Many news followers in Colorado and nationally are regularly bombarded with articles featuring all manner of story lines. Given the sheer number and diversity of competing news bits, it is course quite often the case that readers quickly scan over some stories with little or no regard for their details or potentially deeper meaning.
The following news release might serve well to illustrate that. We submit that it is likely the case that, being so commonplace and even mundane, the story hardly made any impression at all on most people.
Its bottom line: A drug-sniffing K-9 dog alerted on the car of a woman stopped for speeding in one state, with officers subsequently finding more than $1 million worth of marijuana in the vehicle.
That’s it. Nothing more of interest, at least for most readers.
Such a story will always grab the immediate attention of any proven defense attorney, however. And that is because it is always of compelling concern to a legal advocate how police came to legally interact in the first place with a person who is ultimately arrested on a criminal charge.
Shazam, Kianpour attorneys are not suggesting at all that there might have been one or more reasons to question the above-cited stop on constitutional or other grounds.
However, we do say this: We would closely check if the defendant was our client, because that is something that experienced defense attorneys do in every single case.
Irregularities and related police misconduct/mistakes routinely occur in criminal cases in Colorado and across the country. Although an individual might truly have been stopped for speeding (which supplied the required probable cause needed for a police officer to come into lawful contact with that person), it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a speeding citation was just a pretext in a given case to stop a motorist or detain another party for other reasons.
In any event, a seasoned defense attorney will always question the legality of polices searches and seizures to ensure unerring accuracy and truth in a criminal matter.
Every person accused of wrongdoing is entitled to that degree of due diligence and professional commitment.