I had a case in the Pasadena courthouse recently with a client charged with a robbery, looking at prison and a strike on his record, and probably losing an important career that he had because of this serious robbery charge that he was facing.  We were able to do the preliminary hearing in the case, and long story short, we did some real damage to the prosecutor's main witness.  He was drunk.  His story was all mixed up.  He said some things that were inconsistent with some evidence that we had.  We had a video of him — a lot of the social media stuff will sometimes kill witnesses on either side when they lie about something and then they're seen doing something else, or there's a witness that has information that has him doing something else.

The bottom line is, once you damage the credibility of a witness in Pasadena court, or any court related to a criminal matter, the prosecutors realize they're going to have a problem with the case and they could potentially lose it.  If a jury is so turned off by the alleged victim and don't believe some parts of their story, the question starts to become, how can they believe any of their story.  So, once the prosecutor saw that, we sat down — a very reasonable prosecutor up in the trial court level — and we were able to get a non-robbery charge for my client, give him a chance to earn a misdemeanor in the future because he did do something wrong, and we were also not only able to keep him out of prison, avoid him getting a strike, but he didn't do a day in jail which was huge for him because he has a promising career and that was going to be seriously interfered with with any type of custody time.

So, the bottom line is you put the work in.  You do the investigation and preparation, but then you have to be able to execute in the courtroom.  That's where my skill lies as a criminal defense attorney.  I've handled thousands of cases and I know how to damage the credibility of a witness and then I know how to sit down with the prosecutors and point out the problems with their case to get the result that my client must have, and that's what we got in this Pasadena case.

I've had many successful results in that courthouse through hard work, ingenuity, experience and knowing how that particular system works.