Two Noteworthy Victories This Week
A couple of notable victories we wanted to share with our clients and friends.
Last week we had a felony Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon case that was dismissed once we set the case for trial.
I call this a “Three’s Company” scenario. If you are too young to remember the sitcom, “Three’s Company” you’re missing out. In every episode the characters think something bad or immoral is happening. By the end of the show, the characters find out the situation is completely innocent and the whole thing is just a big misunderstanding.
Here’s what happened in our case in a nutshell:
Client pulls up behind the complaining witness “C/W” at a stop sign on his way home. Client is excited because just bought a new motorcycle. He’s in a good mood.
C/W sits at stop sign for a bit.
Another car pulls up to the four-way stop and is waiting for C/W to go.
That car waits and decides to just go because C/W didn’t.
Client taps his horn at C/W to get her attention – maybe she was texting…he didn’t know.
It works and the C/W moves on.
C/W was moving slowly though. Client thought maybe he made her angry for honking, so he slowly went around her. Client was cautious because he had his new motorcycle in back of his truck.
As he approached his house, he felt like the C/W was following him. He didn’t want her to know where he lived so he pulled over to let her go around.
When he did that, he looked left at her and she was yelling at him with her hands all up in the air.
He laughed it off and he thought that made her even more mad because she sped off down the street.
What neither of them knew at the time is that they are neighbors who live on the same street.
Both were trying to let the other pass by so the other wouldn’t know where they lived.
C/W calls the police and says a man in a white truck with a motorcycle in the back pointed a gun at her. The officers question C/W a few times because it didn’t even add up to them what she was saying. At first she said our client pointed the gun at HIMSELF and then she said he pointed it at her…and she described the gun as “thick…one of those short guns…he went like this towards his head.”
Client did not have a gun. What he had was his cell phone with a round holder on the backside. He held the phone with his fingers along the sides of the round holder and kind of flipped it around.
The only reason client was arrested was because he was driving the white truck with a motorcycle who passed her and he owns guns – like many Texans do. But he did not have a gun in his truck or on him and no matching gun was recovered or identified by the C/W.
Client was arrested and had to pay money to make a bond. We got our investigator, Jim Willis, involved after we set the case for trial. Jim interviewed the C/W and not only was she uncertain about what she saw, but her health had declined while the case was pending and she no longer cared to pursue a prosecution. It took us setting the case for trial to get a dismissal. …and like we usually say, time is almost always on the side of the defense.
The Second Victory this Week:
Another client was charged with Indecency of a Child by his own biological daughter. Client had never been in trouble before this arrest, made a career as a college professor and was completely blind-sided by this allegation.
Client had been close to his daughter her whole life. At daughter’s request, client even paid a lawyer to fight for custody of her when her mother wanted to move to another city. The court decided in favor of the mother.
Daughter had been going through a lot between the mother relocating her, a new marriage/stepdad, her father was re-marrying and her boyfriend broke up with her. The last time daughter visited her father, the two got into a verbal argument which was not usual for their relationship.
The night daughter got back to her mother’s house she was hanging out with a friend who told daughter that CPS was involved for an issue that the friend was having with her stepfather. The next thing we know is that daughter was making a similar allegation against her own father.
Father was arrested, he made bond and then he hired us. We obtained all the discovery in the case and prepared our presentation for the Grand Jury.
In our presentation, we outlined all the inconsistencies in the daughter’s statement. In the end, the Grand Jury “No Billed” the case. The client is relieved to have that burden lifted.
While the allegation was solely based on words and there was no physical evidence, just by being charged with a sexual offense caused many struggles in our client’s life, especially with being judged by friends and family. One thing that did not change was the love of his current wife. She believed in him and she stood by his side throughout the case.
To learn more about the grand jury process, read here:
To learn more about being charged with a criminal offense on words alone, read here:
The wheels of justice sometimes may seem slow, but victories like these are well worth the wait!