A criminal defense lawyer will not only consider the actual elements to trafficking in cocaine when analyzing your case, but the legal definitions of the terms used in those elements as well. To understand why this is important to a criminal defense attorney, you must view the case in context of what happens in court.
Without exception, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. A criminal defendant is always presumed innocent until proven otherwise. As important as this concept is, it is frequently misunderstood by the public.
The presumption of innocence means that a criminal defendant is not considered any different from any other person who has not been arrested or has not been charged with a crime. A person does not become a criminal until they plead out their case or until they are found guilty at trial.
Given this important distinction, the best criminal defense lawyers will scrutinize every little detail of a case, beginning with how the facts apply to controlling law.
Once a criminal defense attorney has applied the facts of your trafficking in cocaine case to the applicable elements, he/she will then determine if any defenses lie in the way your case facts apply to the definitions for the legal terms used in those elements.
When someone is accused of trafficking in cocaine as part of a cocaine sale, the term “sell” means to transfer or deliver an object to another person in exchange for something of value or money or the other person’s promise to pay money or give something of value at a later time.
When a person is charged with trafficking in cocaine for allegedly manufacturing cocaine, the term “manufacture” includes the production, preparation, packaging, labeling or relabeling, propagation, compounding, compounding, cultivating, growing, conversion or processing of a controlled substance, either directly or indirectly.
The term “manufacturing” can also be extraction from substances of a natural origin, or independently by means of chemical synthesis. Manufacturing call also be a combination of these processes.
If you are accused of trafficking in cocaine for allegedly delivering cocaine, the term “delivery” is legally defined as meaning the actual, constructive, or attempted transfer of cocaine from one person to another, whether or not there is an agency relationship between you and that person or persons.
Depending on the type of case once has, will depend on the definitions applied. Some trafficking in cocaine cases only concern sales, others only concern delivery or manufacturing. There are others which can include some or all of these terms. For example, a person may manufacture cocaine at a warehouse and then sell it to an undercover officer. In the next section we will discuss the difference between trafficking in cocaine cases that concern actual possession versus constructive possession.