The Constitutional Law weblog, Sheridan Conlaw, is here.
October 16, 2007
(415) 391.4750
THE
When emotional difficulties arise over:
§ Broken relationships
§ Job loss
§ Medical problems
§ Family difficulty
Get help before you get in trouble.
Typical ways to get in trouble include:
§ Self-medicating and overuse of:
o Alcohol
o Prescription medications
o Over-the-counter medications containing alcohol
o Illegal street-drugs including:
§ Heroin
§ Cocaine
§ Methamphetamines
§ Marijuana
For this way lies madness and tragedy: destruction of self, or others, or both.
The justice system exists not to destroy people who get in trouble but to force them, to the extent legally possible, to clean-up, straighten out, and fly right, as you were supposed to do in the fIrst place. We use police, probation officers, prosecutors, judges, and jailers to make sure this message gets across. Of course, some people don’t listen and wind up on society’s scrap heap, the state prison, for a term of years.
In my long career as both a prosecuting and defense attorney, I’ve seen many tragic instances of the above, including normally law-abiding people who have awakened the next morning to learn they’d killed someone the night before, sometimes several people, as the result of driving a car while intoxicated, and were being prosecuted to put them in prison.
If you have been experiencing more difficulty than you can handle and the pain is too great to bear alone, help is available. Call or see
§ A friend or relative. They’re going to find out anyway when you screw up, so why not get the help before, as a preventive rather than after, to clean up your mess?
§ A psychiatrist medical doctor is licensed to prescribe medications to control depression, anxiety, sleeplessness and emotional extremes.
§ A clinical psychologist;
§ A licensed marriage, family, or child counselor.
§ A lawyer who will refer you to one of the above.
Get support while you go through the difficulty of pulling yourself and your life back together.
If you think you’ve got it bad, and I’m sure you do, look
around you at survivors of even worse traumas, from boat people who have lost everything and fled
What did you say your problem was? You're having trouble making ends meet? You've just broken up? Your boss doesn't appreciate you?
I see.
If you are unable to follow the above pointers, then don’t drive while you self-medicate, in order to avoid hurting yourself or others and to avoid jail. Get rid of any weapons and drugs. Don't allow a weapon or drugs in your home, your car, or on your person. You might hurt yourself. If you get picked up for an offense while armed with a weapon, even a toy weapon, the penalties often go up greatly, fast. This is especially so if you've been to prison or have one or more prior felony convictions. Police, prosecutors and judges don’t fool around with such people, as the over-crowded jails show.
Suppose that you’ve failed to protect yourself and now find yourself in a jam, legally speaking. Now what should you do?
Now you need to ask a good, experienced attorney to represent you, someone who has seen this before and knows what to do next. I’ve been defending people since 1974. I prosecuted for seven years before that, from moving violations to drugs, to rape to murder. I served as the head of the San Francisco District Attorneys Office Rape Prosecution Unit.
Give me a call at (415) 391.4750 and I’ll see you to discuss your matter.
There’s no sense asking whether I can give you a fee quote over the telephone as I can’t. I need to see you first to get the details of your predicament before I can evaluate how much time, effort and investigation are apt to be required. In our first phone conversation, the main points I need to know are whether you are in jail or out, what county or court system we’ll be dealing with, and whether you have a court date coming up soon. While setting up your appointment I don't need to hear how innocent you are or how unfair was your treatment at the hands of the police. You can tell me that in person when we meet. If you're calling from a jail phone and someone else is listening, we don't want you creating evidence against yourself.
We also don't want you spilling your guts to family members, friends or cellmates. The rule is, when you're in legal trouble, to keep your mouth shut, unless and until you are speaking in a confidential, private setting with your licensed attorney so that your words cannot be used against you. If you cry to your cellmate, guess what: you've just given him a get-out-of-jail-free card that he can redeem simply by telling the cop on his case that he would like to cooperate by testifying against you. He may try to do that even if you don't speak to him about your case, just because he's close to you and has the opportunity to say that you confessed to him. Cellmates are not your friends. Remember, we're trying to get you out of jail. If it's your relative who is incarcerated, refrain from asking what happened. Just say "Hello" and "Keep your mouth shut until the attorney arrives."
There's no need to lie to the attorney, either. That's how you get bad advice, as we can only work off the facts we know, or think we know.
