A friend of mine who is not a legal professional has advised to pay the ticket off. My concern is not he cost of the fine but that since it's an automatic guilty plea of simple possesion(less than 1oz) then there will a permanent record under my name. My questions are as follows: Will it be permanent for California? For national? If so, is there legal means to plea bargain down to no record for my quilty plea? Any advices are welcome and will be appreciated.
-- Modified on 9/25/2005 10:32:34 PM
most states will allow someone to sign a contract as part of their plea where if they don't get into trouble again for 3yr(?), they get their first misdeamnor expunged.
Really? "Most states" have this procedure? California certainly doesn't, and the question specifically refers to a citation in this state. (The defendant may be able to get the conviction expunged later, but this is true even if he doesn't plead guilty and does not require signing a contract at the time of plea/conviction.)
You may be right that most states do, but I don't have any reason to believe this is true. What evidence do you have to back up this claim? I remember some of the rather wild statements about the law you used to post on this board as if you knew what you were talking about, and I'm concerned you may have started doing the same sort of thing again.
Eventually the decision will be mine whether or not to contest the citation. I need to get all pertinent info before arriving a decision and I have 3 more weeks for this. Wannarideher and Sidone, thank you again
-- Modified on 9/26/2005 1:58:11 PM
Sorry about not being real clear in my post above. Cooch, I was not driving or in my car at the time. What I've described is a short version of what happened. And I'll stay with the short version here: This thing took place a few weeks ago at a motel parking lot. LEO was asking questions and received a voluntary statement concerning the itsy bitsy weed. No arrest due to honesty. Citation given. That was it. Thank you Cooch.
You are right, additional research on your part is definitely needed, and no offense intended towards wannarideher, but she does have a history of offering legal advice without apparant thought towards the possible consequences to a party who might follow her ill advised, poorly conceived, quote,unquote legal advice.
I believe what Wannarideher is referring to is a plea in which ejudication is withheld, which is different than having your record expunged. Please be advised, I am no more a lawyer than she is. The best advice you can ever get here is "get a lawyer"
Good luck, until our draconian drug laws are repealed, this is a matter to be taken very seriously.
so technically this board is null and void for all those who wanna mark their territory.
Anyone who posts here automatically knows to talk to a lawyer, they are want to know what others have done or what other's friends have done.
or had friends in
your first misdeamnor can be expunged...not felony but misdeamnor if you plea bargain into a special contract with the DA to take drug counseling, sex counseling, or other treatment depending on the misdeamnor
Instead of attacking me and marking your territory, why don't you put your law degree up here for all to see since you know everything.
I don't think you've been in NY and I would suggest that you don't visit there you might receive a rude awaking.
My point isn't to attack you. I'm just flagging your messages for the sake of readers who might think you know what you're talking about before they let your guidance get them into real trouble. If you think I should just keep my mouth shut and let such things happen in order to protect your delicate sensibilities then we just have a difference of opinion about what is and isn't appropriate on these boards.
I have no itention of posting my law degree here since it would reveal my identity. But I do have one and I don't think many readers doubt this. You have acknowledged that you never went to law school, but you still write as if you know what you're talking about. Law school isn't the only way to learn about the law, of course, but I have never met anyone who has magically learned the laws of each state he or she has "traveled through".
Nothing you have ever written on this board has suggested you know the first thing about law, yet you continue to offer pointers to people who have real problems they are trying to solve. I could just ignore you and let you cause even more problems for these folks, but I choose to intervene. If you have a problem with this, you'll need to learn how to deal with it. Maybe you can learn how by just passing thorugh California some time.
it says on my website and I have mentioned that I have a prelaw degree. I took the paralegal option with plans to enter into law school and was discouraged. I saw my law professor get off people I would have shot. People who killed over a couple hundred dollars and served 2 yrs for just the robbery etc.
I also saw two lawyers almost get into a fist fight while debating whether or not the Citadel should allow women in. Goes to show you, one of the lawyers were wrong. Most cases I saw showed me that it wasn't the law you broke that mattered, it was who you knew. The DA would be less likely to prosecute a drug dealer or thief is his own precious son was part of the guilty team.
However, I have seen you go into a pissing contest with several people on this board if they didn't agree with you. You have a God complex and I would persuade everyone to stay the hell away from you.
""but I have never met anyone who has magically learned the laws of each state he or she has "traveled through""
For your information, if you had intelligence you would realize that many law statues are on the internet and they are also readily available to anyone who is a college paralegal Alumni.
