Do Most Drug Cases Go To Trial Or Do They Plead Out?


As with most cases, few drug cases go to trial.

There are a couple of reasons for that. If the drugs are found on your person and there is no legal problem with the stop or search and no misconduct by the officer, then those are difficult to defend. As a result, cases where drugs are found on a person usually end in a plea. My job in these cases, apart from making sure there were no legal problems, is to negotiate the most favorable plea for you, one that ideally involves a reduction in charges, no jail time, and a type of probation (whether a pretrial diversion or deferred adjudication) that will allow the case to be expunged from your record or sealed.

If it’s a case where drugs are found in a car and not on a person, these are far more defendable, particularly if you were a passenger and there were others in the car. Often, I can show enough reasonable doubt in these cases that they are dismissed. But if the prosecutor is being unreasonable, these cases can get set for trial.

By far the cases most likely to go to trial are search warrant cases involving houses where the police discovered a large amount of drugs. This is because prosecutors hate to dismiss cases involving large amounts of drugs, particularly when police went through all the effort of obtaining a search warrant.

For more information on Going To Trial In a Drug Case, a free initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (713) 936-4521 today.

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