You recently got arrested for lewd conduct in Southern California. Perhaps you were the hapless victim of a police sting operation at a men’s room. Perhaps you face a battery of charges, including other Los Angeles sex crime counts. In any event, you are almost certainly intimidated by your legal challenges – by all the “stuff” that’s gone wrong in your life recently. And you’d like some clarity.
What might you be able to expect? Will you go to jail? Will you, much like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, be condemned to ostracism for the rest of your life, thanks to the affixation of the “sex offender” label to your name? Will you ever be able to “live down” your charges or “get over” all the trauma associated with the events leading up to and after your arrest?
These are all key questions to think about. And Southern California can treat sex offenders harshly – particularly when they commit violent crimes and/or have a past criminal history (“priors”). A Los Angeles lewd conduct attorney at the Kraut Criminal & DUI Lawyers can provide a free consultation and help you understand and deal with your various legal difficulties. But the challenge of dealing with the anguish of your situation is going to remain for quite some time – and could even remain after you’ve served your punishment and/or exonerated yourself.
The reality is that a significant amount of the stress in your life is caused by uncertainty.
When we don’t know what’s going to happen, our minds tend to proliferate all sort of scenarios. It’s just how our brains operate. For instance, if you knew right now that you would have to go jail for two years because of your crime, you could then start to process what that would mean and how you could deal with it.
But if you DON’T know what your sentence is – it could be two and a half years, 15 years, two months, no jail time at all – then your mind will jump around and play out all sorts of possibilities, which can lead to a tremendous amount of anxiety. For instance, you could get lost thinking about what your life would be if you got a 10-year sentence – how you’d miss out on your children growing up, etc. Or you could get lost in the fantasy of getting exonerated or only serving a few days or weeks, in spite of the heavy charges against you.
And that’s just one aspect of your situation – the lack of clarity about your ultimate sentence.
If you look at any criminal charges – no matter how simple or straightforward – they lead to all sorts of clarity problems like this – stuff that your brain is going to subconsciously try to resolve for you. In so doing, it’s going to create stress, since you’re going to be creating all these different scenarios for yourself, gaming them out, testing them against reality, thinking about what you would do in each one, etc. The key to resolving some of this anxiety is to connect with an appropriate legal team. The team at the Kraut Criminal & DUI Lawyers can help you get a handle on what to do.