License To Breed

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t have kids, nor do I want them. And I’m at the age where my friends start having kids on purpose (unlike college where they had kids on accident). I have two reasons for not wanting kids. The first is very selfish. I like my lifestyle, and having a kid would mess it up. The second is that I can barely run my own life half the time, I can’t be held responsible for another life.

Where am I going with this? I was in juvenile court today, and if you’ve never done juvenile court, its an interesting experience. Matlock had a good post earlier this month covering just how absurd the juvenile court system can be.The kid today is a good kid. And that’s not some defense attorney B.S., he really is. He screwed up once, got put on probation and has been doing fine since. He’s smart, he gets good grades, he’s a good athlete at school, and he wants to go to college and do something with his life.

The problem is the kid’s family. They’re poor and live in a rural county. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being poor and rural, not my lifestyle of choice, but there’s nothing bad about it. But my kid is determined to not to end up being poor and living in Hicksville, Texas. The kid looks at the way his parents live and says “I don’t want to be like that.”But I swear that these parents don’t want to see their kid succeed. I can’t prove it, but deep down I know it. They have these subtle ways of trying to screw the kid up. I have no idea why they wouldn’t want their kid to succeed. I would think if I was poor, I’d really push my hypothetical kids to be the best they could be, so they can make money and take care of me.

It frustrates me to no end, because this is the only juvenile I’ve ever had who’s told me that he wants to go to college. The majority of them have no interest in anything outside smoking dope and petty theft. When I see one kid that A) has a ton of potential and B) actually wants to do something with his life, it’s just sad that the only people encouraging him people like myself, the juvenile probation officer, and the judge. Basically, people in “the system” not his family.

Every so often I get a kid from a good family who decides to screw up. But with most of the juveniles I get, the parents are well know to law enforcement and the kids are just following in Mommy or Daddy’s footsteps. I know its not feasible, or legal, but every time I go to juvenile court, it makes me think there needs to be some of licensing program to be parents.

Money for Nothing

I promise I’ll get back to writing about criminal related stuff, I just haven’t had anything good lately. Just run of the mill crimes, nothing worth writing home (or on the interwebs) about.

So right now myself and the soon-to-be Mrs. BadCourtThingy are in the process of buying a house. And since neither of us are independently wealthy, we went to the bank to get a loan. We tell the nice mortgage lady all our information, and she tells us that we’re pre-qualified for almost $300,000. We looked at each other and laughed.

Now, both of us well educated professions who make a decent living, we don’t have any kids, we have good credit, and apart from my law school loans, we really don’t have any debt. But 300 large? That’s just nuts. In theory, we could afford it. We just couldn’t afford put furniture in the house or groceries in the fridge. And I like to eat.

Finally, I ask the lady, “Aren’t loans like this one of the reasons the housing and lending market is so bad right now?”

She tells me it has to do with adjustable rate mortgages and the subprime meltdown and other such things that I know about, but don’t completely understand. I don’t really have a head for numbers, the soon-to-be Mrs. BadCourtThingy is the brains of our operation.

And the mortgage lady is probably completely right that a lot of the problem has to do with the subprime market and adjustable rate mortgages; but I have to think that giving people, even people with good credit and good jobs, twice the amount of money they can really afford is a bad idea.

The Perfect Client

Occasionally, I end up getting appointed as a guardian or attorney ad litem on CPS cases.  Family law is not my idea of a good time, but I take the cases without complaint for a couple of reasons.  First off, it’s some extra money.  Always nice.  I have a fiancee with expensive tastes.  Secondly, there are plenty of more experienced attorneys that the judge could appoint.  So to me, I really appreciate that the judge is appointing me even though I’m a newbie.  I feel like the judge thinks I can handle it.  Or, maybe none of the older attorneys want to bother with it and I’m the only one who will accept the appointments without complaint.  But I like to think its the former.

I was recently appointed to be an attorney ad litem for a 2 month old baby.  When I went to talk with his mother, I had to hold the baby, even though I reminded the mother that she had seen me drop my cell phone four times in five minutes.  As I sat there, ackwardly holding the baby, I realized that he might just be the perfect client.  Consider:

• He’ll have to whatever I saw.
• He doesn’t think he knows more about the law than I do.
• Won’t lie to me.
• Will show up for court when he’s supposed to.
• Don’t have to go to jail to see him.

