Four conversations
They've got a bunch of new prosecutors, and this one I
hadn't met before. My client Charlie and
a friend had walked out of Macy's with merchandise worth $1,020, so I wanted a
misdemeanor, a quest complicated by the 60 cycles on his rap sheet. But then all that stood between him and that
was a Jefferson, so when the discovery listed the items that were supposedly
stolen, and each "price" was in round numbers -- $120, $300, $360 -- my
suspicions were aroused. I went up to
Macy's and confirmed what any woman reading this post already knows: In a store like Macy's, the price tag will
always give the list price, and the list price will never be the price you pay
for it; it exists only to persuade gullible customers that they're getting a
really big deal by paying the "sale" price.
And I'd checked the statute before, and it describes value of retail or
wholesale items as being the price the item is offered for sale.
So I was loaded for the bear for the pretrial: had the pictures of the price tags on the
stuff at Macy's, and a copy of the statute.
I sat down with the new prosecutor, prepared to regale her with why she
needed to go back to her supervisor and tell him to give me the misdemeanor plea,
because he'd never win the case at trial.
Our conversation was mercifully brief.
Before I could say a word, she said, "The file's been marked to a
misdemeanor."
Charlie was sentenced on Monday to time served -- the two
months in jail -- and I put in my fee bill right away. I'd visited Charlie three times in the jail,
I'd gone to four pretrials, and the trip to Macy's definitely put me over the
cap of $500.
Mark is an excellent attorney. If you're charged with a crime and have fifty
grand or more to spend, his firm is going to be on the short list of lawyers to
hire. I ran into him over in court and
somehow we got to talking about the dismal quality of attorneys on the assigned
counsel list. Rather, he got to talking about it. And was very vehement on the subject.
"Mark," I finally said.
"Why don't you take assigned criminal cases?"
He doesn't because he has clients are willing to pay him more
than the $38.73 an hour that assigned counsel made on average in Cuyahoga
County last year. And I respect
that. But don't put down people who do
take those cases. No, they're not going
to provide a defendant with a Cadillac defense, because that requires
resources, and indigents don't have them.
(I talked to a lawyer last week who was paying $7,500 a day for a jury
consultant. After four days of voir
dire, the prosecutor said something stupid, and the judge declared a mistrial. So much for $30,000. Try asking for money for a jury consultant in
an assigned case.) But a defendant's going
to get a Taurus defense, and the county's only paying for a Kia.
* *
* * *
I'd heard that Tom's case got 29'd, so I congratulated him
when I'd run into him at the Justice Center.
Tom probably gets half his income or more from assigned cases. He's a good lawyer, with excellent people
skills, and he's sharper than some people give him credit for. His client had been caught in a scheme to
forge Cleveland Browns tickets.
Everything had taken place in Canton, but the State indicted him in
Cleveland, because that's where the Browns headquarters are. As Tom put it, "Does that mean if I steal a
Camaro, they can indict me in Detroit?"
The judge threw out the charges at the end of the State's case.
Losing a case over venue isn't something that usually
happens to a prosecutor, and there were some who were upset that Tom didn't
tell them about it in advance. That
would have been unethical: you can't throw
your client under the bus to make nice with the prosecutor. "I tried to tell them they had a problem with
the case," Tom told me. "I asked them to
get me a misdemeanor, but they kept saying, 'what's the problem,' and I couldn't
tell them." He shrugged. "Spent three days in trial for five hundred bucks,
but next time I tell them they got a
problem, maybe they'll pay attention."
* *
* * *
They've got a bunch of new prosecutors, and this one I
hadn't met before. He looked across at
me as I sat down. "Are you assigned or
retained?" he asked.
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