Ensuring Fairness: Understanding Proffers in Court Cases
What does a proffer look like in a criminal case, and what does that mean for you? Hi, my name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a Tulsa criminal attorney with Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve been practicing family and criminal law for almost eight years now, and I want to help you make law easy by just talking to you a little bit about what it looks like when your attorney, or what it means, when your attorney asks the judge if they can make a proffer or an offer of proof in your criminal case.
So I actually just had this come up recently, and there are a couple of different reasons why your attorney might be wanting to make an offer of proof or make a proffer for the court in the context of a criminal setting, whether it’s a misdemeanor or a felony. But the underlying reason is always the same. It’s going to be because there’s something that we think the court needs to be aware of, and more importantly, there’s something that we believe the record needs to show just for the off chance that things don’t go our way and we need to have the record ready for appeal.
Proffers in Action
Okay, so I recently had this happen in a felony case of mine. We were at a preliminary hearing, and at the prelim we wanted to call a specific witness to rebut some of the testimony that the state was presenting to establish probable cause that a crime had been committed. So we had this witness ready, and we kind of knew what the witness was going to say. Not kind of, we had a pretty good idea.
So we get up and we tell the judge, hey listen, we have this witness that it’s basically a rebuttal witness, it’s going to recant or retract or discredit some of the things that the court has heard so far that the state wants the court to rely on in making its decision. The court wouldn’t let us put that witness on, which is a whole other video and a whole other topic. Right now, what you need to know is for that instance, the court wouldn’t let us put the witness on.
The Importance of an Offer of Proof
So we made an offer of proof for the court in that instance. We made sure that the court reporter was there, typing everything we said, everything was on the record, and we made the court aware, hey, we have this witness here, it’s not just any Joe Blow from down the street. This goes directly to the credibility of the complaining witness. This goes directly to the credibility of the state’s case.
This goes directly to whether or not there’s even probable cause to establish that my client’s committed a crime. So even though the court’s not letting us put that witness on, we’re putting it on the record that we had this witness ready, and the court denied our request to present that testimony. It didn’t help my client then, in that moment. The court still said no, but they let us make that offer. So now it’s on the record.
Ensuring Future Legal Options
So from this point, we can go to the next judge and say, hey, we think this judge messed up. We really think that you should have heard from this witness or dismissed the case. And even still, if it doesn’t work out from there, at least it’s on the record. So that way, it’s an issue that can be raised for appeal.
If you have questions about this, I definitely want you to give us a call. My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a Tulsa misdemeanor attorney with Wirth Law Office, and I want to help you make law easy.
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