Understanding a Sex Crime Accusation with your Criminal Defense Lawyer in Ohio

Ohio defense attorney Brian Joslyn explains how sex crime accusations lead to criminal charges being filed against someone in Ohio.Joslyn Law Firm is experienced in representing those accused of a sex crime throughout Ohio. If you or a loved one has been arrested or is under investigation for a crime, please call us at (614) 444-1900 or submit an online contact form to request a free and confidential consultation to discuss your case with one of our attorneys.

If you believe that you’re being investigated for a sex crime, I can’t stress the importance that you contact an attorney immediately. These cases can have drastically different results depending on how quickly you respond to your situation. It is imperative that you immediately don’t talk about your situation with anybody except an attorney. I don’t care if that’s a friend, a family member, a wife, you do not talk about your circumstances with anyone. Any statements you make to other people can be used against you. Of course there are limited exceptions when it comes to spousal immunity and privilege. But even those, in some circumstances, aren’t absolute. So it is important that you only speak with an attorney. As a very experienced sex crime attorney, I would tell you that the first thing that we need to do is understand exactly what you’re being accused of. When a client first contacts me, they want to immediately fill me in on what’s going on. And it will give me a general idea of what I’m dealing with. But what really matters is what the accuser is saying. So one of the first steps that I take is I immediately reach out to the law enforcement agency or investigator that is handling the case. And my goal is not to immediately deny the offense, my goal is not to immediately tell them our side of the story. The goal is to get information. And what I often tell clients, is that you never assert a defense without knowing exactly what you’re being accused of. So a client might come in a say I’m accused of doing this sexual crime. Well I want to know what day it happened on, I wanna know exactly what they’re saying you did to commit the crime. I want to know who they’ve told this to, when they reported it. Was there a rape kit examination? I want to know all of these things before we even start to talk about what our side of the story is. You never assert a defense without knowing exactly what you’re being accused of. So our first goal in any sex crime investigation is to send a letter of representation to the detective, officer or whatever agency might be handling it. Sometimes it’s a children protective services as well, it hasn’t reached law enforcement yet. So that I can make contact with them and learn about what exactly the accusations are. Because what has happened in previous cases, is that you’ll assert your defense, and then when they go back to reexamine the accuser, they’ll say, “well it couldn’t have happened this day because he’s saying he was out of town tat that time, are you sure it wasn’t this date?” and they just change their story. You want them to lock themselves into whatever the accusation that they’re making so you never assert a defense without knowing exactly what you’re being accused of.