Post by Big B on Aug 16, 2015 6:57:49 GMT
When facing jail time (even for a misdemeanor) you have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney and are declared "indigent", the court is obligated to appoint you an attorney.
This Is What Justice Looks Like in Many Small Towns Across America
By Rebecca McCray | Takepart.com
August 14, 2015 8:21 AM
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After four years with the Army in Iraq, Jake Christie would self-medicate his PTSD with the bottle. It didn’t usually end well. One night in 2014, four years after he was honorably discharged, he got into a fight with another regular at a local watering hole near his home in Port Royal, South Carolina. The owner kicked them out and called the police, who found Christie in the parking lot. They told him to take a cab home and not come back. He obliged but remembered halfway there that he had left his messenger bag with his laptop and community college textbooks in his car, back in the parking lot. He told the cab driver to turn around.
Christie heard a gruff voice as he reached into the backseat of his car to grab his bag: “You weren’t supposed to come back.” It was the police officer from before. He told Christie he was headed to jail, but Christie protested, saying he had no intention of returning to the bar or driving. “I’m not going to jail,” he told the cop. The officer pushed him against the car and spun him around to grab his wrists and cuff him. Perhaps as a symptom of his PTSD—“Something went wonky,” he says—Christie flipped out when he felt the officer’s hands on him, and both went to the ground. The scuffle ended when the officer hit Christie twice with his Taser. Christie was charged with trespassing and resisting arrest. (Christie’s name has been changed out of respect for his fear of retaliation by local police for speaking publicly.)
Several weeks later, he found himself in front of Justice James A. Grimsley III at Port Royal Municipal Court. Down near the water in Beaufort County, the local court is tucked inside the city’s redbrick Town Hall.
Together, the charges carried a sentence of up to 60 days in jail, if found guilty, or $700 in fines. “I told them I wanted a lawyer,” Christie, now 40, said. “But the judge said no—if you request a jury trial, you either have to [represent] yourself or pay for a lawyer.” Christie was barely getting by on disability checks of $420 a month from the Department of Veterans Affairs; his PTSD made work impossible. His income, which was below the federal poverty level, made him eligible for state-appointed counsel. Paying for a lawyer was out of the question, but the judge, unmoved, denied him his constitutional right to an attorney. (Grimsley, a local attorney, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
“I just had this sinking feeling when the judge said no,” Christie told TakePart. “The thought of being away from my family, my daughter, in jail…. I just knew it would kill my mom.”
A request to order Grimsley to provide Christie with counsel went unresolved, but he was offered a plea deal and ended up paying a fine. Christie has since quit drinking, but apart from trips to his psychiatrist at the VA, he doesn’t leave home much these days. It’s not just the sensitivity to crowds and loud noises that keeps him in the house he shares with his mother and daughter: Christie is afraid of getting another misdemeanor ticket that could land him before a judge at the local municipal court.
“I figure it’s hard for them to hem me up if I’m at home,” Christie said. “I just don’t want to put myself or my family through any of that anymore.”
Like many states across the country, South Carolina tasks municipal courts with handling low-level offenses—from traffic tickets to more serious criminal misdemeanor charges, such as drug possession, minor assault, and theft. As in many of these courts nationwide, indigent defendants in South Carolina’s 212 municipal courts routinely plead guilty to minor charges without understanding—sometimes without even being informed of—their right to a legal counsel, free of charge. Christie and many others have been denied counsel even though their liberty was at stake—in spite of the U.S. Supreme Court’s determination in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963 that the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to professional counsel regardless of their ability to pay for it.
While harsher crimes that carry felony sentences make the news, citizens are most likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system through misdemeanor courts, also called courts of limited jurisdiction. According to the National Center for State Courts, there are 14,000 to 16,000 such courts across 46 states. In 2009, these courts handled 70 million cases.
Continue reading at: news.yahoo.com/justice-looks-many-small-towns-across-america-122112041.html
This Is What Justice Looks Like in Many Small Towns Across America
By Rebecca McCray | Takepart.com
August 14, 2015 8:21 AM
After four years with the Army in Iraq, Jake Christie would self-medicate his PTSD with the bottle. It didn’t usually end well. One night in 2014, four years after he was honorably discharged, he got into a fight with another regular at a local watering hole near his home in Port Royal, South Carolina. The owner kicked them out and called the police, who found Christie in the parking lot. They told him to take a cab home and not come back. He obliged but remembered halfway there that he had left his messenger bag with his laptop and community college textbooks in his car, back in the parking lot. He told the cab driver to turn around.
Christie heard a gruff voice as he reached into the backseat of his car to grab his bag: “You weren’t supposed to come back.” It was the police officer from before. He told Christie he was headed to jail, but Christie protested, saying he had no intention of returning to the bar or driving. “I’m not going to jail,” he told the cop. The officer pushed him against the car and spun him around to grab his wrists and cuff him. Perhaps as a symptom of his PTSD—“Something went wonky,” he says—Christie flipped out when he felt the officer’s hands on him, and both went to the ground. The scuffle ended when the officer hit Christie twice with his Taser. Christie was charged with trespassing and resisting arrest. (Christie’s name has been changed out of respect for his fear of retaliation by local police for speaking publicly.)
Several weeks later, he found himself in front of Justice James A. Grimsley III at Port Royal Municipal Court. Down near the water in Beaufort County, the local court is tucked inside the city’s redbrick Town Hall.
Together, the charges carried a sentence of up to 60 days in jail, if found guilty, or $700 in fines. “I told them I wanted a lawyer,” Christie, now 40, said. “But the judge said no—if you request a jury trial, you either have to [represent] yourself or pay for a lawyer.” Christie was barely getting by on disability checks of $420 a month from the Department of Veterans Affairs; his PTSD made work impossible. His income, which was below the federal poverty level, made him eligible for state-appointed counsel. Paying for a lawyer was out of the question, but the judge, unmoved, denied him his constitutional right to an attorney. (Grimsley, a local attorney, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
“I just had this sinking feeling when the judge said no,” Christie told TakePart. “The thought of being away from my family, my daughter, in jail…. I just knew it would kill my mom.”
A request to order Grimsley to provide Christie with counsel went unresolved, but he was offered a plea deal and ended up paying a fine. Christie has since quit drinking, but apart from trips to his psychiatrist at the VA, he doesn’t leave home much these days. It’s not just the sensitivity to crowds and loud noises that keeps him in the house he shares with his mother and daughter: Christie is afraid of getting another misdemeanor ticket that could land him before a judge at the local municipal court.
“I figure it’s hard for them to hem me up if I’m at home,” Christie said. “I just don’t want to put myself or my family through any of that anymore.”
Like many states across the country, South Carolina tasks municipal courts with handling low-level offenses—from traffic tickets to more serious criminal misdemeanor charges, such as drug possession, minor assault, and theft. As in many of these courts nationwide, indigent defendants in South Carolina’s 212 municipal courts routinely plead guilty to minor charges without understanding—sometimes without even being informed of—their right to a legal counsel, free of charge. Christie and many others have been denied counsel even though their liberty was at stake—in spite of the U.S. Supreme Court’s determination in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963 that the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to professional counsel regardless of their ability to pay for it.
While harsher crimes that carry felony sentences make the news, citizens are most likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system through misdemeanor courts, also called courts of limited jurisdiction. According to the National Center for State Courts, there are 14,000 to 16,000 such courts across 46 states. In 2009, these courts handled 70 million cases.
Continue reading at: news.yahoo.com/justice-looks-many-small-towns-across-america-122112041.html
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