Question: What are Actual Possession and Constructive Possession in a Drug Charge in Savannah?
Answer: With drug charges, there are basically two kinds of charges that they can give you based on either actual possession—which means I have the drugs, they’re in my pocket, they’re on my person or I’m smoking it—or what they call constructive possession. Constructive possession usually occurs—I like to think of it with a car full of people. And say there’s four people in the car and there’s a bag in the car somewhere that contains marijuana or cocaine. No one claims ownership of the bag, no one immediately says, “Oh, that’s mine,” but everyone in the car might be able—it could be their bag, they might be able to get to it. The keys to constructive possession, where you can really help your case out a lot by knowing what they have to prove for constructive possession, is that in order to be convicted of that, you have to be, it has to be shown that you knew that the substance was there; that you knew that it was illegal and that you could actually get to it. So there’s all kinds of ways that you can get around the constructive possession that a lot of people miss.