This is the call we get most often: a husband, a wife, a son, a parent has just been arrested, and the family is frightened and does not know what to do in the first few hours. Take a breath. The right steps in those first hours are simple, and getting them right protects the person you love more than almost anything that happens later.
This is general information, not legal advice. If a family member has been arrested, contact a lawyer right away.
Counsel comes before anyone explains anything
The single most important step is also the first one: get a lawyer involved immediately, before your family member talks to the police. Not after the interview. Before it. The instinct in most families is to cooperate, to be polite, to clear things up by explaining. That instinct, however good-hearted, is exactly what causes the most damage. The purpose of a lawyer at this stage is to get in front of the questioning, not to clean up after it.
The lawyer makes the record: this person is represented
Once there is counsel, the lawyer's early job is to make a clear, professional record with the police and the prosecutor: this person is represented by counsel, and there should be no questioning of them outside their lawyer's presence. Done properly, that record invokes two of the most important protections a person has, and it tells everyone involved that the conversation goes through the lawyer from that point on.
The right to remain silent is not a technicality
The right to remain silent and the right to counsel are constitutional rights, under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and they belong to your family member no matter how the questions are asked or how friendly they seem. The message worth passing along is short: politely decline to answer questions until the lawyer is present. Not rude, not combative. Just a request for counsel, and then nothing further.
If your family member is not a U.S. citizen, the stakes are doubled
Here is what many families do not realize until it is too late. If the person arrested is not a U.S. citizen, a green card holder, a visa holder, anyone, the criminal case is not only a criminal case. What they say, and above all how the case is ultimately resolved, can put their immigration status at risk. A plea that looks like a minor way to make the case go away can, for a noncitizen, be the very thing that starts a deportation. That is why the criminal side and the immigration side have to be looked at together from the very first day, not bolted on at the end. Defense counsel who understands those immigration consequences, and who coordinates with immigration counsel when needed, is not a luxury here. It is the difference between a closed case and a lost life in this country.
In the first hours, practically
Find out where your family member is being held and what the charges are. The facts of the case do not belong on jail phones or in visiting-room lines, which are recorded, and everything said there can be used. Gather what the lawyer will need, the person's full name, date of birth, immigration status, and where they are held, and let the lawyer handle contact with the police and any question of bail. The less that is said by anyone before the lawyer is in place, the better.
The bottom line
When someone you love is arrested, the first hours matter and the rules are simple: get a lawyer, say nothing without that lawyer, and let the lawyer make the record. Everything else can be sorted out from there. What is hard to undo is a statement or a plea made before anyone thought to slow down.
We defend felony charges in New York and indictable offenses in New Jersey, and when a client is not a U.S. citizen, the immigration exposure is reviewed alongside the criminal case from the first call.