10 March 2010

A very short day in Judge Mott's court this morning. I had one pretrial conference scheduled. Since we took depositions yesterday and it is clear to me that my client will be convicted, we negotiated a plea and set a plea date out so he could get his evaluation at Capstone. Alcohol seems to be the issue with him and the mother of his child. He has a record and we talked about the fact that if he didn't drink he wouldn't have one. This is where the social work part of defense counsel comes in. If you represent someone for a crime, you know the cause of the problem, and you know where he can go to at least begin to get some assistance, then part of representing someone, it seems to me, is to do what you can to help him. And, if he is amenable and understands that what you recommend is in his best interest and he appears to have a modicum of intelligence and capacity, and it might mean some jail time for him, so be it. Success is not necessarily measured in the shortness of the jail time.