Lives impacted by our current justice system

"Jody, can you help me?" asked the strained voice on the other end of the phone line. I recognized it right away as the voice of the father of my ex-roommate--a man who recently lost his wife to cancer, and his daughter (my friend) to drugs. "I'll try" was my response, but by the sound of his voice, I knew that my friend was in deep trouble.

For the past few years, I've listened to people's stories and have read and written books in the true crime genre. I'm familiar with how the legal system works through my connections, friendships, and my involvement in the national movement to bring awareness to media bias that leads to wrongful convictions. These stories have touched me and I've taken the victims into my heart. But I've never been so close to a case.

I want to make it clear that I believe my friend to be guilty of the crime for which she was charged. She plead guilty. She was on drugs and her life has been a mess since her fifty-year-old mom's body first became ravaged by cancer. However, this is a girl who had been sheltered, home-schooled, and had never eaten steak before I cooked it for her. Her family home didn't have central heat and air, and during the time that I lived in it, I would get up in the middle of the night to stoke the fire to keep warm. Her family is a hard working, simple living family, and they are "good people." She was the baby of the family, and a good girl, but her life took a turn for the worse and she threw away all of the values her family had taught her and abandoned her firefighter husband for drugs.

The crime she was charged with was exploiting an elderly person for money. Apparently, she lived with her husband's elderly aunt and abused the woman's ATM card during a period of a couple of months. The aunt has since died and her heir filed charges against my friend when he realized the money was missing. My friend faced a judge with a public defender who only "stood there," according to her father, and the attorney convinced my friend and her father to take a blind plea and promised them she would receive 30 days in a county jail and a 7 year suspended sentence. As you hear with all of these cases, what was promised did not happen. My friend was given a sentence of ten years in prison on her first felony charge.

In an attempt to help, I called a defense attorney and was told that it would cost $5,000 to file the paperwork to withdraw her plea, which has to be filed this week, and if the judge grants her a trial, it would cost upward of $10,000 and possibly $20,000 to go to trial, and she could get a longer sentence from a jury. Her father has only $6,000 saved and few assets to sell. He can pay to have the paperwork filed to withdraw the plea, but what will happen if the case goes to trial? Because of what I believe to be an incompetent public defender who only "stood there," my friend's father has two choices: 1) visit his daughter in prison for ten years or until she is paroled, or 2) find a way to come up with $20,000 and risk her being given more time. He's in a lose - lose situation and his family is devastated. Is this what our justice system has come to? Isn't there a protective measure in place for people who are uneducated about the law and how the justice system works that can prevent this type of thing from happening to the families?

Those in the justice system forget that when someone goes to prison that the family and friends are punished along with them. What can be done to change the laws to protect people like my friend from inept defense representation and to fully educate the family members on the choices that they will have to face if everything doesn't go as planned? It's time that we take a stand for not only those we believe have been treated unfairly in our current justice system, but also for the families who suffer along with them.