What she looks like has nothing to do with her extended time in jail.
Her appearance only came up because of her mug shot. I thought she looked a little hardened and street wise. Others here don’t see it that way. Either way it doesn’t matter. She shouldn’t have been held more than the original 2 days.
I am surprised it’s the judge getting all the blame. It seems like her court appointed lawyer is the one that screwed up. It was the lawyer’s job to represent her client and raise hell when she wasn’t released after 2 days. Really I guess the lawyer and judge should be equally blamed.
I also wonder if she wasn’t sent to the jail on a sort of ‘default’ program, i.e., ‘prisoner gets to stay out of jail only as long as they are clean with the UA-otherwise, back to jail automatically to finish the 6-month sentence.’ It sounds like the kind of non-event that reporters kick up on a slow news day without going too in-depth, investigative journalism-wise.
I didn’t have a lawyer since I had no prior need for one. You have one chance to call someone, and I used it to call my dad and tried to leave a message on his business answering machine which didn’t accept phone calls from prisons. I went to a lawyer after I was released.
Even if she did, the corrections officials would pull their copy of the warrant of the court, which apparently ordered her to be held until further order of the court, not just for two days. They have to comply with that order.
I am surprised it’s the judge getting all the blame. It seems like her court appointed lawyer is the one that screwed up. It was the lawyer’s job to represent her client and raise hell when she wasn’t released after 2 days. Really I guess the lawyer and judge should be equally blamed.
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According to the article you quoted in the OP, she didn’t have a lawyer and there was no hearing. That means it all falls on the judge.
Actually, the issue came up because you implied that it was better for her to be in jail than “living on the streets.” I brought up her mug shot because she definitely does not look like she is homeless.
She could well be a serious drug addict – of course nobody can tell that from a photo. However, I don’t see that homeless women get their hair bleached very often, which this woman obviously does. Therefore, I surmised she doesn’t look homeless.
Then you commented she looks “rough,” which seems to be based on the fact that she’s wearing no makeup and her roots are showing a bit. It’s an absurd leap to conclude, as you did, that looking a little “rough” means she was better off in jail.
There was one who seemed to have been forgotten for a very long time in one UK prison. He had been locked up on ‘Her Majesties Pleasure’ which is effectively a life sentence.(It usually applies to young people committing serious offences)
When you are on HM Pleasure sentence, you can only be released when reviewed, however its is usually straight Life Sentence prisoners who get the lifer review, HM Pleasure prisoners are not quite the same category, and so rare in adult prisons it seems he was simply forgotten and never submitted for review.
Result was that he had done 23 years, without killing or injuring anyone in his original offence, and to get a sense of what sort of people actually do 23 years, well its reserved for murderers, mobsters, terrorists and offenders of the highest degree of danger and for the most serious offences. In fact most murderers will be out in less time than that. He ended up at the time being one of Britain’s longest serving prisoners, this was back in 1993 and he had done almost as much time as the Kray twins.
Some reckon that he decided he had already done more than one sentence, and was owed on crime in return, he wasn’t exactly a complete dining service full of best china upstairs either.
I can only speak for prison not jail (it’s two different systems) but people in prison do have access to legal services. It sounds to me like Hoffman should have filed for a Writ of Habeas Corpus, which is basically a motion that a person is being illegally detained and should be given a chance to appear before a judge.
On a separate note, Michaelia Gilbert of the Clark County prosecutor’s office deserves credit for discovering Hoffman’s situation and working through it to get her released. As a prosecutor, it wasn’t within Gilbert’s normal job duties to help get somebody released from jail but she saw there was an injustice being done and did something about it.
My takeaway from this is that with anything that involves incarcerating somebody that is “automatic” with no need for a hearing for going in, there should then always be a known, set date within a fixed X number of days for an actual hearing or meeting as to what is going to be done next – actual trial, sentencing for contempt, referral to residential rehab, whatever – and not just leave it for whenever the Court happens to get around to it.
That is how it works in Canada under our criminal procedure; there’s always either a return date (the accused must be returned to court for further proceedings), or a definite end to the period of incarceration ordered by the Court.
The process outlined in this article seems ripe for abuse, even by inadvertence.
