Legal is becoming moot 2003-11-02

Wonderlove, R.I.P. It was a good four years, with many nights of drunken debauchery, and as sad as I am to see you go, I'm very excited to see what's to come.

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So, a friend of mine's been having trouble with the D.A.'s office. The kind of trouble that's getting him thrown in jail. Not that any of it is his fault. Let me explain.

He's got a child, you see. But the mother would really rather that he (my friend I mean, not the child) were not in the picture. Ever. Not his fault, she's just psychotic.
But my friend, he wants to be a good father. He wants to be with his kid, available and supportive.
Well, that sort of decision went againt psycho-mom's plan to keep him out of the picture, so she took him to court. Embellished, if not outright made up, quite a few stories about their relationship, got the court on her side, and to keep a long story short, ended up having my friend owe psycho-mom about 25,000 dollars in child support and lawyer fees. Oh yeah, I didn't tell you that, she took him to court, and made him pay for her lawyer.
And throughout the entire process, she's holding a tantalizing carrot in front of him. "Give up your right to be a father, and all this will go away. Just sign your son over to me, and you won't have to see me ever again."

He wrestled with this for months and months. He asked me for advice, and I had nothing to tell him. I know what I would do, but that's only hypothetics.
After much struggling, he finally decides that it will be better in the long run, for everybody, if he signs his son over. And so he does. And she drops her entire case against him into the trashcan.

6 months later, he gets arrested, for failing to pay child support for the past six months. He goes to court, and the court appointed defence attorney comes to him and says, "Okay, you're going to plead guilty, I'll get you thirty days in jail, and that'll be that."
My friend says, "You haven't read my case, have you?" My friend says, "You're fired." My friend says to the judge, "I'm going to represent myself. Oh, and plead not guilty." Naturally, disbelief rocks the courtroom.
The D.A. meets with my friend, and my friend shows him the letter he had received from the D.A. six months ago, saying the case had been dropped.
The attorney says, "We don't know anything about this." He says, "We're going to need time to look this over." He says to judge, "I request an extension on this case while we research new evidence."

A week later, my friend is back in court. And his court-appointed attorney says, "Okay, you're going to plead guilty, I'll get you thirty days in jail, and that'll be that."

Deja Vu, anyone?

After my friend fires his second court-appointed attorney, he meets with the D.A., shows him the paper, and the D.A. says, "We don't know anything about this. We need time to look this over." The judge extends the case another week.

In the meantime, my friend is having to leave work, not get paid, for the time he spends sitting in court. He seeks legal advice. Finds out that for $1,000, an attorney can call the D.A., and let them know the case has been dropped, and all is forgiven. My friend agrees, since by this time, he could have earned the lawyer's fee in the time he's missed out of work.

Tell me, is this justice? A legal system that doesn't bother to read the paperwork of its defendents before bringing them to trial. A D.A. office that will ignore a case until the defendent realizes it'll be easier to plead guilty than sit through this shit week after week. Lawyers who charge a thousand bucks for a phone call that should never have had to be made.

Granted, for a lot of these cases, hell for most of em, the defendants are guilty. But that doesn't make em all guilty, and it doesn't mean that the legal system can treat em that way either. Can anyone please tell me what the fuck happened to justice being blind and impartial, what the fuck happened to being innocent until being proved guilty, and what the fuck happened to the humanity of lawyers? I know a few lawyers, including my brother, who is in law school, and all of them that I know are decent, amazing people. What's it take to turn them into the monsters I've been hearing about?

What frightens me is, what if I get arrested for a crime I didn't commit? Who will save me from the legal machine, that eats defendants and shits convicts?