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 September 25, 2011 in 

Defendant makes plea deal including term that, if he pays restitution, "verfiable to the state as to their source," the state will not pursue charges on two other cases.

Defendant comes up with the money, and a doctor confirms that he has given the defendant the money, but the prosecutor does not accept the money, and instead pursues the additional charges.

I think the lesson here is that, when you're dealing with an Assistant District Attorney who really, really, really wants to get your client, and has shown it by filing serial charges at sixty-day intervals to try to keep him in jail (a practice you've had to take to the appellate courts twice, successfully) [update: a previous prosecutor had filed the serial charges], you'd better define the terms in your plea agreement so that there's no way a court can let her wriggle out of it.Defendant's Motion to Enforce Plea Agreement

"He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor — indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones."
Berger v. United States.
 

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6 Comments

  1. Cynthia Henley September 25, 2011 at 8:38 pm - Reply

    Wow. So, Mark, why do you think this is happening? What is the story behind the story? Is it about the defense lawyer? Is it about the defendant? What is the real story?

  2. Alex Scharff September 26, 2011 at 9:16 pm - Reply

    Instant karma gonna get you…
    I encountered a situation many years ago where I had made a plea agreement with the elected DA for a deferred adjudication as long as the Defendant entered a year long rehabilitation program. When my client and I came to court, the Assistant DA, an older, more calloused career “chap” refused to honor the plea agreement made by his boss and offered prison time. I was livid, outraged, and determined to right this injustice—-only to find out the DA can withdraw his offer pretty much whenever he wants. Of course in my case, we had never even filled out the paperwork or gone before the judge. What ticked me off was I had a deal from the elected DA! Who then backed off when his assistant didn’t like it! I prefer it when people do what they say they are going to do when they say they are going to do it. Whatever happened to handshakes? Relying on a person’s “word?” Thanks for outing this particular DA. If I or a colleague ever have a case with this DA, I’m putting everything in writing and on the record.

  3. Adrian Sloan September 28, 2011 at 10:45 pm - Reply

    Just so you know scribb is extremely unfriendly to accessibility software. Your site slows to a crawl whenever you have scribb frames, regardless of whether I am trying to read the scribb hosted content or not or skip past it (the usual case, trying to read it is even worse).

    • Mark Bennett September 29, 2011 at 8:04 am - Reply

      Thanks, Adrian. I’ll stop embedding it. Do you have another suggestion for embedding or presenting PDFs?

  4. Adrian Sloan September 29, 2011 at 8:38 am - Reply

    I don’t, sorry.

    That does, however, likely explain why there is a problem though not a solution. Trying to use acrobat in the host embedded configuration results in the same sort of extremely sluggish response, so it may well be an acrobat issue rather than anything directly about scribb.

    About the best I could suggest is to somehow extract the text you are interested in highlighting and then provide a link to the full document hosted somewhere. Though that may well be more work than you are interested in.

  5. Tanner Andrews October 9, 2011 at 8:25 am - Reply

    One thing you might consider for hosting the PDF is to, well, host the PDF. Include a link to some document pool somewhere (not scribd: they are more like a roach motel for documents) and people can view it at leisure.

    I’m not sure I would criminalize posting documents to scribd, but I would certainly discourage it. It is not just the incompatibility with accessibility solutions; I use ordinary web browsers and when scribd works it does so badly.

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