What is Criminal Law?
Criminal law is a body of law that apply in criminal acts. In an instance, wherein a person fails to adhere in a particular criminal case, that person committed criminal act because of breaking the law. Criminal law is different from a civil law. The penalty in criminal law involves imprisonment and the forfeiture of the person involved.
Small or big crimes, the criminal law covers all. Criminal cases such as money-laundering, terrorism, extradition, and cross-border crimes are also covered by the criminal law.
Types of Criminal Law
Criminal law has two types; the misdemeanors and the felonies.
Misdemeanor. It is considered as lower level of criminal offense, like the minor assaults, petty thefts, or traffic offense. A person who committed any type of these crimes will be imprison for 1 year or less than a year.
Felony. In contrast with the misdemeanor, felony crimes involved serious offenses; such as rape, murder, robbery, arson, manslaughter, and dealing drugs. Felony crimes carry one year penalty or more than that.
Areas of Criminal Law
This law covers those series concerns within the society like murder, robbery and rape. Opportunities were made available for lawyers in both public and private practice. Criminal lawyers typically deal with the case from the beginning up to end of the criminal case. This involves of filing the cases; such as investigation, visiting the police stations or prisons, taking statements of the witnesses, checking the medical reports, liaising with the court personnel and police, probation officers and filing pleas or motion.
It also involves conducting final trial, if it is not being carried out by the barrister. The post sentencing might work on the appeals at the higher court levels. It will also involve files of paperwork and big amount of researches.
What makes a good criminal lawyer?
Criminal lawyers should obtain a law degree first and then qualify as a solicitor through further examinations. A criminal lawyer must be excellent orally and possessed written advocacy skill. Those are the major important skills that must possessed by a lawyer in order to handle criminal cases. A criminal lawyer should be smart, quick and have thorough understanding when it comes to the criminal laws, its procedures and functioning of judicial system.
You must be able to handle great sizes of work and then perform well while under pressure to retain a careful attention to detail. Your communication & negotiation skills should be excellent and you need to be good at communicating and working with different people. You would have to get used to working long & unconventional hours.
A criminal lawyer is dealing with many clients that are dangerous, drug addicts, chronic offenders or mentally unstable, and it’s very important to keep back personal judgment. A lawyer must be honest and trustworthy and has enough patience in handling the situations of the clients. Crime, in its nature, carries more notoriety, so it is very important for the lawyers to maintain an absolute discretion in handling and dealing with people.