Like many former lawyers, I remember representing a client whose case embodied such a gross miscarriage of justice that I now use it as an example to explain the unfairness of the law to others. My client, whom I’ll call Bobby, was an elderly man with a recent traumatic brain injury that had left him disabled and unable to find stable housing. I was working with him to secure a place in assisted housing and was in contact with him on an almost daily basis. At some point, though, for about a week, he vanished—no notice, no clue regarding his whereabouts. He just disappeared.
When Bobby finally arrived back in my office, he told me that he had been arrested. He had been robbed, and during the robbery his prescription heart medication was taken. The robbers, presumably after discovering it was not a drug with street value, threw his prescription onto the street in front of him. A witness to the attack had called the police, but when they arrived the robbers were long gone. Bobby, however, was still at the scene trying to pick up his medicine from the ground. Bobby was arrested by the officers for possession of prescription medicine outside of a proper container.
Since the non-profit organization that I worked for couldn’t handle criminal cases, Bobby was assigned a public defender. He sat in jail for a few days before meeting with his lawyer, who explained that if Bobby pled guilty, he would be placed on probation for a year and the charge would be dropped at the end of that time. Bobby, who wanted to leave jail as soon as possible, agreed to this and thought that the matter was resolved.
As Bobby told me this story, I immediately began to worry about his housing situation. The assisted housing facility would not allow people who were on probation to reside there. After several calls with his public defender, I realized that there was not much that could be done. Bobby, after all, had admitted his guilt in front of a judge and had waived any rights he had to appeal. So he had to wait a year, living in substandard housing, before he would be eligible for the assistance he desperately needed, all because he had made his guilty plea without understanding the full consequences.
“Defendants don’t know what’s what,” said Dan Canon, author of the new book Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class, when discussing Bobby’s situation with me. “You take a poor or working-class person that gets swept into the criminal justice system and is accused of a felony or something like that and the defense attorney is like, ‘You need to plea…’ and they can’t weigh the strengths and weaknesses of their case—they can’t tell what’s a good deal and what’s a bad deal.”