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Obstruction of justice is a broad term that can cover a wide range of different actions. To commit obstruction of justice, you must knowingly and intentionally interfere with or impede a government prosecution or investigation. When charges are brought against a person for obstruction of justice at the federal level, it is typically to make sure that law enforcement officials are able to do their job unimpeded. The sanctity of the criminal justice system must be respected.
You might be charged with obstruction of justice during any part of an investigation, sentencing, or the prosecution in between. Most commonly, federal charges are filed against people who make an active effort to tamper with court proceedings or investigations. Some of the crimes include:
Covering up a crime can sometimes have worse ramifications than actually committing the crime, especially if you get caught. Obstructing justice might apply to situations in which a person meant well but ended up impeding an investigation anyway.
There is also a concept called obstruction of evidence. This occurs when a person tries to destroy or tamper with evidence during a trial or investigation. The goal is to get rid of enough evidence that the prosecution can’t make a case stick. Obstructing evidence also occurs when you intimidate witnesses to coerce them out of giving testimony, or when you purposefully give false statements yourself. It might be considered if you interfere with court proceedings and actively try to make the evidence inadmissible in court.
Criminal obstruction is a serious crime, especially at the federal level. Whether you’ve been accused of obstruction of justice or obstruction of evidence, it’s important that you get in contact with an experienced lawyer as soon as possible. The point of obstruction charges is to make sure that people cannot interfere with the processes and duties carried out by the courts.
You might be surprised by how many different forms obstruction can take. Some of the different offenses include:
There is a federal statute that dictates that if you destroy or alter any documentation in an attempt to influence a federal investigation, you might be charged with obstruction of justice. The penalties for this charge are severe. In fact, depending on the circumstances, you might be charged with a maximum of 20 years in prison.
In order for this charge to stick, the prosecutor has to do more than prove you destroyed or falsified documentation while being investigated. This is the case even when the destroyed documentation is critical to the federal investigation.
For a person to be convicted, the prosecutor needs to prove that the documents were relevant to federal investigations, and that you knew this, and that you purposefully destroyed the documents to keep them from being used as evidence.
This statute doesn’t just apply to paper documentation. It also applies to any tangible object that can be used as evidence.
In addition to applying to individuals, the statute can apply to private entities who try to keep information away from government agencies. Lawyers might use a number of different defenses to protect their clients from the charges. If the prosecutor manages to prove that you did destroy the documents, your lawyer might point out that they haven’t yet proven that you did so with an intent to obstruct justice.
There have been cases in which lawyers argued that acts such as document shredding were simply part of normal business. If the documents that were shredded happened to include important evidence, that isn’t the fault of the person doing the shredding.
There are a variety of other types of obstruction charges. One statute specifically states that you cannot keep a victim or witness from working with law enforcement or reporting a crime. If you interfere with witnesses during any criminal investigation, you might end up being sentenced to a maximum of five years in federal prison.
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