Sometimes courts get things wrong. Sometimes lawyers do a bad job. I’m unsure what your examples have to do with anything more specific than that, or what you’re asking me to address with respect to those examples. I didn’t say that no person who has ever been through a legal proceeding has reason to complain. I didn’t say anything about malfeasance being the fault of the victim. I said that maybe that lawyer was incompetent. Maybe he or she was.
There still doesn’t exist a mechanism to plead guilty to a felony without anybody telling you you’ve been charged with it. What you are saying is that your brother in law went into a courtroom before a judge, and something happened, and when he walked out he knew he had offered a guilty plea, but he didn’t know to what. He didn’t sign a single piece of paper with a charge listed on it. He never asked his lawyer “what are the charges,” and his lawyer never mentioned it otherwise. The judge didn’t say “are you pleading guilty to this offense.” The DA didn’t tell the judge what the charges were. None of this happened, and your brother in law walked away without ever wondering until it came up years later.
What I’m saying is that as a strictly mechanical matter, this is extraordinarily unlikely bordering on impossibility. There wouldn’t even be a felony conviction of record under these circumstances. Either he’s on the record saying that he wants to plead guilty to an offense, or he didn’t plead guilty.
The thread asked for personal experiences. It also asked why people assume public defenders are incompetent. Since you’re one of those people, I’m sure you won’t be offended if I point out some places where those assumptions might be grounded in some misunderstandings, since after the killer low-mid 5-figure salaries, the debt load, the stress level, and the high rates of alcoholism, heart disease, and depression, the admiration of the general public is one of the top perks of the gig.
Most people represented by duty counsel in criminal matters end up convicted, therefore duty counsel get a bad rep. It has very little to do with the skill of the duty counsel, and has very much to do with the perceptions of the criminals.
Do you realize how many people are unaware of the severity of a felony, as opposed to a misdemeanor? It’s more than I’d have thought, as I’ve seen that question often asked online. So if someone pleads guilty to a felony for a simple screwup, and gets several months probation, and they don’t realize that a felony follows them through life, it’s a hard lesson to find out years later after it’s too late. A public defender should have explained the various options, not one sole solution just to make his own job easier.
Given my own experience with paid lawyers, I can easily believe those stories. I’m not talking about lawyers who are faced with a case they can’t win. I’m talking about lawyers who don’t even try. The ones who believe every case is pick one from column A and two from column B, and the outcome is already known in advance.
I sat on one case, where a young guy was busted for shoplifting. A misdemeanor around these parts. But store personnel tried to physically detain him and he pushed one of them away. Now it became Aggravated Robbery, a felony. Now I can only speculate, had he pleaded guilty to shoplifting, he’d have gotten fines, costs, possibly some jail time, and probation. Even though technically it was a felony, it was still really just a case of shoplifting. Mind you, I’m speculating, because he did the smart thing. He pleaded not guilty. Make them prove the Felony.
I don’t know if he paid for his lawyer or if she was a public defender. Doesn’t matter because I would have loved to put his ass in jail for shoplifting, but I’m not sending a kid to prison over a push/shove. Besides, store personnel acted beyond their scope of authority when they tried to physically restrain him, something that even store policy prohibits. His attorney never brought that up, which would have mitigated the felony part of it. What made the decision for us was, not the defense attorney, but the prosecutor’s attempt to paint this kid as a violent criminal to be removed from society. Since we were only given the choice to convict or acquit him of the felony, the kid walked.
If you need a public defender, it probably is a case where the outcome is known in advance. If you actually committed the crime, you’re not really going to have any defenses. All you can do is rebut the evidence the prosecution presents. Rebutting evidence is expensive. You’ve got to hire experts to do that, and thanks to the Republicans, public defenders don’t have the resources to do it (even in areas where they get paid well).
OK. So he was aware he was pleading guilty to a felony at the time, but you both think he should have been more thoroughly apprised of his options; that’s perfectly reasonable and I’m definitely not here to tell you you’re wrong about that. Originally it seemed like you said that the felony charged was “picked” without his knowledge. If that isn’t the reason you have a problem (admittedly I’m still not at all clear what the problem is more specifically than you don’t like lawyers), I don’t have a problem with your having a problem.
That’s all it was. He was told it was a felony, he knew he’d screwed up, and there was no real defense but to make it right. It was me, years later, that brought it up about not making sense that $55 was a felony. In Texas, you can shoplift up to $1,500 before it becomes a felony, so $55 is chump change in comparison. Why would that be so felonious? But it wasn’t in Texas, and laws are different in different states. Hell, in South Dakota, it would be summary execution before a tribunal on the same afternoon. (I jest, but the point is made.)
Further, I found it hard to believe that a man could suffer lifelong deprivation of his rights over $55. Looking into it, we discovered that the original arrest was based upon either of two charges. Since he was willing to cop a plea, it’s my position that he could have made it contingent upon the lesser offense. Especially since that was the one that really applied. But, apparently the prosecutor selected the felony charge, the public defender didn’t bother negotiating any options, and my brother-in-law blindly walked into it. In other words, he didn’t need a public defender, he would have gotten the same penalty on his own.