-- On 9 Sep 2001, at 17:35, Matthew Gaylor wrote:
If Brian Dalton hopes to have his conviction for pandering obscenity thrown out, his new attorneys will have to prove he received poor legal counsel. But the attorney who represented Dalton said that wasn't the case. "With all the facts that I know, I believe he was effectively represented,'' said Isabella Dixon, Dalton's original attorney.
If your lawyer advises you to plead guilty without a plea bargain in place with a known penalty. or the charge bargained down to something with a small maximum penalty, that advice is so bad as suggest some conflict of interest or impropriety on the part of lawyer giving the advice. One would expect such advice from a court appointed lawyer who is taking his orders from the prosecution. Even if you are guilty as hell and they will have no difficulty proving it, you can bargain something out of them by threatening to put them to the trouble of actually proving it. Even if what Isabella Dixon says was true, it would still be a shocking impropriety for her to say it, since she is trying to influence the case in the direction of keeping her client in jail. The very fact that she is saying it suggests that it is not true. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG N+gTXtqTXzV+LqsT3VhwRNgg4WD0U1FCGjZJHe2R 4m5oCaRdB2JNt4mAF+yMc6WYVrMpA1l8jJs96RihK