Just left the jail from the AM first appearance calendar. One inmate refused to give any information or to accept representation from my colleague when she offered her services. He said that he wants drug treatment and when she told him that that wasn’t an option, he refused to talk any more. At the podium, she told the judge that he declined representation and was only interested in drug treatment.
We get a lot of people asking for drug treatment who really just think that it’s a way to divert their case from the regular trial calendar. Maybe in felony court– I don’t know– but at the misdemeanor level, people come and go with such regularity and in such great number that unless there’s a mental health issue, we can’t offer them anything beyond the jail’s N.A. meetings and some information about local charities. This fellow seemed a bit different, because he told the judge that he wanted drug treatment and said “and if you let me out, I won’t come back to court.” That said, the judge (who isn’t actually at the jail, but conducts court via video from the courthouse) asked the defendant whether he wanted to have a preliminary hearing or to bind his case over to State Court. The defendant said State Court and the judge started to address bond.
Something about this guy made me think that he really wanted help, and wasn’t just trying to be difficult. Mainly it was his apparent reluctance to leave jail unless it was to enter drug treatment. I’ve seen one man stay in jail an extra six weeks while a judge had his father come to court and order the father to release the son’s disability checks– all because the son was afraid to leave jail without going to a treatment facility, and he needed money for that.
So I told the defendant “If you don’t want to get out, a preliminary hearing takes longer.” He got it at once, faced the camera and said “Your Honor, I changed my mind. I want the hearing.” While the judge ordered the hearing, the defendant looked at me in apparent shock and asked “Why did you do that?” I shrugged. “You helped me. Why?” I shrugged again and said, “Well, you seemed to want to stay in jail. I guess you can’t get drugs here, so it seemed like you needed to know how to stay longer.” He nodded and thanked me, still amazed.
Not that I do this job for appreciation, but it is nice to know that there are times that I can actually help someone in a substantive way, and I’d like to think I did so today. Whether the extra two weeks in jail will do any good or not, maybe just knowing that someone thought that he was worth a minute of my time– not as a lawyer, but just as a person– will give him some amount of resolve to keep looking for the next person who might think so. Or maybe it will give him a bit of self-worth that lets him reject the next person who wants to pull him back into a lifestyle that he desperately wants out of. Who knows? But maybe….
