Recently had a client charged with an unusual crime, to wit: Being in a drugged area. Had to actually look it up in the California penal code, and it looks like a classic example of legislative overreach.<\/p>\n
In the usual enthusiasm to maximize crime and punishment someone clearly thought it would be much easier if just being around people using drugs was a crime rather than having to do all that tedious sorting out as to who’s drugs are whose and who might just be an innocent bystander.<\/p>\n
But when you read the code section it’s clear this was scaled back to mean a more ordinary sort of crime. That is if someone was aiding or abetting drug use, than that is punishable as a misdemeanor. Still difficult to prove, especially in case that’s older than a year or two as was my clients.<\/p>\n
In my clients case they offered a deal after I set it for trial where if my client makes a donation to the victim witness program the case will be dismissed. Still it would have been a very interesting trial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently had a client charged with an unusual crime, to wit: Being in a drugged area. Had to actually look it up in the California penal code, and it looks like a classic example of legislative overreach. In the usual enthusiasm to maximize crime and punishment someone clearly thought it would be much easier if…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-california-criminal-law-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5317,"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4211\/revisions\/5317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markagallagher.com\/socaldefenselawyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}