Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

Re: length of pretrial detention for drug smuggling

You're talking about an actual case that involved an Orange County youth (young man in his twenties) caught smuggling drugs out of Pakistan. He actually helped stop a high jacking of an aircraft. He was prosecuted in New York in the Federal Court there. His parents hired a local attorney, now Judge Ron Krebber serving on the bench in the Orange County Superior Court. Judge Krebber didn't represent the defendant but did fly to New York on the matter.

The bail would be sizeable since the sentence, even then, was harsh. And the generally held bias of the bench is that drug smugglers have lots of money stashed away. The same prejudice the bench has against Arabs who are visiting this country. Time to trial could have been as much as a year due to the international character impeding the gathering of evidence to defend the case. Since it was probably a slam dunk looser the time spent in custody would be counted against the time in custody after the conviction.

There are several articles in the Orange County Register Newspaper about the case that Krebber worked on. These may be available through their Web Site. This case was approximately 15 years ago.

My buddy Harry Batchelder practicing law in New York City has a lot of information on prosecution of criminal cases for the Feds in that time period. He worked for a time as a Federal Prosecutor for the Organized Strike Force. Harry once flew out here to watch a heroin buy go down, which involved an individual in a New York case.

The truth is always stranger than fiction - Lots of luck