Life as a Public Defender
BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. -- My client shuffled into the courtroom in his jail issued jumpsuit, shackles on his legs and handcuffs around his wrists. Brian Jones was in custody for resisting arrest without violence, and petit theft.
When I approached Mr. Jones the first thing he said to me was that he wanted to take the plea offer. The offer in this case was credit for time served. My client stopped caring and he just wanted to go home. Giving up happens too often but in this case luckily I had filed a motion to dismiss the charges.
The motion was scheduled to be heard that day. After a brief discussion Mr. Jones agreed to wait until the motion was heard before we would resolve his case.
I hate when my clients want to plea to charges that never should have been filed. They do this just to get the case over with or because they are incarcerated and they can't afford to pay the bond. They just want to get out of jail. Taking a plea in these cases only make rap sheets longer with the charges becoming priors that will be used against them if they ever get in trouble again, even for something like a trespass.
So what did Mr. Jones allegedly do? During a consensual encounter with a police officer at a bus stop he gave the officer his alias. He's a musician and uses a stage name instead of the name he was given at birth. He also had a wallet in his pocket that did not belong to him.
In the motion I filed to dismisss the charges, the argument was made that although Mr. Jones gave the officer his alias he did not impede the officer's duty. The minute the officer typed the alias into his computer his birth name was revealed. Therefore there was no resisting arrest.
As for the wallet, Mr. Jones found it at the bus stop and he had planned to drop it in the mail. Even if you don't want to believe that he was going to return the wallet, he never stole it. Police records showed that the arresting officer was told a woman called the police department to say she left her wallet at the bus stop.
This time when I called the case in front of the court I didn't have to begrudgingly tell the judge that we had a negotiated resolution for time served. It was the prosecutor who responded and she did so with a defense attorney's favorite phrase. She told the judge, "The state will be announcing a nolle pros in case number 145678MM10A."
Nolle prosequi is Latin and means the state will no longer prosecute.
It felt good that I had at least one client that day who didn't have to agree to the state's offer only because he couldn't afford to bond out of jail.
The high profile trials of Manuel Noriega, Timothy McVeigh, OJ Simpson and George Zimmerman are among the important legal stories Kim Segal covered as a journalist for over two decades. While working as a producer for CNN, she began attending law school at night, and was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2005.
At 46, she left her television career for a position as a Public Defender in Broward County, Florida.