What's my winning percentage?

Prosecutors like to talk about winning over 90% of their trials. What that ignores is that they pick the cases they take to trial. I, like every defense lawyer, regularly get sweetheart offers on marginal cases. That leaves the cases where there's either a huge difference of opinion or, more often, no real defense and a client who won't face reality.

Last year I had a kid who broke into the local burger stand and swiped some change and a case of Frappucinos (maybe we should have made him drink them as punishment, but anyway....) He goes to the cop shop a block away, walks up to the first uniform he sees, and says:

"I'm turning myself in."

"For what?"

"I just robbed Joe's Burgers."

"Wait right there...[radio] Hey Barney! Drive by Joe's Burgers and see if somebody broke into it!"

"[radio] Yeah, the window's busted and some jerk pried the till! There's most of a case of Frappucinos across the alley here too!"

"You have the right to remain silent....."

"Never mind all that, I DID IT!"


When this works its way through the system, the prosecutor really doesn't want to spend time on the trial. Young Einstein, on the other hand, wants his day in court. No matter what the prosecutor offers to drop, he's going to trial!

I, of course, am scratching my head for something to say in his defense. "My mom's on crank and last I heard my dad was in prison again" may be true but is an argument for sentencing, not guilt.

Naturally, this got added to the prosecutor's winning percentage. Kid ended up convicted of a lot more than he would have if he'd made a deal.

Contrast this with the Great Crow Caper. My client in that one had a pet crow that lived in a cage on his porch. The door stayed open except at night (to protect him from raccoons) and the crow would come out, fly around, chase thrown bottle caps, sit on my client's shoulder, and eventually hop back into his cage to rest.

Problem is that what my client saw as a happy friendship was seen by the State as "keeping captive wildlife without a permit". The game wardens eventually got a warrant to seize the bird. Acting on the warrant, they search the client's whole house (for the record, it is a foul libel that game wardens are hired from the guys who flunked the State Patrol IQ exam), finding funny white powders in the back bedroom along with a variety of other illicit materials. This leads to the client being charged with a bunch of drug crimes good for about five years in the concrete hotel.

I file a suppression motion, basically arguing that there was no need to toss the entire house to confiscate a bird off the porch. Two days before the hearing, the prosecutor calls and offers to reduce everything to a misdemeanor possession of marijuana and two days in jail. After some arm twisting, my client accepts.

Technically, the prosecutor got to put that one in the "win" column. After all, my client was convicted of a crime. On the other hand, a weekend in jail is a big improvement over five years in prison. Personally, I felt good about the result.

Put your kid first dammit!

One of the toughest situations for a juvenile defender to deal with is one where the client is the subject of a custody fight between the parents. Each parent wants to blame the other for the fact that the kid is in trouble, each wants to bring all the allegations from the custody battle up in Juvenile Court, and each wants to be in control of what happens with the kid.

It's a given that the kid has to make his/her own decisions about the case. In Juvenile Court, though, they tend to rely on their parents to understand this scary part of the adult world. If the parents are fighting over the kid's future already, it gets really confusing for the kid.

I've seen studies that indicate that parents who engage in protracted custody disputes have most of the symptoms of personality disorders. It's one reason I quit taking family law cases several years ago- I'd rather take the afternoon off than spend it on something like that.

So here I go again forcing boundaries on parents who have none of their own. God, it gets tiring.