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Video Transcribed: Stage 7 in an Oklahoma Misdemeanor Case is the pretrial, or known as the the pretrial conference. I’m Oklahoma attorney, James Wirth, and I want to explore this topic to better educate those wondering.
So different judges handle this differently. Generally, the pretrial is all about the preparations that need to be made before you go before a judge for a bench trial or a jury for a jury trial. So it’s the judge ensuring that we’ve got everything set and everything’s ready to go, so we don’t run into issues at that time.
If you are the defense or even the state, it’s about getting ruling on certain evidentiary hearings. It’s about determining whether we have a complete list of witnesses ready to go. It’s about pretrial motions, like motions in limine, which is making rulings on admissibility.
That happens at the pretrial. Some judges do that directly before trial, other ones set it out as a separate date and then maybe the trial would be about a month later or something like that.
Whatever the case is on that date, you want to already have … if you’re representing a defendant, you want to already want to have your case ready to go.
You’ve got all the discovery, you’ve got your defenses and everything. You’ve got that lined up. You know how the trial is going to go. You know who your witnesses are.
You’ve got all those listed, exchanged, and you’re filing motions on stuff that you want to keep out. You want a ruling from the judge that this is inadmissible. You want a ruling from the judge that your stuff is admissible. So you have as little surprises at trial as possible.
And that’s what to expect at a pretrial. Most of the time that pretrial stuff is done in chambers. So if you’re going through a case, you might be sitting out in the courtroom and your attorney, the state’s attorney, or the prosecutor, and the judge may be meeting in chambers and going through these items, getting those resolved in preparation for a trial.
If you’ve got questions about this, you want more than this general information on a video, you’re going to want to talk about your specific circumstances with an experienced attorney. If you want to talk to any attorneys at my office, Wirth Law Office, go to makelaweasy.com.
