For many of us, Mom warned of the dangers of hanging around the “wrong crowd.” While associating with people with “checkered” pasts may have the potential to impact you negatively in some ways, simply being around people with legal issues is not, by itself, usually against the law. If you’ve found yourself arrested and charged based largely upon your having been at the wrong place at the wrong time around the wrong people, you need quality legal representation. You need an experienced Tampa Bay criminal defense attorney working for you to get the acquittal or dismissal that you deserve.
D.T.’s case was an example of a man in that kind of situation. Here’s what happened: Polk County detectives, one June morning, approached a Lakeland house that, they believed, contained the suspect in a Walmart robbery from the night before.
Eventually, everyone exited the house and one detective did a “pat-down” search of each occupant. The detective found a gun in D.T.’s pants. Because D.T. had a criminal past, the state charged him with possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. For a person in a position like D.T., this was more than a minor crime. A conviction could mean D.T. doing anywhere from three years to 15 years in prison.