Chicago Defense Lawyer Robert J. Callahan on Narcotics Defense

V.O.: Yeah, I can only imagine. So, you know, kind of going back to the narcotics issue and just what to do when you’re actually arrested. I mean, you know, we’re talking sometimes somebody’s life literally in on the line, with prison time, and fines and everything else. I mean can you, on your typical narcotics case where someone is busted for selling, what do you guys do in those situations? How do you go about it? Robert: Well, I mean, we usually are going to get involved in the case after someone’s been arrested and there is going to be bail set. So, the first thing we’ll do is we’ll prepare for a bail hearing and when we go to the bail hearing we can get a first look at the preliminary case file which is going to follow the case all the way throughout. And there is some information in there that we can grab and use it to start to put together a strategy for the defense of the case. One of the things we do in every case that I like to talk about is we subpoena, we formally request, any dispatch recordings from the police cars. Narcotics cases not as much, but we also subpoena and formally request any 911 calls or any phone calls made associated with it. We can look at the preliminary report that, that preliminary story or narrative that the officer has put into his report and kind of use that to prepare for what our strategy, our overall defense strategy is going to be. And we use that at the preliminary hearing which is the next stage. So we just try to, we have a kind of system in place where every step along the line we kind of use…(Last seconds of audio are corrupted).