap, it's deadly. LSD, there's demand for all the hallucinogenics. We really need to make hallucinogenics legal to prescribe because there are a lot of therapeutic values to that. And then a lot of people think that it has a spiritual value, but nonetheless, it's a Schedule I drug. Uh then you got the federal system. The federal system can be scary. If you are arrested for dealing in a Schedule I or two drugs, Schedule II drugs include cocaine, heroin, LSD, uh, then uh MDMA, ecstasy, methamphetamine. Then you're going to find that if you're accused of having dealt in a high enough quantity of that stuff, your butt's going to be in jail usually until your trial date or until there's a final disposition of your case, unless you can overcome the steep presumption that there's no set of conditions that can guarantee your return to court. I disagree with the legality of it, but the courts have upheld that. And then if you're convicted of a certain limited amount, minimal amount of a Schedule 1 and 2 drug, you're going to have either a five-year or 10-year mandatory minimum in prison in federal court. Abby, how many people or what percentage of people do you think are not going to snitch when they're facing those kind of risks?

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Oh, I would think it's very low a percentage of not wanting to snitch because you want to get the best deal for yourself, and some people might feel like they have to throw others to get the best deal.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Abby, did you know that in Virginia, if you possess illegally even one pill of Adderall whose effective drug uh ingredient is amphetamine, that's a felony crime.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

I had no idea. That's kind of scary, because you could also be with someone and they had the possession, but you could get charged with being in the same car as them, couldn't you?

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Oh, that's the next thing for us to talk about. But before we get to that, of course, I think the possession of any drug should be a misdemeanor crime, if at all. Uh there is a somewhat of a safety mechanism in Virginia that if you're found guilty for the first time for a drug offense and if it's for possession of drugs, the judge does have the discretion if you want to ultimately dismiss the case. It's called the 251 disposition, but it's no cakewalk. You've got to do a certain number of community service hours, you've got to do random urine drug testing, you've got to do uh uh a drug program, and if you're found to have violated that, then you can be convicted and sentenced up to the maximum possible sentence, which is up to 10 years in prison for just possessing one Adderall. But let's get to this dragnet thing. Okay, so the crime of possessing drugs is based on possession of any contraband, including illegal drugs, as knowledge, dominion, and control. Knowledge, dominion, and control. So you're quite right, Abby. Let's say you're at a party. Okay, I'll admit to a ding-aling thing I did. I was at a normal uh conference national organization for reform of marijuana laws when marijuana possession was still unlawful. This was in DC, and there was this guy who kept inviting me up to his hospitality suite at the hotel, and I knew what was going to happen, it was then some. So I go up there the next night, it was around 9 p.m., the elevator opens, the reek and power and smell of the marijuana was stronger than the only Grateful Dead concert I went to. And when I went to a Grateful Dead concert, it was the Boston Garden with terrible ventilation where 50% of the oxygen was sucked up by marijuana. The marijuana stench was such in the in the hospitality suite, it was like six rooms down from the elevator that I almost got blown back into the elevator with the stench. So I walk into this stenchy uh hotel suite, and there are only two people who aren't partaking are partaking of the marijuana. Myself and the chief prosecutor from some big city over there in San not San Francisco, it may have been San Francisco over in California. In fact, there were people doing whippets too, which I understand are fun. I mean, I've had nitrous oxide at the dentist's office, but people were taking those uh mouth to metal, which I understand can cause mouth burns. So I did a little digression because I wanted to entertain the audience that even I, uh with criminal defense experience, could have done a ding-aling thing like that. And I was thinking to myself, okay, let's say the cops bust down the door in DC at the time they had an arrangement where you could get the case dismissed afternoon's community service and drug education. But that wasn't the smartest thing because the prosecutor might have said, now we get to get cats. So uh that's knowledge, dominion, and control. There was marijuana all over the place. I could have been dragnated into that whole thing. I could have been convicted of that. I could have gotten up on the witness stand and said only myself and another person weren't smoking the marijuana. Uh, but that's a risk. So just remember, when you're with people you don't know, when you're with people you don't know if you can trust, you don't know if they got drugs on you. It's nice to give a hitchhiker a ride, except number one, you don't know if the hitchhiker's gonna rob you or worse. And number two, you don't know if the hitchhiker has contraband uh drugs or whatever on there. Uh now this is gonna be a shorter, uh, a shorter show than often, uh, but let's go into some things you can do to protect yourself, uh, whether you have drugs on you or not. So that your your car gets stopped from moving violation by a cop, allegedly not making a full stop at a stop sign, not uh signaling to change your lanes or to make a turn. Uh we've been over this before. Go to CatsJustice.com slash rights. We're at 703-383-1100. Our email address is info at beatheprosecution.com. Our blog is at CatsJustice.com slash blog. The cop asks a question, where are you coming from? What do you have in the car? Uh your mantra is I am not speaking, and or I want a lawyer if you want to assert your right to remain silent in order to have a lawyer. The cop says, pop open your trunk, will you pop open your trunk? Please pop open your trunk. Let me uh search for weapons to make sure I'm not at risk. No, no, no. Say it nicely, say it politely. You can even say no, thank you. That's an enjoyable one. You want to really throw the cops off? Can I search it? No, thank you, as if they've been offering you a favor there. Say it with a smile. Kill them with kindness. Uh so let's say the cop says, Well, tell you what, if you don't let me search and I've got grounds to arrest you for this, that, or the other anyway, let them. Because then you go ahead and you're gonna go in front of a judicial officer within a few hours. The judicial officer will ask some uh name, rank, and serial number questions. You can answer those. Don't say anything about the incident. The magistrate might sometimes make a mistake, I don't like it, and ask about the incident. Don't talk about that. And as long as there's nothing unusual in your background or about the case, as long as the magistrate's not uh concerned that you're at risk of too high risk of flight or too high a risk of harm to yourself or others, you're expecting to be out anyway, with or out with with or without paying a bond. So know the names of the bond companies before you uh get arrested. If you are going to be carrying drugs on your other contraband or with people with contraband. Abigail, once a person gets arrested, what should they do?

