Carrying a pistol without a license in the District of Columbia
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mark Rollins. I’m an attorney here in Washington D.C. I also practice in the state of Maryland. Primarily the area of practice is criminal law. Today we’re talking about carrying a pistol without a license scenario. That’s basically how can two people who are being arrested in the same car be charged with the same weapon or the same drugs. In this scenario we’re going to say the weapon. In this fact scenario that I’m going to discuss, because this has happened numerous of times, an individual is stopped by the police officer for a traffic offense. Let’s say he changed lanes improperly and the police office pulls him over. There’s two people in the car; you have a driver and you have a passenger. The driver, in the middle console, open container of alcohol. They went to the store and someone opened up the container of liquor and that will get you an open container of alcohol. The officer sees the alcohol in plain view and now he’s going to arrest both individuals. Both individuals get out of the car. They are arrested and the officer then goes back into the car and conducts a search of the car. He can arrest for that open container of alcohol, by the way. He’s now arrested these two individuals. He’s put them into his car. He then begins to search the automobile. Upon searching the automobile, he finds, on the passenger side, he sees a handgun. Is it better for the officer, the individuals who are stopped to now talk to the officer, to explain to him whose handgun it was, who it belonged to, whose car it was, to give an explanation to the office to try and get out of this trouble or allow the process to take place and contact their lawyer? If you choose B, contacting your lawyer, you choose the correct answer. One is that without these individuals talking it gives the lawyer a lot more to work with, so he doesn’t have the statement of those individuals. Now he can challenge the stop, whether the officer actually had probable cause to do the stop. Two, he can challenge the actual gun that was recovered because that gun is constructively possessed. In other words, neither one was in actual possession of it and we call in constructive possession. The lawyer can challenge that and say which party had the more controllable possession of the weapon. The lawyer would also, hopefully, do a thorough cross examination about police procedures, whether they use the dusting latent print off the weapon or that they use the super glue technique. There are a number of things the lawyer can do to challenge this stop. The only way that can happen is if the individual contacted a lawyer first; did not make statements. In that fact scenario there was a lot to work with and a lot that a good criminal lawyer could work with in that fact scenario..
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