Top Chicago Defense Lawyer Robert J. Callahan On Winning Cases
0
V.O.: Absolutely, absolutely. I guess, so can you give me some examples of some you’ve recently won? Anything interesting? Obviously you don’t have to name names here but you know, just some cases that you’ve recently helped some people out with.
Robert: Trying to think back to recently, there have been a lot of them. They kind of start to blend together. One of the ones that I talked about was where we represented someone who was driving on a restricted driving permit and they had permission to drive during certain hours for work and they were driving somewhat outside the boundaries of that particular permit. And the police pulled this person over and they kind of invented a story. They said he didn’t have a valid driver’s license, he was driving outside the bounds of his restricted driving permit and he told us he was just visiting his cousin’s house. They basically made up this long story that through our investigation we were able to pick apart and basically argue at the time that he was driving within the bounds of this particular driving permit. Now they seized a bunch of different contraband from that person’s car. Because we were able to show that the stop and arrested was illegal by picking apart the police story, all the illegal things found inside of his car were suppressed. There is something called the exclusionary rule that applies to criminal law, and what that exclusionary rules says, basically, is that if evidence is illegally obtained it should be excluded from evidence. That’s the exclusionary part of it. We do a motion to suppress evidence in those cases, do an investigation, file a written motion to suppress evidence, and then present it and argue it before the court. And in that case we were able to get the evidence suppressed and excluded and that surprises people because he said, you know, “I had a car full of drugs and other illegal things, they stopped me. They found it. I was caught dead to rights. Red-handed”. And they’re surprised when that’s been suppressed and the case gets dismissed. The state doesn’t like it; they argue and they fight tooth and nail. They threatened to appeal at times, although they hardly ever do. And we… And that case was about two months ago and this is something that happens over and over. It’s almost…(Last seconds of audio are corrupted).