Miami Weapons and Firearm Charges Defense Attorney

Facing a Gun Charge in Miami?

We’re a North Miami criminal defense trial practice, and we handle weapons cases across Miami-Dade — from North Miami Beach and Aventura down through Miami Shores, Biscayne Park, and El Portal. Florida takes firearm charges seriously, and the penalties can be far heavier than most people assume when they’re first arrested. That severity is exactly why we don’t treat any gun case as a quick plea to get off the desk. We prepare every case as though it will go in front of a jury. That approach changes how prosecutors deal with you, and it changes the range of outcomes on the table. Before anything else, though, you deserve a straight answer about where you actually stand.

Weapons Charges We Defend

Gun cases come in a lot of shapes, and the charge on your paperwork drives everything that follows. We defend clients facing:

• Illegal possession of a firearm and carrying without the proper permit
• Concealed weapons and concealed carry permit violations
• Felon in possession of a firearm
• Aggravated assault or aggravated battery with a deadly weapon
• Weapons trafficking
• Straw purchase allegations

Some of these are misdemeanors. Some are serious felonies that can move into federal court. What matters is that the same trial team stays with you across that whole range — you’re not going to get handed off the moment your case gets complicated. If your exact charge isn’t on this list, call and ask. Firearm law in Florida has a lot of overlapping statutes, and where your case fits determines your exposure.

Florida’s 10-20-Life Law and Enhancements

Here’s the part that catches people off guard. Florida’s 10-20-Life law attaches mandatory-minimum prison time when a firearm is involved in certain felonies. In broad strokes: pulling out a gun during a qualifying offense can trigger a minimum of ten years, firing it can trigger twenty, and if someone is shot, the exposure jumps to twenty-five years up to life. A mandatory minimum means the judge’s hands are tied at the bottom — no matter how sympathetic your situation is, the floor is the floor. On top of that, habitual offender designations can stack even more time onto a sentence.

We treat that sentencing exposure as its own defense front, not something to worry about later. Our firm keeps a dedicated Three-Strikes and habitual offender defense practice built around sentencing mitigation — the work of challenging whether an enhancement even applies to your facts, and pushing back hard against life-sentence risk. Getting ahead of that early can be the difference between a fightable case and a foregone conclusion.

If any of this is landing close to home, don’t sit with it alone. Call us at (305) 315-5147 and tell us what you’re facing — we’ll walk you through what the numbers actually mean for your case.

When Gun Charges Go Federal

Not every gun case stays in state court. Trafficking, straw purchase allegations, and felon-in-possession charges can all get picked up by federal prosecutors, sometimes out of an FBI or DEA investigation you didn’t even know was running. When that happens, almost everything shifts. Different prosecutors, different courthouse, and a sentencing system that follows federal guidelines rather than Florida’s — usually with less room to maneuver. The one thing that shouldn’t change is your lawyer. Our federal criminal defense practice covers weapons charges and includes representation against FBI and DEA investigations in federal court, so if your case crosses that line, you won’t be scrambling for a new attorney at the worst possible moment. We stay with it.

Red Flag Orders and Firearm Confiscation

A lot of gun clients are dealing with two problems at once and don’t realize they’re connected. Alongside a criminal charge, Florida’s red flag law lets the state seek a Risk Protection Order to take your firearms — and that’s a separate, civil proceeding with its own hearing. Most defense pages ignore it entirely. We don’t, because we run a dedicated Risk Protection Order defense practice. We represent clients at those hearings, challenge the evidence the state is using to justify confiscation, and petition to vacate or modify orders that shouldn’t stand. The RPO hearing decides whether you keep your firearms and for how long, and it often moves on a faster track than the criminal case. Having the same team on both means nothing said in one proceeding blindsides you in the other.

How We Build a Gun Case Defense

Between the two of us, our partners bring more than 25 years of combined trial experience to the table, and we genuinely prepare cases to be won in court rather than negotiated away in a hallway. What that looks like in practice depends on your facts, but the questions we ask early tend to shape everything. Was the stop that led to the gun lawful? Did the officers have a real basis to search, or did they overreach? Whose gun was it, really — did you actually possess it, or is the state relying on it being near you? And does the enhancement the prosecutor wants to apply even fit what happened? Each of those is a place where a case can be weakened, narrowed, or knocked down. We build the defense around the answers, not around a generic script — and we build it as if we’re going to trial, because that’s how we get you the strongest position whether the case ends up in front of a jury or resolves before it.