riley county military criminal lawyers

When you’re faced with serious criminal charges that can upend the future of your career, housing and retirement, it’s essential to appoint the finest attorney in your defense and maximize your shot at holding on to your freedoms. This is the government you’re dealing with, after all — they have the power to seize everything you’ve ever had and everything you were ever promised. This is what felon sex offenders, drug traffickers and murderers are supposed to deal with, and not without good reason. However, from time to time, the wrong person winds up convicted. If you’re here reading this, that person might just be you.

Every military member reserves the right to contact the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and have a defender appointed to them. However, it’s difficult to stress the importance of electing a civilian military lawyer instead. While there are excellent attorneys who can be appointed to you by the judge advocate, it’s unwise to count on the right one being assigned to your case, especially with the entirety of your future on the line.

Let’s go over some of the reasons to stick to a private military criminal lawyer instead.

1) Appointed JAG lawyers may have limited knowledge of the particular laws that pertain to your case.
Not all defenders are versed in the same legal matters. Some of them might have studied the laws concerning murder and theft more than sexual misconduct or drug abuse, for example. Your particular case may pertain to post abandonment, but that may be an area that your appointed attorney has a limited understanding of.

While they can certainly do their best to research the matter, the amount of preparation that goes into an effective presentation is sizable enough — every minute counts. When your defender is forced to study a relatively new topic in order to construct their defense, it saps valuable time from the focus on the actual presentation. It also lessens their confidence when the spotlight is on them, and it furthermore increases the likelihood of case-ruining mistakes being made.

Hiring a private JAG attorney ensures that every law relevant to every case will be intimately understood from the outset.

2) Appointed JAG lawyers may have little or no experience relevant to your case.
It’s well known that not all JAG lawyers are long-standing defenders of the military members to whom they are appointed by the judge advocate. In fact, some of them have never been appointed to a case before. This would be fair if the JAG lawyer in question were handling a small case such as petty theft; however, instances where fledgling defenders have been assigned to deal with serious crimes have been noted from time to time. The results are unsurprisingly less than excellent.

Still, while your odds are fair of ending up with an attorney who has a few cases under their belt, it’s not the kind of risk you should take when there are so many variables to account for. It only takes one shortcoming to throw the case against your favor, and book smarts alone won’t secure your defender’s competence in the courtroom.

Private JAG lawyers typically have years or even decades of experience over countless battles to secure your case.

3) Appointed JAG lawyers may lack the air of eminence, projection of confidence and verbal finesse to effectively communicate and ultimately connect with the judge and jury.
Lawyering is about more than just knowing the books and staying on top of the proceedings in court — there’s a certain look and a means of carrying oneself that altogether forge a higher impression on the personalities who will ultimately decide your fate. Constructing emotional links with the judge and jury is essential to summoning their respectful attention, but an inexperienced and ill-informed attorney may not flow with the case under the intense pressure of courtroom proceedings, which can ultimately fail to convince the relevant listeners of the attorney’s confidence in their client’s innocence.

Private JAG lawyers are highly respected, well-known and may have personally dealt with the personalities that will need persuasion in the courtroom.