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arraignment before/after I got pulled over for not wearing a seat-belt. Come to find out my license is expired. Anyway, I decide 'fuck hiring a lawyer, I'll muddle through it. In these instances, lawyers would charge 500 bucks for entering a plea at an arraignment (via phone) and then take whatever plea agreement the prosecution offers. I can do this! Except, I can't enter a plea via phone, apparently. So I show up for my arraignment (!) for the misdemeanor charge of driving with an expired operators permit. Dressed to the nines. Everyone else? Sweatpants and t-shirts with all sorts of writing on them. Anyway, they hustle us before a judge in a group, and she starts arraigning us one by one. She reads the charges, lists the possible penalties, and asks for your plea. A few people go. One woman already had a plea offer in place. Then a latina woman gets up. She has a laundry list of driving and car-related charges. She's facing THOUSANDS of dollars in fines. Thousands and thousands. The judge reads them off, and this woman starts immediately saying "That's fine. I'm guilty. I did it, I know it. " BUT the judge starts to LEAD her. (I've seen it soooo many times in law school...the prof will basically spoon feed some students the answer when they're totally lost. What's odd, is, even then, some of these students, in fact most of these students DON'T get it, even though everyone else in the room gets it) "Are you sure you want to plead, ma'am? The prosecutor hasn't had time to review the file...he needs more time to read it and get back to you...." But the latina doesn't get it. Straight over her head, she just keeps saying "I did it, I know I did it..." And there's this big pause. The judge can't come out and say "Look, dipshit, the prosecutor will probably drop some of this. Plead not-guilty and wait for a pre-trial conference, because, jesus christ on a crutch, you can just change your plea to guilty then!" So I'm sitting in back and this big pause is hanging in the air like a thick cloud of stench, you could hear a pin drop, and I say in a funny voice whispered behind my hand, "WAIT AND TALK TO THE PROSECUTOR!" Everyone in the room, including the judge, turns to look at me. The latina stops for a moment, then quickly says, "I think I'll talk to the prosecutor." "So...not guilty?" "Not guilty." "Ok. Pre-trial conference set for December 3rd..." She'll probably end up saving a lot of money. And I suspect the judge might have actually appreciated what I did, strangely enough. Then again, who knows.
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