I’ve been having a string of successes at work lately. I’ve had four indictments dismissed in the past two months, and have received can’t turn em down plea offers in just about every case I’ve touched. This past Tuesday I started a single count felony drug trial. I picked a jury of 13: 12 jurors and one alternate. The DA got up during voire dire, talking about how he represents the People and the People have the burden. I got up and said “you know, we lawyers like to use big words, latin phrases, legal jargon. One of the legal terms we use is defendant. And my client is called the defendant. And the person sitting at this table over here, well, he represents “the people”. I’d like to remind you all, that my client sitting here, he is a person too.”
That person, that client, hated me. Thought I was a complete jerk-off the entire time. Argued with me in front of the jury, shook his head, made stupid comments out loud, was just a complete pain in my ass. On Wednesday morning, the DA told me that the co-defendant was not going to testify against my client. They had already sentenced him, and he had nothing to gain and nothing to lose if he didn’t testify. They offered us a misdemeanor and a year in jail. The judge wouldn’t do it – he looked at the DA and said “you made your bed, now lie in it”. See, the DA hadn’t put the co-defendant into the grand jury to testify. He hadn’t made him give up a signed statement saying my client gave him the drugs to sell to the police informant. The DA screwed up, and the judge was going to make him suffer for it.
Small problem, you never know what a jury is going to think. And, if they thought the co-defendant was lying, that my client had given him the drugs but wasn’t going to say so, my client could be facing 12 1/2 to 25 years in state prison. Well, it didn’t get that far. The people rested their case on Wednesday afternoon and I moved for a trial order of dismissal and the judge granted it. Was my client happy? No. He said he wanted to “beat that DA at trial” and thought we should’ve continued with the trial. Huh? Did I miss something? I thought having a case dismissed was winning at trial. Maybe there’s been a new definition that I didn’t know about.
