If you are ever charged with any crime in St. Petersburg, demand to see a criminal lawyer before you say anything to the police or a member of the prosecutor’s office. It is a very good idea to keep the name and phone number of a criminal lawyer in your wallet. Of course, you will argue its ridiculous to do that because you are a good citizen who never gets into any kind of trouble. Usually, you don’t get into trouble with the law. However, you can be accused of a criminal act without having committed a criminal act.
This is one example of a man accused of a crime he didn’t commit. We will call him Jack to protect his real name. Jack was a good neighbor who helped an 85 year-old neighbor with shopping, house chores and every so often Jack and his wife would cook for her. Jack never accepted any money. One night, a man resembling Jack broke into the neighbor’s house and beat her so she would tell him where her money was. This intruder spoke in a muffled voice, and he had gloves on which left no prints. When the police arrived, they took note of the fact that the man identified by the woman appeared to be Jack, and of course Jack’s prints were everywhere. Jack was arrested and he could not post bail. This meant he lost his job; his family lived by using food banks and other charitable organizations. They lost their home because they could not make the payments. If Jack had a Criminal Defense in St. Petersburg, he would have been out on bail and the attorney would begin to question the police about what evidence they had. In fact, they had none but the statement of an elderly woman with bad eyesight who thought the man she saw in the dark looked like Jack.
An attorney working in Criminal Defense in St. Petersburg would have stopped this case at the beginning. Six months after Jack was jailed, the real culprit was found with possessions from the victim’s house in his trailer home, along with many other items taken from other homes. Jack was cleared and released from jail to go home to a devastated family who by this time were living in a travel trailer and eating with the help of food stamps and from friends and family.