Articles Posted in About Micah Belden – Sherman Criminal Lawyer

Often I get asked how I can defend people accused of heinous crimes, or even small crimes. How can you defend criminals? How can you defend the guilty (as if everyone trapped in our justice system is guilty)? Normally this question comes from somebody looking down their nose and implying that it is morally questionable or ethically borderline to defend honest citizens accused of crime, whether they did it or not.

I do what I do not only because I love it, but because I am needed badly. Criminal defense lawyers and honest jurors and judges are the main obsticles to politically motivated laws and pressures to put you in jail if doing so is beneficial to those wearing the badge or controlling the government (or to run up a $10,000 bill against you for allegedly driving “intoxicated”). Court systems in America designed to “do justice” can easily evolve (or de-volve) into systems to protect those in power and maintain the status quo. There are plenty of ethical prosecutors and police officers out there, and this article isn’t a stab at them, but the political and professional system in which they must serve brings tremendous pressures on them to arrest and convict you.

If you think our criminal justice system as a whole is about “presumption of innocence” and “burden of proof,” you are sadly mistaken. Every week innocent individuals are herded like cattle into our courtrooms across our land like cattle and pressured into pleading guilty (often without a lawyer) to crimes they have no business pleading guilty to. Every week or month it seems that someone is freed from prison on DNA evidence proving their innocence of the crimes they were convicted of or to which they pled guilty.

Over the years, I have tried many jury trials and achieved real results for real people. I only represent human beings faced with loss of freedom and property, and I play to win. I am not a “settlement” lawyer who gets the best deal possible and talks the client into it. I get the best deal possible and give people the reasons in favor of taking it and the reasons to reject it and go to trial. It is 100% the accused’s decision, which I can help them make correctly.

In recognition of my work for real people, I was one of 55 trial lawyers in America selected to attend the July 2009 Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College, an annual three-week-long trial training school in Wyoming. At the college, legendary trial lawyer Gerry Spence and many of the most successful trial lawyers in America taught us how to be ourselves and communicate better with everyday people. We also learned how to better listen to those we defend. We learned advanced techniques on how to understand our cases to the fullest, so we can truly speak to the judge or jury on a person’s behalf. I stay very active with Trial Lawyer’s College to keep becoming a better lawyer.

Also to become a better lawyer, in the last five years I have completed over 132.25 hours of Texas criminal law continuing legal education (only 15 annual hours in any subject area is required). This year alone, I have attended a postconviction remedy seminar in Austin, an advanced criminal defense course in San Antonio, and am scheduled to again take the State Bar’s Advanced Criminal Law seminar. Criminal defense is not an easy job if done right, so make sure that any lawyer you choose has a reputation both for knowing criminal law very well and has a reputation for being a trial lawyer. Ask them to show you their jury trial results for the last three years and you may be surprised.

My name is Micah Belden and I am a criminal defense lawyer in Sherman, Texas -the city in which I was born and will be buried. I was raised and currently live in Howe, Texas. My father was a farmer and my mom a housewife. We were forced to sell the farm early in life, and I watched my dad labor hard to feed our family. I try to bring his backbreaking work ethic to the practice of criminal law.

I was taken to the Baptist church week in and week out as a kid. Sometimes I went voluntarily. I learned small town values that gave me a moralistic view of the world, and see those morals jumping into my everyday decisions at a surprising rate. I do my best to treat people fairly and demand that others are treated fairly. This led me to be a criminal defense lawyer.

After graduating from Howe, I attended Texas A&M because the school fit my view of the world and was a comfortable place to learn. I love history, and after changing majors a couple times, ended up in the history department where I belonged. I attended virtually all the football games and was somewhat active in Bonfire, and was unfortunately on campus when it fell in 1999. I worked the next day moving logs, and learned to appreciate how fragile life and all we have truly is.