December 9, 2024

I spend an hour and a half of the hour-long appointment loudly communicating my dissatisfaction of my current attorney's performance. After our last appointment over two weeks ago I was looking at a basic list of about 43 issues. I recollect that map, out the wrongdoing in my case. It strikes me that I created that list without being able to review the proceedings in any way whatsoever. The first seven and a half months of being told we needed to wait for transcripts and to have line summaries prepared is actually unnecessary to the second step of legal writing when you can just watch the case on the internet, notwithstanding the first trial and any pretrial hearings. Upset about my post-conviction arguments contained in the rough draft I received about two months ago, I requested a simple list of issues my lawyer identified with solid legal standing but ended up writing my own list after not receiving anything from her about it. After presenting her with my own list, she said she would send me a document containing the compilation of both of our lists but she never did. Some group members carried my complaints to my brother who shoveled excuses at them, including how Natalie supposedly had set an appointment to speak with me and cancelled it due to illness, but I never received a notice from the prison litigation coordinator for either supposed event. She also dismissed my frustration in a text to my brother on the premise that inmates get emotional around the holidays, but my frustration has virtually nothing to do with the holidays and is actually predicated on the idea that my attorney hasn’t even accomplished “step two,” which could have been done with what we all had available to us the day after I was convicted. Basically, she just has not bothered with “the process and the work that has been done.” It is largely just a distraction of impotent arguments by someone unfamiliar with the case, the law, or both. And instead of reserving time and working with me on this, she has instead poisoned my family with excuses that mix with their own ignorance and arrogance to leave me destitute of my most necessary support.

During the conference call she made the error of disagreeing with me, to which I was compelled to vomit definitions and quotes from cases considered controlling authority at her. I am right. I am not a lawyer or never studied to pass a bar exam, but I comprehend what I read and I am absolutely certain of the issues I identified as being meritorious issues that demand a judge. Instead, it seems voluminous impropriety that forever perpetuates incarceration by holding the convicted under a court system’s “harmless error” analysis and the years it takes to ricochet up through the reviewing courts for reconsideration is the customary approach. Except my case goes beyond the usual and is in fact quite exceptional in so many ways that failing to present those issues is really disingenuous to an honest account of it all.

Yes, I want to pick the corn out of the punch bowl, but failing to remove the whole turd leaves the punch still undrinkable. Actually, no punch is drinkable after someone drops a turd in the bowl and it all deserves to be thrown out. Picking out the corn isn’t the solution to the problem.