It is important to know what an assault if unfortunately someone around you gets accused of such guilt. Knowing everything about this will help you to choose and decide the lawyer you will have to hire to fight in defense. You will know what to expect from him, you will need an experienced criminal defense lawyer for your friend who will be able to pull you out from this allegation.
To define the assault, Wikipedia has stated that “an assault is carried out by a threat of bodily harm coupled with an apparent, present ability to cause the harm. It is both a crime and a tort and therefore, may result in either criminal and/or civil liability. Generally the common law definition is the same in criminal and tort law”. Through this definition it is clear to understand that it is a danger to one person from the other, physically and the possibility of a person harming physically to another person. It is a crime.
This is a very serious allegation, it can pull you in a trial even sue you for social compensations so it gets very important for you to hire a lawyer or contact to one to get advice about what should be done as soon as possible. This is a law in many countries to take legal action about a person who try to harm any other one whether physical contact have been made or not, the action will be taken just because of a complaint. This law has been made to prevent people attacking each other violently, this is why this law acts very soon and only a threat will be consider a complete assault. When a person carry out a gun and point it to kill any other person and he will be afraid of that it will be considered an assault without touching.
Trial because of assault can be pull out in a criminal case for very simple reasons and very big one, it can be charged as misdemeanors to attempt murder, it will have different accusations or sentencing enhancement. It can be charged in many different ways depends on the situation in which the crime has been done, which means because of pointing out the weapon the allegation will enhance for using weapon and sentencing enhancement will also increase and it will make the crime a criminal act.