How do you get to a felony assault? We call that an aggravated assault in Arizona. I want to review a few of those ways to get an instant ticket to the felony world. Hey guys, attorney Mark j Victor here. I'm the owner and founder of the Attorneys for Freedom Law Firm, and today I want to talk a little bit about the crime of assault. This is something people don't generally understand. People come into my office all the time and say things like, Hey Mark, I'm charged with assault, but I never touched anybody. This is going to be an easy one. Can't imagine how they feel when I explain to them that you could actually be guilty of an assault without even touching somebody. Let me explain. So there are three different varieties of assault. Think of them as three different theories to prove the same.
One crime of assault, and they're all misdemeanors. The first one is intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly causing a physical injury to another person. So don't do that. This actually does require a physical injury. Like I said, you could either intend to cause a physical injury, do something knowing it's going to cause a physical injury to another person, or just be reckless about it, which actually is consciously disregarding a substantial risk that another person is going to be injured. That's number one way to commit assault in the state of Arizona. The second way is intending to put another person in imminent fear of a physical injury. You know what this is about? Remember that game? Maybe you used to play by taking a rock or a hard object, or if you were raised in Massachusetts like me, maybe a snowball and pretending to throw it at a person and then watching them recoil like this and then laughing at them.
Yeah, that's actually an assault. You didn't know that. Well, you did that. Did you intending to cause another person to be in fear of an imminent physical injury? Notice you never touch the person, and yet that's still an assault in the state of Arizona. The third way is to simply touch another person. You don't actually have to cause a physical injury, but just touch another person with the intent to either injure them or insult them or provoke them into maybe getting into a fight. So in this case, you actually have to touch them. But remember, case law breaks this out in such a way that maybe you just touch their hat, or even if you touch, say the windshield of their car and they're in the car, that could be considered touching a person as well. Any of those three amount to a misdemeanor assault in the state of Arizona in a misdemeanor, the worst possible thing that can happen is six months jail.
So don't do that. How do you get to a felony assault? We call that an aggravated assault in Arizona. Well, the way to get to aggravated assault is commit one of those three varieties of misdemeanor assaults plus something else. I want to review a few of those ways to get an instant ticket to the felony world. First, if the injury you caused to the other person is considered a serious physical injury, automatic ticket to the felony world, you'll be charged with aggravated assault. What's a serious physical injury? Well, probably a broken bone, something that somebody has to go to the hospital for, something not necessarily putting their life at risk, but a serious physical injury sort of interrupts their life or maybe an extended period of time. Another way is if you commit one of those misdemeanor assaults with a deadly weapon or a dangerous instrument, what's a deadly weapon?
A firearm. I talk about this one a lot when I speak to the gun crowd. If you pull out your firearm and you point it at another person intending to make them scared, you'll very likely be charged with the crime of aggravated assault. And I haven't even talked about the concept of a dangerous offense. Yes, any of these felonies could be considered either dangerous or non-dangerous. That's another aspect that's involved. And if you're charged with a dangerous offense, that will definitely increase the punishment. Another way to get to a aggravated assault, a felony assault, is to cause temporary but substantial physical injuries to another person or to cause a misdemeanor assault to a victim who is restrained or unable to resist at the time. Maybe somebody beat someone up in a bar and they're on the floor recovering. If you kick them on the way out the door, you just committed a felony aggravated assault.
Also, if you commit a misdemeanor assault after you entered somebody's home with the intent to commit that assault automatic ticket to the felony world, this is Arizona law saying, Hey, look, it's worse if you do this. If you actually enter somebody's home and intend to assault them, you get an automatic ticket to the felony world. And then if you're an adult and you commit an assault on a minor, somebody under 15 years old, automatic express ticket to the felony aggravated assault world. And then of course, if you are subject to an order of protection, you're in a domestic violence type of a relationship, and your other sort of former partner now has obtained an order of protection, it could even be a family relationship as well, and you violate that order of protection and you commit what would otherwise have been a misdemeanor assault on that person because it's in violation of an order of protection, automatic ticket to the felony world.
And then there are some special classes of people. So if you commit a misdemeanor assault on one of the people in the protected class, automatic ticket to the felony world, who's in the protected class? I bet you can guess. Police officers, firefighters, teachers, medical professionals, even public defenders are in the class of protected people. So if you commit an assault on one of these people who is actually engaged in the performance of their duties, automatic ticket to the felony world. Look, if you're charged with an assault, either a simple assault or a felony aggravated assault, you need an experienced criminal defense attorney, somebody who's been dealing with assault cases for decades of time. That's the experience we have here at the Attorneys for Freedom Law Firm. I've been defending people on these types of cases for almost 30 years now. We also defend people who are charged with state assault crimes and federal assault crimes.
That's right, you can be charged in the federal courts with assault as well. It's a little bit of a different beast in the federal court. Lots of criminal defense attorneys do state cases, but not federal cases. We have decades of experience representing people in these types of crimes in both forms. So if you are charged with an aggravated assault or even a simple assault, give us a call. Come on in, schedule a strategy session, put an hour aside. We'll go through your entire case very carefully, give you a full evaluation of everything that you're looking at, what your risk is possible defense is how we'd handle the case, maybe some discovery issues, things that need to be preserved immediately. We'd be happy to help you out. So my name is Mark j Victor. I'm the owner and founder of the Attorneys for Freedom Law Firm. Check us out attorneys for freedom.com. And if you're interested in the attorneys on retainer program, attorneys on retainer.us. Thanks for listening.
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Credit: Marc J. Victor, Attorney’s on Retainer