What is a mitigation packet? скачать в хорошем качестве

What is a mitigation packet?

Stefano Molea, a criminal defense lawyer in San Diego, explains what a mitigation packet is and how it should be tailored for every criminal case.  Law Office of David P. Shapiro 3500 5th Avenue #304 San Diego, CA 92103 https://www.davidpshapirolaw.com/ Hi it's Stefano Malea here, a San Diego criminal defense lawyer and partner at the Law Office of David P. Shapiro, where we help good people regain control of their future when charged with a crime. In today's video, I want to talk about a mitigation packet. If you've worked with a lawyer, maybe you have an active case, you may have heard your lawyer talk about wanting to put together a mitigation packet to send over to the prosecuting agency. Let's talk about what a mitigation packet really is. As the name implies, it's to mitigate. To lessen the sentence, to try to contextualize the situation that led to the criminal charges. To lessen the criminal culpability that one might assign to the person who was charged with the crime, just by looking at what the reports say happened. So a mitigation packet is absolutely important, it is critical in a lot of cases. However, there's a few things to keep in mind when talking about mitigation packets. The first one is, not every case demands a mitigation packet. By that I mean, if my client's telling me, Stefano, I didn't do it, or Stefano, this was self defense and I'm not interested in a plea bargain, then a mitigation packet isn't relevant. It'd be weird to ask to mitigate something when we're not really talking about entering any type of plea bargain or post-conviction where we're trying to convince a judge to hand down the least amount of punishment possible, which is what a mitigation packet normally is designed to accomplish. A mitigation packet's only gonna be used when we're talking about either plea bargaining or to reduce a sentence from the judge. There are different types of mitigation packages. Most of the time, they're going to include some type of character letter. A character letter is not just, Hey, this dude is a really nice person, a really good business person, a really good father, husband, et cetera. That's not what these character letters should do most of the time. There are some times where a generic character letter is okay, but in the majority of cases, you want something tailored specific to the major central issues relevant to the case. More importantly, a letter within a mitigation packet should also, when talking about the person's character, acknowledge that this person's been charged with a crime. If it's after a conviction or after some sort of plea and we're, for example, pending sentencing, pending the judge making a decision of what the punishment should be, the character letter should acknowledge that the person has pled guilty, because otherwise there's always this question mark. Well yeah, this is their opinion about this person's character, but is it taking into account the fact that this person has admitted to engaging in x, y, z conduct? That's a very important aspect of character letters that are gonna be part of a mitigation packet. Another thing that you see in mitigation packets usually, is a psychological evaluation. In sex crime cases, it's gonna be a psychosexual evaluation. In some violent cases, they're gonna be psychological evaluations that are going to be focused on making psychological assessments of someone's propensity to commit a crime in the future, or a source of the issue that led to the violent act and whether or not there could be a plan for the future. Which brings me to another important point, which is the mitigation packet should not only talk about the context in which the incident occurred. It should not only try to humanize the client in a way that provides perspective outside of this case, but it should also try to create a plan for the future so that someone can look at it and say, Okay, there are guardrails or safeguards being put into place in the future as far as a plan to avoid this type of scenario again or to mitigate the chances that this person's gonna be in criminal court in the future, so those things are obviously very important. Ultimately, the way in which this packet's put together. It's not just a bulk of papers that are being handed over to the prosecutor. There has to be a story told, and that's the letter that is at the top of the mitigation packet or the email in which all the attachments that are part of the mitigation packet are on. It's this storytelling that's really the secret sauce of an effective mitigation packet. It's the ability to tell a story, to weave in all the various parts of what's included in the packet, to make a compelling case for either a very favorable plea bargain or possibly a significant reduction in punishment as compared to what maybe someone else would be getting or what the law calls for. Hopefully this video has given you some helpful information about what a mitigation packet is,