- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
"I should have advised her to plead no contest. Instead I said she should get a lawyer, which means she'll now wait for the court to appoint someone and come back here -- if she makes it -- to the courthouse a second time to file a plea."
But then, you would have been giving her legal advice, which as a non-lawyer you are neither qualified nor permitted by law to do. Of course with indigent, marginalized persons like Taeja this sort of thing is largely tolerated and goes on all the time. But you did the right thing. The consequences if she failed to show up would hardly be worse than pleading no contest, and court-appointed attorneys deal with flaky clients all the time. Even in a simple shoplifting case, she needs to have an attorney to represent her.
To the person who said she would do well in a 12-step program, how do you know? What are the chances her abusive boyfriend would let her attend 12-step if he won't even let her call her mentor? What she needs is to take some initiative and ditch the guy and genuinely seek out any kind of legitimate help, which is going to take some initiative on her part. Otherwise there's a good chance that the only intervention she's going to get is in an institution.
