[My lawsuit.]223] Cases of transporting drugs.
One of my master's classmates is my fellow villager and has a very good relationship with me, and he returned to his hometown to work after graduation. One of his classmates' younger brother was detained for drug abuse and is being held in a neighboring city in my city. The master's classmate wanted me to help defend him, but I politely declined and introduced him to a classmate who was a lawyer in the city. After the client's brother signed a contract with my classmate, my classmate went to meet his brother once, and then somehow, he came back to me and asked me to come forward to defend his brother. My master's classmate also called ** to plead, saying that their family conditions were very poor and hoped that I could help, so I only charged a few thousand yuan for oil to intervene in this case.
In court, I defended my client's innocence, arguing that he had come to the city for the purpose of collecting debts, that he had no intention of transporting drugs, that he had committed acts of transporting drugs, and that there was no evidence that he had knowledge of the drug trafficking in his co-defendants. The court of first instance did not accept my opinion and still found him guilty of transporting drugs, but only sentenced him to 9 years in prison, compared with 15 years in the same case.
Both the father and brother of the parties are very satisfied with the verdict, but the parties still ask for an appeal and hope that I can ** the second trial. When I met, the client asked me to bring a message to my brother and asked him to manage his ** and real estate, and I knew that his financial situation was not as bad as my classmate said, so I insisted that the second instance should be charged according to the normal standard and no longer assist. When they saw that I didn't agree, they didn't contact me again, and I didn't ask about it again.
About another year or so, one night, I received a **, it was the person concerned. I was very surprised and asked him if he had come out, and he said that he was later acquitted. After I hung up, I quickly searched for his verdict on the Internet, and he entrusted a local lawyer ** for the second trial, and later the Provincial High Court remanded for a retrial, and he was found not guilty in the retrial.
To be honest, I was a little flustered, and I was worried that I would be disgraced if I defended him for a lesser crime. I quickly found the case file, looked through the defense statement and transcripts, and found that I had determined the direction of his not guilty defense from the beginning, and I also defended his innocence in court, thank God.
In retrospect, my strategy at the time was to put the crime to death, because if the crime was convicted, the sentence would be very severe, and it would be better to gamble. If I had no choice, would I have pleaded his innocence? I'm afraid it's hard to say. The lesson of this case is that even in a criminal defense with a not-guilty rate of only a few 10,000 points, we should be optimistic enough to unswervingly fight for the freedom of our clients when conditions permit. 8 out of 10,000 "winning rate", but there are still people who will win. I really never thought that the criminal cases I handled were also innocent, although the success was not mine, but the shock to me was undoubtedly huge.
Author: Zhou Xiaoming, Ph.D. in Economic Law, Postdoctoral Fellow in Law, Partner at Dentons. His main areas of practice are corporate and equity, dispute resolution, computer and data, and criminal defense.