Burbank Criminal Defense Lawyer

Burbank Criminal Defense Lawyer

The handcuffs clicked shut outside that Burbank restaurant—the officer reading rights while tourists walked past with shopping bags, pretending not to stare. You weren’t supposed to end up here, not on Magnolia Boulevard with your phone taken away and your car already being towed toward some impound lot you’ve never heard of. The Burbank Police station smells like disinfectant and fear, and the booking officer keeps asking questions you don’t know how to answer without making things worse—each word you say gets written down, each silence interpreted as guilt.

What Happens After They Arrest You

The Burbank Police Department books you first—fingerprints that smudge no matter how many times they make you try again, the mugshot with lighting designed to make everyone look guilty, the property inventory where they catalogue everything in your pockets like you’re never getting it back. They ask about your address, your job, your criminal history, whether you’ve ever been arrested before—and they frame these questions like casual conversation when really they’re building a case file that the Los Angeles County District Attorney will read before they decide what to charge you with. The bail question comes next, and this is where many, many people make their first mistake. The bail schedule says one thing, the judge might say another, your family panics and calls a bail bondsman who charges a non-refundable premium—and suddenly you’re out ten percent of a bail amount that might have been negotiated down if you’d had a lawyer at that first hearing. Or worse: you can’t afford bail at all, you sit in custody for days or weeks, you lose your job because you can’t show up for work, and by the time you finally see a judge you’re so desperate for release you’ll agree to any plea deal the prosecutor offers. The 48-hour rule matters—California law requires the state to arraign you or release you within two court days of arrest, not counting weekends and holidays. Get arrested Friday night and you might sit until Tuesday. The court date paper they hand you lists an address you’ve never been to: 300 East Olive Avenue, the Burbank Courthouse, a building where your future gets decided in a system that processes thousands of cases a year and doesn’t particularly care about your individual circumstances unless someone forces them to care. Walking into the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Burbank feels like walking into an airport terminal designed by Kafka—metal detectors, long lines, hallways full of people clutching court papers and looking lost. The arraignment courtroom runs like an assembly line: the judge calls names, the prosecutor reads charges, the public defender stands next to you for ninety seconds and asks how you want to plead, and if you say “not guilty” they hand you another court date and tell you to come back in three weeks. The plea offer comes immediately, sometimes before you’ve even seen the police report—the prosecutor knows you’re scared, knows you want this over with, knows that statistically most people plead guilty at arraignment just to make the fear stop.

Call 212-300-5196.

This is the institutional pressure Alan Dershowitz has written about for decades—the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County isn’t designed to try cases, it’s designed to process guilty pleas efficiently. The prosecutors have conviction rate metrics to maintain, the judges have crowded calendars to clear, the public defenders are genuinely good lawyers trapped in an impossible system where they cannot possibly give adequate attention to every client.

Your Lawyer Choice

Your Sixth Amendment right to counsel doesn’t just mean any lawyer—it means effective assistance of counsel, a lawyer who will actually challenge the state’s case rather than facilitate your guilty plea. The public defender who stood next to you at arraignment for ninety seconds cannot file the suppression motion that might get the evidence excluded, cannot investigate the Burbank Police officer’s disciplinary history through a Pitchess motion, cannot spend hours reviewing the discovery to find the Brady material the prosecutor “forgot” to disclose. The “criminal defense” lawyer with the billboard on the 101 Freeway probably handles DUI cases exclusively—if your case involves drugs, theft, assault, domestic violence, weapons charges, or anything else, you’re hiring someone who will be learning your type of case for the first time while representing you. You need someone who knows the Los Angeles County prosecutors personally, understands how Burbank judges rule on suppression motions, has tried cases in that specific courthouse, and—most importantly—has a track record of actually going to trial when the plea offers are unacceptable. The single most important decision in your criminal case happens in the first week: hiring counsel who will fight, not just negotiate the terms of your surrender.

The first plea offer is always the worst plea offer—this isn’t cynicism, it’s mathematics. The prosecutor hasn’t done any real work on your case yet, hasn’t reviewed the evidence critically, hasn’t considered whether the Burbank Police search was actually constitutional, hasn’t thought about what a jury might believe. They’re offering you the maximum they think they can get you to accept out of fear, and they’re counting on you not having a lawyer who will demand discovery and file motions. You have more leverage than you think: the evidence might be weaker than it looks, the prosecutors are genuinely overworked, the trial calendar backlog means they can’t actually try every case that doesn’t plead out.

Brady v. Maryland requires prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence—evidence that might help your defense. The California Courts recognize that Brady violations happen constantly, systematically, throughout the system. Without a lawyer who will fight for discovery, you’ll never see the witness statement that contradicts the police report, never know about the video evidence that shows a different version of events, never learn that the officer who arrested you has a history of constitutional violations. Dismissal before trial—the prosecution unable to proceed after your suppression motion gets the evidence excluded, or unable to prove probable cause at the preliminary hearing, or simply deciding the case is too weak to pursue. Acquittal at trial—a jury that doesn’t believe the state proved its case beyond reasonable doubt, twelve people who looked at the evidence and said not guilty.

The long game matters more than the short game: protecting your ability to work in your profession, maintaining your immigration status if you’re not a U.S. citizen, keeping your record clean enough that this doesn’t destroy your future prospects. A conviction that seems minor today—just a misdemeanor, just probation, just get it over with—can become the prior conviction that makes your next case a felony, the crime of moral turpitude that triggers deportation proceedings, the record that prevents professional licensing forever. Criminal defense isn’t about begging prosecutors for mercy—it’s about forcing the state to respect your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches, your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, your Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel and a fair trial.

212-300-5196.