For the rest of my life, I have access to statues and the law computers at the law library in Charleston and access to the lawyer to got those murderers off if I need to. I even own the Wills and Probate book. It costs $65 but I could add to my library if this stuff wasn't on the internet.
Use your brain before acting like you own the place. If you do own TER, let me know. I don't want to financially contribute money to a jackass such as yourself.
Nothing you have written here contradicts what I wrote, so your accusation that I lied is, at a minimum, unsupported. A lie is an intentional falsehood and you have not shown that anything I said was false. Even if you can point out an error I made, I assure you it was unintentional. An unintentionally false statement is not a lie, it is an error. But it doesn't seem that I made any errors in my message.
I said that you didn't go to law school, which is true. Paralegal school is not the same thing.
I said that "Nothing you have ever written on this board has suggested you know the first thing about law," which is also true. The fact that you went to paralegal school (on which I take you at your word) is beside the point. Maybe you used to know about the law, but you plainly don't now.
Regardless of your history as a paralegal student, your posts about what the law says or how it works have almost ALWAYS been wrong. Sometimes they have been soo incredibly wrong that someone acting on your suggestions would get him or herself into very serious legal trouble which they would otherwise have avoided.
You wrote that "most states will allow someone to sign a contract as part of their plea where if they don't get into trouble again for 3yr(?), they get their first misdeamnor expunged" and I challenged you to back up this claim with evidence. You have not provided any evidence that even ONE state does this, let alone 26. Instead, you complain that I have the audacity to doubt you. People who argue that way are seldom right.
You're quick to question my knowledge of the law, but if you check the threads in which we have argued before you will see that many readers (including several who clearly know quite a bit about the law) have chimed in to say I was right. Unless my memory fails me, there has never been even even a single post from anyone on this board saying you were right and I was wrong. Given the many people in addition to me who have said you're wrong and the fact that no one ever said you were right, don't you think you should question your own legal knowledge instead of presuming that I'm the one who doesn't know what he's talking about?
(I'll go out on a limb here. If any reader has ever read an exchange between wannarideher and me in which you believe she was right and I was wrong, please speak up.)
You point out that lawyers are often wrong, which is true. But you don't even attempt to argue that I was wrong about anything I said. Non-lawyers are often wrong too, and if I had to choose between legal opinions from a lawyer and a non-lawyer I would bet on the former.
As to having access to statutes, I note that YOU are the one who said you were familiar with the laws of "most states I have traveled through". I did not put these words in your mouth. You didn't say you had researched the laws of every state you visited. In fact, you still haven't said so. All you said is that you know what the laws are in those states. The fact that you "even own the Wills and Probate book" doesn't seem relevant, since this thread is about criminal laws.
I know you have access to statutes online. Having access to the statutes is nice, but actually reviewing them would be better. And understanding them would be a vast improvement from where you are at the moment.
Sorry if you think I have a God complex or enjoy "pissing contests". You do aggravate me, but in the same way that the Intelligent Design crowd aggravates evolutionary biologists. The biologists know what they are talking about and have presented a well-reasoned argument supported by vast amounts of evidence, but the ID people just say "Nah, that can't be true; therefore we must be right" and then claim their position is as scientifically valid as the one accepted by scientists. Your discussions about the law seem very similar, and have about as much basis in reality. The reason I always tell you you're wrong isn't because I have a God complex; it's because you're always wrong. Try addressing that problem instead of attacking the people who point it out.
-- Modified on 10/3/2005 9:50:05 PM
You wrote that "most states will allow someone to sign a contract as part of their plea where if they don't get into trouble again for 3yr(?), they get their first misdeamnor expunged" and I challenged you to back up this claim with evidence. You have not provided any evidence that even ONE state does this, let alone 26. Instead, you complain that I have the audacity to doubt you.
I told you months ago that SC wanted me to sign a contract in which I plead guilty, attend sex therapy counseling and if I behaved for 3yrs, the charge would get expunged. The LE also told me that similiar states had it for misdeamnors. It was at that time, that I dismissed my first lawyer, got another and was ready to continue to push back the court date in hopes of it getting dropped.
My nephew is also a cop in another state and he has told me that his state has something similiar. The time period may be different but if someone has a misdeamnor, they get a second chance if they behave and cooperate with the police with some sort of agreement. (He works with narcotics in another state so I am dreading the day he finds out what I do)
As for my research, the fact that this is a message board and not a client/lawyer meeting means that it is open for discussion. I didn't go attacking you when you bit off several people's head many months ago.