Really, I don’t see a downside.  Other than the baby possibly throwing up on me while I’m holding him.

Some of the items of my list lead me to my next question.  Is there any other profession out there, that members of the general public think they can do on their own?  If my car needs anything other than an oil change or to rotate the tires, I take it to my mechanic and let him handle it.  When I’m sick, I go to my doctor.  He’s the one who went to medical school for god knows how many years, not me.  Heck, I don’t even tell the kid working the fry machine how to do his job.  Afterall, the fry manager is a graduate of Hamburger University.  I didn’t attend.

So why is it that any person off the street who caught the last 20 minutes of The Firm on cable, thinks they know how to be an attorney?  To be fair, I have had a couple clients who have been through the system so many times they probably do know more than me.  But I’ve also had people who, on the first visit with them, tell me that I have to do X, Y, and Z because they know its the law.  Nine times out of ten, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

I wouldn’t tell my doctor how to do a heart transplant on me.  So why does someone else think they can tell me how to write a suppression motion?  I don’t get it.

It Figures

The week that blog traffic gets a boost is the week that I’m way too busy to provide any new content.

On the 10th, Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice mentioned my humble little blawg in a post noting that Texas seems to have an abundance of blawggers.  He went on to note that I have “inexplicably chosen to post anonymously, and that Texas blawggers don’t really focus on anything outside of the Great State of Texas.  Then on the 14, Grits for Breakfest commented on Scott’s orgininal post, so there I was again.

To deal with the latter comment first.  Scott is absolutely correct when he says, “I just think they don’t give a hoot about what happens in foreign lands, like the United States of America.”  There’s enough going on in Texas.  Why worry about what the Okies, or God-forbid, the yankees are doing?

My main reason for the secret identity is that I felt it would be just be easier.  This was never intended as a marketing tool or anything along those lines, just a way to for me to write about being a lawyer and occasionally blow off some steam.

So my question for my small readership is, do you really care who I am?

And I promise I’ll post more than once a week.  Or at least, I promise I’ll try to.

There’s No Justice Like Mob Justice

This isn’t exactly related to being a lawyer, but it is criminal justice related. According to the Houston Chronicle:

DALLAS — A man accused of raping a woman at knifepoint in a Dallas apartment was beaten by an angry group of people and shot at least twice, authorities said.

The 26-year-old man, who was not identified, underwent surgery Friday after being hit with a baseball bat and shot, apparently once in the head, according to The Dallas Morning News. Authorities did not immediately know the suspect’s condition on Saturday.

—

Authorities said he sexually assaulted the woman, and some of the children fled. After he laid down the knife and started getting dressed, the woman ran outside to tell her boyfriend.

The boyfriend and some others confronted the suspect in the apartment, and a fight began. Police said the fight led out into the parking lot, with an unknown number of people taking part.

The suspect in the rape eventually broke free and ran into another apartment, where he was shot.

Authorities were investigating the melee that followed the alleged assault.

As I tell my friends who aren’t fortunate enough to live here, don’t mess with Texas isn’t just about not littering. My favorite part of the story are the comments from people basically saying people in Dallas are pansies because they didn’t finish the guy off, like the Houstonites (or Houstonians, I don’t know which is correct) would have.

There’s also all the comments along the line that “its too bad he lived, some bleeding heart judge will give him probation” or “the person who shot him will get in more trouble than the rapist.” I’ve never practiced in Harris County, so I have no idea what of sentences the judges and juries hand out. I have a hard time believing this suspect here would get probation

I think the comments go to a bigger problem though, of how the public views the criminal court system; that its just a revolving door system where the prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges just cycle career criminals through the system, give them a slap on the wrist and send them back out to commit more crimes. If the public puts more faith in mob justice than the justice system to get the job done, what does that say about the US justice system?

But, people are generally pretty ignorant about how the court system works. When there;s more people that can name the nine dwarves than people who can name the nine US Supreme Court Justices, Joe Six-Pack off the street might not be the best person to offer an informed opinion on what needs to be fixed with the Courts. Despite what people may want, it just isn’t possible to throw everyone in TDC and give them the death penalty. I suppose us attorneys have a duty to explain to lay people how the courts work and why certain things happen, but some lawyer telling you about the courts is a lot less exciting than Law & Order, and makes you think a lot more. Its easier to assume everything is wrapped up in an hour and the good guys always win.

That being said, that alleged rapist is damn lucky he’s not dead.