Spotsylvania County Carjacking Defense

Building a strong defense if charged with carjacking is important early on in a case. An experienced carjacking lawyer will help craft and build the Spotsylvania carjacking defense to protect your rights. Please contact an attorney today.

Common Defense Strategies

In handling carjacking cases in Spotsylvania, it depends on what the case is for the defense strategy. There are certain elements of carjacking that need to be proved by the prosecution. The carjacking defense in Spotsylvania will focus on all of those elements but some elements are stronger than others.

Threat

Determining whether or not there was the use of force, threat of force, or a deadly weapon. Those are things that Spotsylvania carjacking attorneys usually focus on in carjacking cases. It is usually easy to prove that they are using the vehicle without the other person’s permission.

Alibi Defense

Another thing for carjacking would be the idea of an alibi defense. It is sometimes hard when people are victims of carjacking for them to make that identification, not because they were afraid. Sometimes, they only get a quick look at the person who takes their car and so identification problems tend to be a good place for defense attorneys to try to build their case because the ID for a witness can certainly have a lot of problems to it and there is a lot of science out there about mistaken identities as far as identifying a carjacking or somebody who allegedly is committing a high-pressure crime.

Certainly, the ID or the alibi defense, the elements of the crime itself, and then, at some point, later on, there could certainly be questions about why the person had the car, whether or not the person had the ability to use the car but mostly it comes down to ID defenses and defenses on the force element.

Steps to Building a Defense

The initial steps that somebody is going to be taking to build these carjacking defenses in Spotsylvania are, again, collecting information. Information is the key here, so finding these witnesses and finding this video before it is destroyed. If there is an alibi defense, that especially is important to get these facts down and to get credible alibi witnesses and paper trails and video trails to help show that the person was not there and that there is a mistaken identity situation.

If there is a lineup or some type of ID by the victim in the case, that is something that needs to be scrutinized specifically and looked at under a microscope in order to be able to craft the best possible defense.

Attorneys have to start off defending the case by gathering as much information as they can and looking at it all to carefully define where the weakest spots are, but information gathering is often time-sensitive so it is something that needs to be done pretty quickly. People forget and videos get erased and the longer one goes on in time, it is harder to find the evidence that is needed.

Expert Involvement in Carjacking Cases

The elements necessary to prepare for a defense are going to depend on the type of defense. If it is an alibi defense, an individual is going to need witnesses; an individual is going to need paper trails; an individual is going to need independent, corroborating evidence; and an individual is going to need to be able to pick apart any identification by the victim.

If it is going to be the more literal statutory defense, which would be saying that the actions taken by the person were not violent actions or cannot be considered a crime of violence or did not involve certain types of weapons, then what one is actually looking at is a situation where an individual is going to have a much more legal argument, so what exactly was seen, what exactly can be proved by the prosecutor, and then showing that legally the courts have interpreted that to not fit into this category involved in a carjacking case.

Aspects of a Carjacking Charge

In a carjacking charge, there has to be violence or the threat of violence. The person has to physically be in the vehicle but there has to be a person involved. The person could be near their vehicle and a person could take it through the threat of force and then use it without their permission but they do not have to be in it and pulled out.

Get the Help From an Experienced Attorney

A carjacking charge is very serious. Getting the help from a carjacking lawyer to build a Spotsylvania carjacking defense is vital when facing these charges. If you have been charged with carjacking, reach out to an experienced carjacking lawyer today.