At least I am not one of the posters on this board that is telling people that LE have to identify themselves. My dinner date requirement is a good defense for my escorting. I don't shout on the top of my lungs that I am an escort when we go into the hotel room. Most of my dates actually make comments themselves on how much I have changed "since they last saw me" so all this flaming you have done to me since I have started is petty.
I believe I am more careful during my session including the no collection of money aloud than most providers but you continue to attack me when I try to help out new providers.
Technically LE can arrest anyone they want who is an escort, it don't mean they are going to win and I don't believe every john or provider should plea bargain just because their lawyer wants to move onto the next case
If someone was in urgent need for legal advice, this board is not the place they should go. They should go to several lawyers and ask how much experience that lawyer has on a particular arrest and also buy some books on the subject concerning individual rights and privacy laws.
I remember that thread from several months ago, but it involved something very different from the program you described in this thread. The police offered you a special deal that isn't available automatically -- if you cooperated in a sting so they could nab others, they would go easy on you. You posted here because you thought they were breaking the law by making such a proposal.
Relatively few defendants are offered deals like that; in particular situations police feel that a particular defendant could be useful in an ongoing case. They might need an attractive young woman for a particular sting, so if you and I were both arrested on the same charge at the same time you would be offered the deal and I wouldn't.
The police arrest far more people than they could ever use in their stings, so only a small fraction are offered deals like this. Some who are feel, as you did, that the deal would put them in harm's way and say no. They're well within their rights to do that, but the result is that they don't get the deal they were offered.
What you described in the current thread was quite different. In response to a question about the legal consequences a particular woman was likely to face, you said "most states will allow someone to sign a contract as part of their plea where if they don't get into trouble again for 3yr(?), they get their first misdeamnor expunged." The word "allowed" suggests that any arrestee can decide on her own to make such a deal, but the reality is that the police will offer such deals only rarely. When someone has been arrested and wants to know what awaits them, they should not expect such an opportunity.
More fundamentally, the arrangement you described in the current thread said nothing about participating in a police investigation. All it said was that the arrestee could sign a contract agreeing to stay out of trouble for a few years in exchange for removing the arrest/conviction from her record. There's a big difference between the two scenarios, so your earlier post didn't come to mind when I read this one.
As to your last point: I don't attack you for trying to help new providers. What I attack you for is confusing tips about what is PRACTICAL with tips about what is LEGAL. Your two-date system may be a very practical way to operate, but when you first talked about it here you claimed that it made your activities legal, or at least that it made you impossible to prosecute. That simply wasn't true, and a new provider who believed that it was could get herself into lots of trouble.
TER has over 30 discussion boards. Practical tips for other escorts would be appropriate on many of them, but when people look for guidance here they want to know what the law says and not what works for you. In most of your answers you have at least implied that you understand the law and that this understanding is the basis of your advice. That is where people can be misled, and that is where I try to intervene before it happens.
Although I get frustrated by what you post here, I have always said that your heart is clearly in the right place. I still believe that. But good intentions are not enough to ensure good results, and your good intentions will sometimes cause very bad results indeed unless someone counters them. That's all I'm doing when I respond to you.
sidone you hit the nail on the head. i have no problem with people "playing" lawyer...unless it could cause someone else harm...
In NYS it's called an ACD, "Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal". It’s suspends the charge for 6 months and if no other charge are made against the person or occur during that period then the charge is dismissed.
US citizen, it's probably minimal, given CA expungment schemes.
But if he's a foreign national, expungment is not effective except under Federal 1st offender statutes (18 USC 3607, generally 1st count simple possession), and ANY drug charge can be a lifetime deportation.
I suggest you pay a visit to the arraignment courtroom on a day before your scheduled appearance. Some courts have a counseling attorney available to advise those being arraigned. There may be a "diversion" program whereby completion of the requirements will result in the charge being dismissed.
Your observing a session of court before your court date should give you sufficient information to enable you to make an intelligent decision.
generally, neither diversion nor expungement operates to eliminate a guilty plea and removability or inadmissibility for a forn national. Given LA is full of them (half the entertainment industry - I swear there are as many Canucks as Messicans) ya gotta be conscious of this.
A plea that is the deal of the century for a citizen, ESPECIALLY relating to drugs (less so to prostitution), can get a furriner deported without relief.
A statement like Clinton's, that you "didn't inhale" would be sufficient admission to deny a green card or visa. (yeah, a single count of simple possession less than 30 grams of mj is waivable IF you have a USC IR, but that is NOT the general case.)