ghetto v. ghetto

I’ve been doing some work this summer for an attorney who lives in another city. Let’s call him BB. I’m working on this case for BB right now that’s bothering me. Granted, I haven’t had all that many real cases to work on yet. Okay, okay, so this is only my third real case; I’m still very, very green. But still. This one bothers me.

This lady. I don’t know about her prior record, but somehow she wound up on probation for seven years. She’s a single mom with six children. SIX. Now for the last however many years she’s been on probation, she’s never once missed an appointment with her probation officer. She’s never once had a positive drug test. She’s made payments on her fines as she could along the way, but she’s not making much money. She lives in the ghetto with her six children. She has a job, but no car, and she’s been trying to work her way through the probation so she can move on with her life with her six kids.

Her younger brother lives with her, too. I don’t know how long he’s lived there, or why he lives there. But he lives there, in his sister’s house, with her and her six children.

She came home from work at an unusual time one day, just in time for the police to raid her house. The police, who were tipped off by a confidential informant, say they found drugs in the brother’s bedroom. The amount of drugs they found (I don’t know what kind of drugs) was sufficient to charge this lady with possession with intent to deliver.

The drugs don’t belong to her, she says, they must belong to her brother. She says she didn’t know they were in the house. She’s not using drugs–she’s never had a positive drug test. And she’s probably not selling drugs–she can’t even make her probation payments sometimes, and again, she has no car. And six children.

Did I mention she has six children? She has SIX CHILDREN.

Of course, the state files a motion to revoke her probation. This motion is going in front of the most pro-state judge in the county. According to BB, in all the years that this guy has been a judge, he’s never once granted a defendant’s motion to suppress evidence. Just an example. This judge basically thinks the police can do no wrong. And this lady is most certainly going to lose at her probation hearing and she’s going to go to prison for a while.

BB helped this lady once before when CPS came to take all of her children away for some reason. I don’t know the particulars, but BB was appointed to represent her, and he successfully kept them from taking her kids. In fact, the CPS case was so ridiculous that the judge scolded them in court. BB says it’s the only time he’s ever won against CPS in the first hearing.

Anyway, this lady came back to BB for this new problem, and he contacted me to research the possibility of compelling the state to disclose the identity of their confidential informant.

Spoiler alert: It’s a really long shot in her case. Long, as in almost impossible. Here’s why:

The informant was not a participant in the activity for which this lady was arrested. The informant wasn’t present for the arrest (as far as we know). The informant didn’t even arrange for this lady–the alleged drug dealer–to meet up with an undercover agent and sell him some drugs. This informant, whoever he or she is, basically picked up the phone and called the police and said, “Hey! This lady who lives in this house is a drug dealer,” or something to that effect. And the police went and got a search warrant and then raided her house and found drugs.

It’s not enough that the informant’s tip formed the probable cause that allowed the police to get a search warrant. It’s not enough that this lady wants to know why in the world this person singled her out. It’s not enough to speculate that the informant might give testimony relevant to determining this lady’s guilt or innocence. Some evidence has to be shown to prove that.

It would be enough if we could cast doubt on the informant’s credibility such that the judge feels that disclosing the informant’s identity is necessary for a fair trial. Of course, I have yet to learn how one can cast doubt on the credibility of some person who remains unknown and nameless.

In any event, this lady’s probation is going to get revoked.We can attack the charges against her in other ways, but while we work on it she’s going to sit in a cell.

The only person in the world that this lady has to help her out is her stepmother, who’s currently taking care of the six kids. The stepmother has back problems, though, and she called BB’s office the other day to tell him she can’t do this much longer. BB told her to try to hang on a little while, but if she can’t, all six kids will become wards of the state and they’ll go into foster care. The client will most likely have her parental rights terminated, and then the kids will either be adopted out or they’ll grow up in foster care. And if at least half of those kids don’t end up in the criminal justice system themselves at some point in the future, it’ll be a damn miracle.

I fail to see any justice being done here. Who is the victim in this case? Some imaginary user who would have eventually bought the drugs that were found? Of course not.

BB says that the other day he was talking to a friend of his who used to do criminal defense work, but he was unhappy with that and is now a prosecutor. BB asked his friend if he liked his new job better than his old one. The friend said that he had sure thought he would, because he thought he would perhaps be able to relate to his clients better as a prosecutor. But then he realized something: it’s a lot of the same people. The same people who needed his services as a criminal defense lawyer were now needing his services as a prosecutor. According to BB, it works like this: One person gets into trouble, and in order to get out of trouble, he offers to snitch on someone else. Then the next person in trouble offers to snitch on someone else. People cynically use the system as a weapon either to exact revenge for previous transgressions against them or to improve their own lot. Or both.

If an acceptable solution to this exists, I certainly don’t know what it is. I also don’t know if this is a problem that is specific only to this city, but I suspect it’s probably happening to some degree everywhere. Maybe it was naive of me to not have thought critically about the justice system in this way before now. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m not all that surprised to learn about this sort of abuse of the system. It’s not right, and now this lady and her six children are going to pay for it.