We Know It’s Her Legal Right To Be Defended, But Does She Deserve It?

CONTENT WARNING: Drug Use, Child Abuse

I’m a public defender; I provide criminal defense to indigent clients facing deprivation of their rights and freedom.

I was representing a scumbag client. She was a meth addict who got high and beat the h*** out of her eight-year-old daughter with a belt after she accidentally broke mommy’s meth pipe. [Client] was charged with child cruelty and possession of meth, and, given her criminal record, the district attorney’s plea offer was three years of prison.I told [Client] that was the best offer I was going to get from the district attorney, and her options were to accept that offer or go to trial. Needless to say, [Client] didn’t want to go to prison for “giving that c*** what she deserved” and started freaking out at me. I further pointed out the mountain of evidence against her — primarily, the photographs of her daughter’s injuries, the bloody belt that was recovered from her bedroom, the broken meth pipe with meth residue in it, and the fact that her daughter was going to testify against her at trial.

After she was done cursing me out and calling me a “public pretender” and every other derogatory name she could think of, she fired me and somehow managed to hire a private attorney for the low price of $8,000. (I still don’t know how she managed to come up with that, but I have plenty of reliable guesses.)

The private attorney “guaranteed” her that he could win her case at trial, and that’s exactly what she chose to do.

Long story short, the private attorney clearly never even read this woman’s file before the trial. The trial lasted roughly three hours, the jury was literally out for only five minutes, and the judge sentenced her to ten years of prison.

It was a good day.