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If a jailed client tells you what the law is, would you listen?
Or do you refuse the “other” who you’ve determined isn’t as smart as you — after all, they’re not trained attorneys and are, perhaps, uneducated.
Wrong, get over yourself.
The lesson of this story is to be in the present, to be aware. Don’t be afraid to take a back seat to an “ordinary person.”
When is this learned? When you realize you failed to. Then, sadly, it’s too late. Best to have the eyes and the foresight to appreciate when you are being told, even from someone not as “educated” as you.
Here is a story as told to me almost thirty years ago.
“The client was a real funny guy, George, who loved to laugh.”
George was in jail for failing to show at a misdemeanor trial for which he was convicted; he had been convicted in absentia, meaning he didn’t show up for trial, the conviction was a misdemeanor stalking charge against a girl he had crush on.
But in order to be tried in absentia, you have to be given actual notice. That he did not get.
“When we met in the jail, he told me, in a most exaggerated southern Indiana drawl, that by not informing him at the last pretrial of the trail date before he left, usually by a card signed by the judge, both the lawyer and the court failed to follow the rules and he would hire me if
‘I would listen’ and show me how ‘I could get his case overturned, like boom.’”
“Well, in those days, when I first started out, they didn’t have the vast online resources we do today, and I couldn’t afford the special WestLaw Terminal at $200-plus dollars an hour, so I had to hit the books at the law library.
I found the case, filed a motion with the good Judge who quickly overturned the case, ruling that, ‘Defendant did not have actual notice of the trial date.’
Problem was he did 24 days in jail. The State was not going to retry it, so it was a
double victory.”
The moral of the story?
Listen to your clients. They may know more than you.
How will you know?
When it’s plain as the nose on your face.•
__________
Roy Graham is a criminal and family lawyer in Bloomington. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
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