As of March 2020, The Tennessee Supreme Court has ordered that all in-person criminal court proceedings be suspended until April 30, 2020 due to during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are few exceptions.
Since court dates are postponed, you may ask, “should I hire a criminal defense attorney now or wait?”
Although this feels like the new normal, it’s temporary. The world may have slowed down, but it isn’t shutting down, it’s changing. We have to adapt to these changes. Eventually, things will go back to ‘business as usual’.
That said, here are a couple of reasons you should contact an attorney now:
You may gain an advantage in defending your criminal charges. The criminal courts have drastically slowed down. In this lull, Criminal defense attorneys can get a jump start on defending your case.
- We can request videos, both dash cam and body cam footage and review footage before a hearing.
- We can request toxicology results for DUI cases and probably get the results before your first court date.
- We can file motions in General Sessions court to gain leverage in defending your case.
- For our serious felony cases, we can continue the discovery process, case analysis and draft motions on your behalf.
Being prepared early gives you an advantage. The current situation is temporary and courts will resume in full force. At that time, we will experience heavy dockets due to a backlog of cases. If you haven’t spent this down time working with a criminal defense attorney, you could find yourself in a situation where your attorney is too busy with an influx of cases to focus their undivided attention on your case. Or worse, you can’t get in to meet with one because everyone else waited until the last minute too.
Criminal defense attorneys may not be in court every day as they are used to, but we are still working our cases and communicating with the State in an effort to reach agreements now, before we are all back in court. Our trials for April have been canceled which means we can give you our undivided attention to help you or your loved ones fight charges. Our experienced team of criminal defense lawyers and paralegals are ready to help. Just fill out the contact feature and we will get back to you.