THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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Last Friday she had to go to court on the Child Abuse charges. She was planning on asking for a continuance and going to Texas on Saturday. My father was afraid she would skip out so he paid me to take her (yes I took the money and gladly, after all I had to be around her). No one else showed up to "support" her. Damn the luck. Plenty of people showed up to lock her up. There were 7 people there to testify against her. She had no attorney or anything. The prosecuting attorney knew of her plans to go to Texas, and made sure the judge knew about it. My sister said she didn't have an attorney and needed to go to "Legal Aide". Someone from Legal Aide was there. He had 5 minutes to prep for her case. She was offered a plea bargain of 15 days served, 2 years probation, with a 180 day suspended sentence. Otherwise, if she pled not guilty she would have got 180 days. She took the plea bargain, and got lucky. You should have seen the look on the judges face when he saw the pictures of my nephew when he was in the hospital. She is to have only supervised contact with him, without possibility of review at least until November 2002. She is to undergo another psychiatric evaluation and get therapy, and to take a second series of parenting classes. She still maintains that she is innocent, but I pose this question to the masses. If you were innocent of child abuse, would you not have spent the last 7 months working with the police and trying to find out who did it? Would you not have had an attorney? Would you have pled guilty just to get a shorter sentence or would you have gone down fighting for your innocence and your child? I know what I would have done had someone given my 7 month old a skull fracture. I would have hunted high and low to find the bastard that would do this to a baby and then nailed their ass to the wall. I would have gone down fighting. If it meant 6 months instead of 15 days, I would still have fought. But that is just me. What about you? |
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