So the lawyer and I had to talk. The talk, of course, cost me money, three-quarters of an hour’s worth, or on toward three hundred dollars.
First, he told me he thought maybe we ought to see if they would offer some kind of settlement. He said I might think about copping to neglect if they would return my children.
In essence, then, we could talk about this at the next court date and if everyone were amenable, within about a month after that I could have my kids back.
But I didn’t do anything, I told him. My boy was hit with a baseball that his friend threw with competitive exuberance against one of those “return the ball” screens. Except he was distracted and missed it.
The lawyer said he knew what happened and how it happened and he said he knew I wasn’t guilty of anything. He said that sometimes we find ourselves in a position where someone else is holding all the cards and at times like that it’s usually better to fold.
What does that mean? I asked him.
It meant that they had me beat financially, that they could drag the case on for maybe eighteen months or so which would cost me a fortune and during which time they would file a permanency plan which in all likelihood would recommend the judge terminate my rights as a parent and that my children be kept in foster care until such time as they were adopted by loving, caring people who wanted them.
So my lawyer stopped the clock then, so to speak, and said he wanted to tell me a story, but that he wouldn’t charge me for his story. He had his paralegal pull out a court transcript — apparently it was one she was familiar with because she knew exactly what he was referring to and where to find it.
It was a case that had seventeen court dates. His client hadn’t done anything wrong, nothing, but they managed to make it seem as if the client was about ten shades worse than Jeffrey Dahmer.
The bottom line of the case and what was in the transcript was a simple spoken line where the DAG said to the judge that the truth didn’t matter. Straight out. She said the truth didn’t matter. She said this after my lawyer claimed that what she had presented was simply not true, that it was an outright lie, a pure fabrication and he could prove it. The DAG held to it, that the truth didn’t matter, that the only thing that mattered was the presumption, or the mere possibility that it might be true.
My lawyer went off. He told the judge that if the truth didn’t matter it could not be a serious court. He said he had presented and was again presenting truth, facts and records that showed the truth and which totally belied what the DAG was claiming.
So my lawyer looked at me when we finished reading and said that the judge peered out kind of blank-eyed, that he stared out into nowhere off beyond where they all were. Then he yawned and put his hands up in the position of “what should I say?”
He didn’t stop what was going on. He didn’t find for my lawyer at all. He just, as my lawyer told it, “looked at me kind of sheepishly, and let it all go on.”
It’s all fixed, my lawyer said. So think about making a deal. The worst that we would accept is your going on the registry, but at least you’d have your kids back.
I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything.
So I sat there in his office and cried.
