No Happy Endings

A while back I wrote about a kid I had in juvenile court. He’s the bright kid with the parents holding him back.  He’s also the one that everyone (meaning myself and everyone on the State’s side) realized his potential and bent over backwards for him.

Unfortunately, he screwed up again.

He had a really good placement for him and he didn’t want to go.  I certainly understand why he didn’t want to go.  Who would really want to go someplace they had never been, away from their family, because a bunch of people you don’t know say you have to?  So the really good placement is out the window and instead the judge has ordered him to boot camp.

The kicker is, when I talked to him before court, he didn’t give me the usual “why is everyone picking on me” B.S. that most of my kids give me.  He knew he messed up and that he was going to have to pay the piper and he’s smart enough to know that trying to weasel out of it isn’t going to fly.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to him after boot camp is over.  He needs to go to school, he’s easily smart enough to go to college and (for the most part) he’s got the drive to make something of himself.  I just hope that he gets the opportunity to break the cycle of poverty.

Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner

Since my beloved Detroit Tigers have started the season by going 0 - 7, it’s up to me to pick up the slack and get some wins.  I got my first win at a jury trial.  Only it was as a prosecutor. And it was against a Pro Se Defendant.

Occasionally, I get asked to be a special prosecutor on Class C cases. This one was a trucker who got clocked going way to fast, and decided that even after a very reasonable offer he wanted to take it to trial and represent himself.

I’m not sure why he didn’t hire an attorney if he wanted to fight the ticket. He’s a trucker, he’s got a CDL, and having a ticket on your CDL, as I’ve been lead to understand, is not a good thing for your insurance or your employment. But whatever reason, he should have had one. The trial didn’t go well for him at all.

It could be a lesson for all the non-lawyers who think that just because they watch Law & Order, they can be an attorney. Its not that the defendant here wasn’t a smart guy. I spoke with him in pre-trial and before the trial started, and he seemed like he’s at least average intelligence. But without legal training, he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to conduct an effective cross, he didn’t know how to introduce evidence. Its not rocket science, but without a legal education and some on-the-job training, most people wouldn’t know how to do it.

I’m happy with the win, its kind of fun to be the prosecutor, for a change of pace. Even though it was my first win, I decided to hold off on any celebration. I’m saving that for my first ‘not guilty.’

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.

Personality Types

In my fairly short time being a criminal defense attorney, I’ve noticed you can basically break clients down into four categories.

1. Admits they’re is guilty, just wants a deal.
2. Admits they did the crime, but it was justified, ie self defense.
3. Swears they’re innocent, and actually are innocent.
4. Swears they’re innocent, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Most of the clients fall into the first category. They know the screwed up, they know there’s no point in wasting everyone’s time and potentially getting a harsher sentence from a jury. Its just easier to take a plea. All they want from their attorney is the best deal possible.

I’ve only come across a few people that claim they have a legal reason for what they did. That’s not to say self-defense, duress, or any of the other justifications under the law don’t happen. They just haven’t happened to my clients. I did try a case where one of my defenses was self-defense. But, the client was Billy from the post below. He wasn’t popular with the jurors. One day I’ll write the story of that trial.

Category number three hasn’t happened to me. I’m sure it will one day, but it hasn’t yet.

The fourth category of clients interest me the most. I’ve had plenty of clients who have told me they’re innocent to begin with, only to end up taking a plea offer. I’m not quite sure why they have to convince me that they’re innocent. Maybe they assume that I’ll work extra hard for them I think they’re innocent and wrongfully accused. I work equally hard for all my clients. Eventually they’ll come around, say they did it, and take whatever deal has been negotiated. Some of them even take the plea, tell the judge they’re guilty, and then after the plea still swear up and down they’re going to be wrongfully imprisoned.

Case in point. The client, a homeless gentleman gets stopped by the police because he matches the description of a guy who stole a bike. He admits he took the bike, and takes the police to where he hid it. The owner of the bike doesn’t want to press charges, and it should have been done. But, at the location where he stashed the bike, the police also found some expensive power tools that were brand new, and still had the price tags on them. Naturally, the police wondered how a guy who couldn’t afford to eat, could afford a new, top of the line drill. A fair question.

When the police go to the hardware store, before they can even ask any questions, the clerk gives a description of my guy and tells them a drill (the same time my guy had) and some other tools that my guy was found with were missing. He gets arrested, duh.

By the time I get appointed and talk with the guy, his story is that someone (he doesn’t know who) gave him the tools, and he’s not going to take a deal. The offer from the D.A. was pretty reasonable considering his extensive rap sheet and the fact he had only been out of prison for a few months before this crime. But, he swears to me he’s innocent. I tell him what exactly the police have against him and that taking this to trial isn’t a smart idea. He says he wants to go to trial.

