How people end up named
Identification is usually the spine of these cases. It comes from a photo array, a street identification made within minutes, a description of clothing, a phone placing someone in an area, or an account given by another person who was charged. Identifications are made quickly, under stress, often in poor light, and once made they tend to harden. Being nearby, lending a car, or arriving afterward is enough to get a person named in the paperwork, even when the document describes their alleged role very differently from everyone else's.
What to do before anything else
Do not discuss the case with anyone else who was charged, and assume that calls from a detention facility are recorded. Conversations with friends and relatives about the facts are not protected, and they become evidence. Do not delete anything from your phone or your accounts, and do not post. Instead, write down where you were and who can confirm it, and collect anything with a timestamp on it — receipts, transit records, work logs, ride and delivery app history, building entry records. Those are the items that go stale first.
What the first conversation covers
We look at exactly how the identification was made, since the procedure used is often more revealing than the result. We look for video from the location and from the route, and send preservation requests before recordings are recycled. We go through whether any statement was taken from you, when, and in what circumstances. We also look at whether your position and a co-defendant's are actually aligned, because in these cases they frequently are not, and that affects who should be representing whom.
