All of our clients who are charged with fraud or just like any one of our other clients, they want to get their charges dropped. That’s the first question, is it possible to get these charges dropped. And that’s what I’m here to talk to you about today. And we do a significant amount of fraud and we do minor frauds right up to this very serious, large scale, multi million dollar frauds involving 1000s of pages of documents, and they run the full gamut. And people can be facing very minor sentence rate up to multi years in jail. And obviously, it’s in their best interest if we can get the judge withdrawn or diverted or, or a conditional discharge of some fact avoid a criminal record. So how do we do this? How do we go about getting any type of fraud charge withdrawn? The answer to that is, first of all found whether we can do that is in the disclosure. The police should obviously do an extensive investigation, and they produce documents and paperwork, search warrants, documents, bank records, you know, you name it, depending on the fraud. And they turn all of those documents, whether it’s 100 pages, or whether it’s 20,000 pages over to the to the crown attorney, the crown attorneys then expected to get all that disclosure to us. So it could, it could be a minor fraud, just 100 pages of documents that we need to look at witness statements, videos of witnesses, versus very complicated, high level bank fraud involving high level employees at the bank. So once I get that, I will review that it might take me a day, it might take me a week, depending if there’s 1000s of documents before I can, you know, form an attendance of opinion about the strengths and weaknesses of the crowds case. Once I finished that process, and there may be missing disclosure, by the way, after there’s optimising disclosure where the crown hasn’t given me full disclosure i right away for it, they send it, maybe the police haven’t turned it over to them, or maybe it hasn’t occurred to them that there’s other issues that need to be explored and given to me. Now I’m in a position to meet with the client on a simple fraud case, that might be several meetings on a complicated fraud case, it’s going to be endless meetings, frankly, over weeks and weeks. You know, volved in fraud cases, right now we’re the hours are just simply endless, like high level cases are. So what am I doing with the client, I’m providing them an opinion about whether we can win this case, what the odds of winning it are, and pointing out the problems in the case, or unfortunately, in some cases, I’m going to tell them look, they’ve got the perfect paper trail here, they got 10 witnesses against you, it’s a slam dunk case, we have no chance of winning, and we just have to negotiate the best possible sentence for you, which is an art form to we’re here to lower that sentence. But I’m talking about case where I can find some problems, a lot of fraud cases. As you can imagine, with paper trails, there can be gaps and issues where it doesn’t necessarily point to your client where it points to multiple accuse fraud cases can be very complex, they’re not necessarily easy to to prove. And, you know, I’m going to find and the lawyers are going to find the mistakes and in a case that we can potentially point out to the crowd so that those meanings may be a very simple case, maybe one or two minutes with you on again, high level, I’m going to need you to pour through those records and meet with endlessly. You know, I have talking sometimes hundreds of hours on some big cases at that. At the end of that process, I’m prepared to meet with the crown at a crown pre trial. So let’s let’s assume that I’ve found some errors, should I point those out to the crown, some technical issues, it depends if it’s an air that can be fixed, and I repeated this in multiple videos. If the police your crown can fix the hair. And you got to know if they can or not, you need to be experienced, never pointed out to them. Because you want you’d never want them to see that fixable error. they’ve missed it. It’s within 1000s of pages of documents, it’s a hole in their case that they can they can fix don’t point it out to. But in many cases involving fraud, the IRS can’t be fixed, the police made serious errors, there’s serious gaps that can’t be fixed. I feel comfortable in those cases in pointing these out to the crowd and try to give us some there’s no reasonable prospect of conviction or there’s a very weak case. If there’s no reasonable prospect of conviction is not in the public interest to continue. And you hope to be able to convince your crown simply withdraw that the charges that’s in a perfect world. That’s obviously a very weak case. There’s other cases where there is a reasonable prospect of conviction, but it’s weaker. And the crown agrees with me, I pointed out the flaws that can’t be fixed and circumstantial case identity gaps. search warrants aren’t valid, you name it. There’s all sorts divisions that can arise in any fraud case, that where they can’t prove it was really your client who committed a fraud, credibility and reliability issues with witnesses, the list goes on. So in that case, we’re sometimes able to get the charges diverted. The Crown says, Yeah, you know, this is a, this is a lower level fraud, I’m just going to divert it, your client can do some counseling, when we get them, even though even though he just claimed he didn’t do the fraud, let’s get them to pay the $10,000 restitution gladly help pay, we’ll pay that to get the charges withdrawn, even though we maintain we didn’t do it, you know. And maybe there’s a peace bond so that the client candidate attended that bank or look or business or deal with that person anymore, that’s a great result, especially a hate to see it, especially on a higher level fraud, where the person might have been facing a jail term, but the crown recognize they got such a weak case that they’re willing to avert it. There are other cases where, you know, the crowds got a pretty decent case, clients got a great background. You know, the CRO could ask for criminal record, but they’re happy to resolve it because the risk of losing maybe some rescue, maybe we can wrestle a conditional discharge with from the which still avoids a criminal record, that’s often a great result, especially when it’s risky matter to head to trial, and there’s always risk and heading to trial. So for a client is guilty, a conditional discharge is often a great result. And we have to negotiate with a crowd, we have to know what to say, there’s an art form to negotiation, just like any negotiations, criminal law, a lot of criminalized property, negotiating, presenting things, knowing what to say, when to say it, and knowing what not to say, I can’t stress this enough. There are so many Criminal Lawyers across the province, who I’m sure at one point in your career made the mistake of disclosing too much information to the crown, which the police have cracked. And so you’ve got to recognize that and resist that at all costs. So many of these cases are resolvable in a good fashion for the client. Obviously, there’s many other cases where it’s not, sometimes the crown on a high level of fraud, even when there’s no reasonable chance of winning, we’re just gonna have a trial, it’s 5050, the crown doesn’t want to they’re not going to drop a charge when there’s multimillion dollar fraud. But in in lesser matters, you know, matters under 5000, you can often work something out where your client avoids a criminal record, every case is different. But these are the tactics and strategies of how to get a charge drop. You need to find an experienced lawyer who’s been there done that who’s done many fraud trials, who knows what works and doesn’t and understands the law, and has the experience and the committed passion to do this stuff properly.
By Michael KrusePublished On: July 28, 2023Last Updated: June 12, 2024Categories: Fraud, Video
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