It is said "the wheels of justice turn slowly." But turn they do, and they came around late last week for The Boy.
Back around the end of February, while The Boy was on probation for his little boo-boo, he got busted again for underage drinking — less than a week after he finished a week in the cooler for his first probation violation (failed drug test). The mere fact of getting arrested was another probation violation, and that one cost him a month in the Cinder Block Hilton.
As I said earlier, we got the notice last week: his arraignment is Jan. 9. We told him at the time that he could either save himself some money and hire an attorney (as if he wasn’t having issues paying the last one) or try his luck with the public defender. Given that “live for the moment” is a rather tame way of describing his attitude, guess which way he went?
Hi ho, hi ho, off we go. We actually got to talk to the younger partner in the PD’s office — he’s so fresh out of law school that there’s still pieces of shrink-wrap clinging to him. That’s not a completely bad thing: a new guy is more likely to be idealistic and try harder. The senior lawyer wasn’t there, but he used to be a DUI lawyer before taking the public defender gig, so underage drinking isn’t foreign territory for him. They should have a good idea of what the DA is going to offer in a plea arrangement in a few days; with any luck, he might get away with a smallish fine and six months of probation. The joker in the deck is that the cop didn’t give The Boy a breathalyzer or a blood test, so any evidence they have is fairly flimsy. If J, whom he was riding with, can’t be found to testify, all they have is an assumption (but if J does show up, he’s Up The Creek). Another helpful item is that he took a DUI class and drug awareness course after the arrest, so it’s not likely he’ll have to go through them again.
It would have been fun to let The Boy get to know the federal judge that Mom worked for back in the day.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
7 comments:
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Good luck with this, Far. Hopefully it will just be the fine.
ReplyDeleteDidn't he get charged with under age possesion of alcohol? If so, a cop doesn't need to give him a blood test or breathilizer.
ReplyDeleteoo, solar -- yummy photo!
ReplyDeleteFAR, I hope this all works out OK. As you know, I lived through it with Our Boy and it isn't fun.
Hiya FAR.
ReplyDeleteGood luck to the Boy, but good luck to you too. Hope everything works out right.
Hey, Far. What startles me about all of this is how seriously the courts take this kind of rather normal behavior these days. I think the cops are over-trained on the topic and pressured to pursue it vigorously.
ReplyDeleteHey folks!
ReplyDeleteBoran, KB, FM, thanks for the luck. We'll need it. :-) KB, yup, I remember oh so well. I just thank God I have *one* kid who isn't bound & determined to kill us from stress.
Solar (yeah, love that Gilligan icon), I've not heard that to be the case. Seems like that would give the cops license to bust any kid they wanted to, and stick them with an underage drinking charge. (He didn't have any on him, some possibly in him, at the time. If a cop is going to arrest someone, they should go through the effort to build their case.)
Ghost, I'm not sure what the deal is there either. Maybe it's an "easy target" kind of thing. Maybe it's orders from "above." Who knows?
You can thank MADD for the crazy overpressure on underage drinking.
ReplyDelete