my past work experience at Legal Aid - part 10

Monday 30-9-2002

This week is our mid semester break but I decided to go to Legal Aid anyway so that I can finish a week early at the end of the year. I went to Magistrate Court 1 with a solicitor from my team. She had a pleading there. Usually, the duty lawyer handles it but she said that it was her client so it was better for her to go. Our client is a 20-year-old white male who had before him nine charges and three failure to attends. He also had some outstanding charges in the District Court so basically, what we were going to try to do for him today was to ask the judge to move the nine charges up to the District Court so that they can be dealt with at the same time. But we had to deal with the three failure to attends today, otherwise, they will lock our client up. We were also going to apply for bail even though the solicitor wasn’t the least bit confident of succeeding because she confessed to me that she has little experience in applying for bail and because of our client’s three failure to attends. It’ll be very hard to convince the judge that he’ll attend his next court appearance.

Our client’s nine charges were all property related and were pretty minor except for his robbery charge. I thought it rather strange that every house he decided to break into belonged to someone he once knew so it was quite easy for people to identify him. As for the robbery charge, the girl who was working behind the counter at the petrol station at that time happened to have gone to the same high school as our client so what can I say besides bad luck. With respect to his three failure to attends, our client didn’t have any valid reasons for not turning up so we ended up having to tell the judge about the family problems that he was having at home with his mum and the fact that our client actually made it to court today.

With regards to the bail application, the prosecution wanted the address of where our client will be staying while on bail but he couldn’t really remember the exact address of his mate’s place where he was living. Furthermore, he wasn’t too sure that he wanted to use that address (after the solicitor told him that the prosecution may send police out to check the place) because he didn’t know whether his mate had anything to hide. In the end, we used his brother’s address even though we were sure that the judge wouldn’t like the fact that it’s actually his younger brother. As it turned out, the judge didn’t bother with an address so the 30 odd minutes we spent trying to figure out an address turned out to be a waste of time.

We ended up spending approximately two hours with our client in conference before his appearance before the judge but in the end though, the solicitor said that it was worth it because we managed to get the result we wanted and that was the bail. The solicitor further said that if it was the duty lawyer, he/she would have only spent about 10 minutes with the client and probably wouldn’t have gotten bail. Our client was also fined $600 for his three failure to appears.