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Uh call a lawyer.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

And why is that?

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Well, I mean, the lawyer knows the laws in and out, and the prosecutor, the police, they're all working against you, and you want someone on your side working with you to help you, and they'll know you know the right steps to take.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

What should a lawyer know about drugs and the chemistry of drugs?

SPEAKER_00 12:33

They should have you know a good foundational knowledge about it, especially what the law says, the levels that you're allowed to have, or the amounts, not the levels. And also if they don't know them personally, that they have expert witnesses on, you know, in their back pocket ready to fight with them and look at the evidence.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

You know, Abby, I'm very lucky that I had a great chemistry teacher in high school. I'm not gonna say I liked her personality. She was a taskmaster, but I still remember even the name bromofymol blue, which was used to test for certain uh certain substances. Uh I know about things like instability of uh of certain compounds, and and the list goes on. I welcome knowing this information, I welcome working with uh with drug experts, I welcome working with uh marijuana uh I've worked several times with one of the nation's top marijuana cultivation experts. I love dealing with the science. The fact of the matter is I love doing anything that helps my clients. In the abstract, a lot of stuff in law school was boring. But then we if we took those things that were boring in law school and apply them to working with real, breathing criminal defendants, it becomes exciting. It goes from parsing through uh uh statutes and it being as boring as anything to now parsing through statutes and knowing that doing that parsing can make the difference between winning and losing. Abby, what's the most important ways to uh start going after a win in a court case?

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Oh goodness. I would say self-improvement and suppressing evidence, like filing motions to suppress the evidence.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

That's right, because the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution says the police cannot do a search of you or your things without probable cause to do so, and under many circumstances the cops have to have a search warrant that's issued by a judicial officer or approved by a judicial officer, and uh that that's got to be with probable cause. And sometimes people are caught so red-handed that that's the only way, the difference between winning and losing. I love doing that, I love doing all of that. Uh so Abby, if people need our services or want more information, where can they do that?

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Um, you can check out our website at catsjustice.com. That's k a t-zjustice.com. You can give our office a call at 703-383-1100. Our texting number is 571-406-7268, or you can send us an email at info at beatheprosecution.com.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Abby, I want to give a little bonus to our listeners before signing off. If you are using prescription medications, prescription drugs, make sure you have them in the original container because it is your burden, not the your it is your burden to prove you have these drugs or medications lawfully. Not that the uh and the prosecutor has no burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you have them unlawfully if they're not in the package. Furthermore, uh let's say you've been uh prescribed oxy or whatever they're prescribing now for painkillers because you had a wisdom tooth taken out. Let's see if uh say you have a friend or family member who thinks they're a comedian and looks at the bottle of your pills and says, Oh, let me try one. You grab it out of their hands without assaulting them. Well, maybe don't grab it. You say no, you can't do that, so you're not an accessory to that, and flip it over. If a friend says to you, oh, you know, you're in pain, here's a painkiller. I've got some uh what do they use other than oxygen? Percoset. Uh percadan, vicodin. Don't. Take the pain. Take the pain. Or get it prescribed. Until you get it prescribed. Okay, thanks everyone for listening. As always, Abigail, thanks for being with us. This is John Katz, a criminal defense lawyer, DWI defense lawyer, and drug defense lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. Looking forward to when we speak to you next time in a week or two.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Thank you for listening to this week's episode on Defeat of the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast. We're trying to give people a leg up against police investigations and court prosecution. We welcome your contacting us at info at defeat of the prosecution.com.