Not just any attorney can successfully defense drug possession cases. As with DUI defense, what sounds simple isn’t when the person you are trusting to fight for you is ill-informed and, to put it bluntly, lazy and incompetent. So what makes for a successful drug defense attorney? Someone who is so committed to fighting for your rights that he never assumes he knows more than he needs to know.

Drug defense revolves around the most sacred of Constitutional protections, the right to privacy. Simply put, all Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes, cars, work, and wherever they may be situated at the time of the intrusion. So, if you are sitting at home minding your own business watching TV, the police or any other state actor cannot simply barge in and search your home, even if someone says something isn’t quite right about you and your activities. There must be more. But this right to privacy goes beyond the home.

A couple of years ago the United States Supreme Court ruled in Arizona v. Gant, 129 S. Ct. 1710 (2009), that the police cannot search your car incident to arrest, even if they towed it (called an inventory search). See also State v. Henning, 209 P.3d 711 (Kan. S. Ct. 2009) (applying Gant to Kansas law). Many years ago I took up the habit of reviewing new case opinions from Kansas and Federal courts every week. Thus, when this case was released (as well as Henning) I was on it. Instantly, the status of many of my open files changed. Many of these ended up being dismissed. Had the clients hired other attorneys, they might have been forced to wait until their appeals were exhausted, thousands upon thousands of dollars later.

There are a myriad of other legal principals that apply to this area of criminal defense, such as proper foundation for admission of toxicology reports, credibility of confidential informants, valid affidavits in support of probable case of search warrants. Suffice it to say that all of these issues demand an attorney who continuously reviews case and statutory law to make sure he is up on the law at the time your case gets to trial.

I am prepared to help you with your case. One final point to consider is how willing your attorney is to fight for you. As an Assistant DA with Sedgwick County prior to opening my office in 2002, I successfully prosecuted more than a dozen jury trials, and dozens of bench trials. Since 2002 I have successfully defended clients in many more jury trials, and hundreds of suppression hearings and bench trials. Indeed, in the last two months of 2012 alone, I had five jury trials for my clients, the final one resulting in a Not Guilty verdict, a great way to bring the year to a close!