Criminal Defense of Immigrants
§ 11.43 iv. The Client Has No Outstanding or Potential Arrest Warrants
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If the client has outstanding warrants, they must be cleared before the client’s liberty can be obtained during the post-conviction case. Outstanding warrants also present the client in a terrible light to court and prosecutor when seeking a favorable exercise of discretion. To avoid this problem, the client’s surrender must be negotiated on the outstanding warrants; the client must be defended on the underlying criminal case, as well as the probation or parole violation matter, and the client must serve any new sentence s/he receives before being released. Those cases must be handled in such a way as not to trigger new immigration damage. Only then can the post-conviction work on the original problem conviction or sentence be done. This problem makes the whole case much more difficult — how much more difficult depends on the circumstances.