Attorney Gerson successfully negotiates plea deal for man arrested on drug charges

My client was arrested in Pittsburgh on drug charges of Conspiracy to Possess with Intent to Deliver Controlled Substances. A drug charges task force in Allegheny County was notified that an individual from New York City had been detained as a result of drug interdiction activities at a bus station in Philadelphia, and arrested on drug charges after a search incident to arrest resulted in seizure of a $100,000.00 worth of Ecstasy. The New York resident agreed to cooperate with state and federal officials and identified my client and another individual, who were expecting to meet him at the Greyhound Bus station in Pittsburgh, to pay $100,000.00 in cash for the Ecstasy shipment. The felony drug trafficking charges my client faced involved substantial mandatory minimum sentencing. However, the response to the Informal Discovery Request I filed revealed that the detention and arrest of the individual in Philadelphia were potentially illegal and, therefore, the resulting arrest of my client was also hypothetically unlawful. Consequently, I filed an Omnibus Pre-Trial Motion seeking suppression of physical evidence and statements attributed to my client, based on violations of his 4^th Amendment, 5^thAmendment, 6^th Amendment, and 14^th Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. On the date of the hearing on the pre-trial motions, I successfully negotiated the terms of a plea agreement whereby the Office of the Attorney General agreed to not seek the applicable mandatory minimum sentence, and recommend a probationary sentence in consideration of a general plea and forfeiture of the U.S. currency seized at the time of my client’s arrest.  My client, whose primary goal was to avoid lengthy incarceration or a state sentence, authorized me to accept the terms of the negotiated plea agreement, which was ultimately approved by the court.