When you receive drug possession charges, it is not time to lie down and wait for the legal hammer to fall, hoping that the judge has a good day and goes easy on you. While this may make for interesting television, your life and your rights are far too valuable to leave to chance.

Your prosecution is already building a case against you, so it is important that you take steps to defend yourself against the charges using all the tools you have available. In many instances, you may have more ways than you realize to fight the charges and challenge each piece of evidence that the prosecution brings against you.

Building a cohesive drug possession defense is often time-consuming and complicated. An experienced defense attorney can help you understand the defense options available and ensure that your rights and privileges remain secure while you work to protect your future.

Challenging the evidence against you

Many drug possession defenses attempt to undermine the grounds of the arrest by calling into question the conduct of the officer or the circumstances under which the officer found the evidence. If you have not considered these avenues of defense yet, it is wise to explore them as you create a legal strategy.

However, even if you do not find strong grounds to challenge officer conduct or evidence collection, you still have a number of ways to challenge the evidence itself. When an officer charges you with drug possession, it is for a specific substance, not simply “they had drugs.” This means that the evidence against you must match the charges.

You can request that the evidence against you undergo detailed laboratory testing to determine its chemical composition, compelling the prosecution to produce the evidence and send it to a lab.

If you’re lucky, the prosecution may not be able to produce the evidence, if there was a clerical error and it was misfiled or never made it to evidence storage in the first place.

However, if the results from the lab are not in your favor, then you may still take steps to scrutinize the methodology within the lab, such as the calibration of the instruments used to identify the substance.

Build your defense now, while you have time

If you wait to begin building your defense, you only minimize your own options to defend yourself and make it easier for the prosecution to secure a conviction. Don’t hesitate to begin working on your defense as soon as possible to give yourself a better chance of beating the charges, keeping your rights and future secure.