I suppose its possible that if I found twelve jurors as dumb as my client, I might be able to get him off. I also suppose its possible that some random guy off the street gave my client the stolen tools and its a mere coincidence that tools were missing after my client was in the store. And I suppose its also possible I could win the lotto and go out with Jessica Alba on the same day. But I don’t see any of those things as very likely.

Of course, after he spent a couple more weeks in jail, he tells me that he did in fact steal the tools and he’d like me to work out a deal for him. I guess I’ll have to wait a while longer until I get a truly innocent client.

What I Didn’t Learn In Law School, Pt 1

I’m pre-emptively labeling this as part one, because things I’ve learned on the job, that I never learned in law school will be revisited again.

Over at The Defense Perspective, Stephen Gustitis had a post about using a polygraph as a method of client control. His reasoning goes, criminal clients often refuse to face the facts, even if the prosecution has a mountain of evidence against them. Since they won’t face reality, the client will insist on a course of action where the only outcome is the client spending time in prison, when they could have taken an offer and received less time or probation. If you give the client a polygraph, there’s two potentially positive outcomes for the attorney. The client passes and you can go to the prosecutor with that tidbit of information. Or, the client fails and will (hopefully) decide to face reality.

Where am I going with this? Client control. Extremely important and a subject that was never covered during my law school education. Even in my “practical law” classes when we’d have to roll-play being a client, no one was even the client who wouldn’t take the great deal you worked out for him. Or the client with mental illness. Or the client that just flat out ignores you. Everyone would behave like an attorney talking to another attorney. That’s not the fault of the students, they don’t know how else to behave.

My first experience with an out of control client came at my first trial. Up until then, pretty much all my clients just wanted me to get them a deal. The ones that were trouble, my boss would handle, since he has a lot more experience than I do. But, this one was a misdemeanor, and should have been a pretty easy case for the defense. The first time meeting the defendant was right after I was appointed to him. I asked him how he wanted to handle the case, if he wanted me to work something out with the County Attorney or if we needed to set it for trial. His response was something along the lines of, “I don’t want to hear nothing about a deal, we’re taking this thing to trial.” He probably also used a fair amount of profanity for that one sentence as well.

Whenever I’d meet with or talk to the defendant, we’ll call him Billy, he tended to have a lot of trouble staying on topic. I’d ask him a question and he’d give me a long rambling answer, and I use the word “answer” in the loosest sense of the word.  It was usually a jumble of semi-coherent thoughts about how the county was out to get him, or how the state of Texas was out to get him, or that I wasn’t doing my job, and so on.  He’d always end his diatribe by saying, “We’ve got to get this information out at trial, so the jury knows the truth.”  I’d repeatedly tell him that we had a very simple, and winnable case, and if we started talking about how the state of Texas is screwing him over, the jury would think we’re trying to bullshit them, and wouldn’t appricate that.  He’d agree with me, and then go right back to ignoring whatever I said.

Quite frankly, I had no idea what to do with this guy.  There was nothing in any of my law school classes that even remotely prepared me for dealing with a guy like this.  Stephen’s above suggestion of giving him a polygraph wouldn’t apply since A) Billy had no means to afford a polygraph; and B) our defense was that he had legal authority to commit the acts, not that he didn’t do it.  I couldn’t remind him that going to trial costs extra, since he was a court appointee.  In short, I was stuck.  All I could do was keep telling him that its very easy to talk your way into jail.

The trial was an unmitigated disaster.  Even though the prosecutor, the judge, and my fiancee said I did a good job, I felt like I had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  Billy took the stand, with my blessing.  I told him to testify for two reasons.  First off, he had been waiting five months to tell his side of the story.  There was no way in hell he wasn’t going to get up there and testify about how the county, the judge, the prosecutor, and the great state of Texas were out to get him.  This was going to be his moment in the sun.  It was like Festivus came early for him, he got to air all his grievances.  After the prosecutor got done with Billy, I just wanted to lay my head on the table and wave the white flag.  The second reason I told him to testify was that we’d get two extra defenses if he took the stand.  If I had to do it again, I’d probably tell him not to take the stand, but I know he wouldn’t listen to me.

Was there anything I could have done to keep Billy under control?   I’m not entirely sure.  But I do know that law school does a poor job of preparing people for difficult clients.  I know the rebuttal.  You’re a criminal defense attorney in a rural county.  You’re not exactly dealing with the best and the brightest who are going to listen.  And that’s true, but a class on client management would be very beneficial to new attorneys.