I had a client who turned down a good deal for probation offered by the prosecuting attorney, by maintaining innocence of theft from the cash register at a big Costco type superstore where he worked. Unfortunately, when I checked the cash register tape against the log sheet my client signed showing his breaks, it became absolutely clear that my client stole the money. Still he refused to admit he stole. So I took the evidence to the attorney for the co-defendant, the assistant at the register, and told him our clients had been lying to us and I needed him to confront his client, as mine wouldn't budge. The other attorney's client, when confronted, admitted the theft. I then had the two young men talk together, whereupon my client finally 'fessed up and I was able to recover his lost deal and keep him from receiving a lot worse had he kept fighting a losing battle.
Years ago, my fellow attorneys have rated me as being among the most capable and dependable attorneys in our area. I’ve tried to continue to improve by accepting some of the most challenging cases of their time.
These include the Golden Dragon Chinatown Massacre case (five murders, eleven woundings, conspiracy), a case I tried twice, having hung the jury the first time. Also, the case of a father who was falsely accused of sixty-one felony counts of child sexual molestation, which I forced the district attorney to dismiss after a month-long trial, by hanging the jury.
It includes the Foxglove poison-murder case, where my client, a young woman, was accused, falsely, of conspiring to use poison to murder several elderly men to inherit their estates. She'd already inherited one estate and had several more old friends in their nineties who she was seeing almost daily. The police dug up four bodies. She was indicted and spent two years in jail before I succeeded in having the case dismissed after intense litigation.
There's a difference, it seems, between old men dying and murdering them.
One shouldn't jump to conclusions from large circumstances when the truth lies in the details. Our job was to focus on the details, such as the lack of a will, while the authorities were blinded by the big stories. Why would you poison someone who hadn't made out a will in your favor, if poison-murder, to inherit, was your game? Wouldn't you want to see the will first, drawn up by a lawyer to make it legal? I think you would. That little detail was missing, but it didn't stop the prosecution from holding my client.
What if there were no proof of poison? And that the medical examiner who said he detected poison in a friend's blood, a man who had not included my client in his will, had made a mistake in testing the blood? That's what happened. A doctor made a mistake, which I forced him to admit on cross-examination, long after the investigation began and the damage was done.
As you can see, just because the prosecuting authorities say that something is true doesn't make it so.
But it can take a long time and a great deal of work to uncover the truth.
Through the Bar Association of San Francisco, I accept court-appointment on indigent cases where the public defender has conflicted out. My fellow panel attorneys have rated me as qualified to represent in the most serious of cases.
Since I believe that experienced attorneys should pass their expertise along to new attorneys, I write articles for professional journals, I have given talks and seminars to public defenders, district attorneys, judges and members of the public.
I also teach law at
The subjects I teach are Constitutional Law, Freedom of Mind Law (the First Amendment freedoms of speech, press, religion and assembly). These are the things that make America great, if we can avoid going astray when we become panicked by an attack, as in 9/11.
How can you afford to hire someone with this long and rigorous experience?
I’ve been making myself affordable to ordinary people for a long time. It's how I make my living. Why don’t we try to figure out a way that I can help you?
Sometimes when I see a new client I ask whether you are feeling self-destructive and would like help in finding counseling for the emotional problems that often underlie the criminal law problem that brought you in to see me. I’m happy to make a referral and may be able to use a medical report to help understand how the situation arose and the steps you will plan to take to see there is no repetition. This may be helpful in mitigating a bad situation.
So the trick is to get the support you need before you get into trouble. We want you to avoid problems in the first place, but failing that, to see that you get help in pulling yourself back together and return to the high road with as little additional hurt as possible.
This can be a tall order and you should expect work, not guarantees, because it is difficult indeed to foretell the future outcome of a case when police, prosecutors, jurors, probation officers (who write sentencing reports) and sentencing judges are pulling in the direction of jail.
This is where I come in, pulling in the opposite direction. It's a tug of war, waged with evidence and words of legal doctrine and procedure.
Whether you see yourself as a white-collar or blue-collar worker, the goal is to avoid your having to wear an orange vest or an orange jumpsuit, an orange-collar worker, so to speak.
We’ve been doing this for a long time.
We can help you.
CALL: (415) 391.4750
Speak loudly and clearly.
Ask for Mr. Sheridan.
Leave a message stating your name and the number where I can get in touch with you.
If you repeat the number clearly and slowly, so I can pick it up on the cellphone while driving or in the hallway at court, you can be even more sure that your number doesn't come out garbled.
Most of us rely on voicemail these days for when we're out of the office and in court or visiting a client in custody or inspecting a scene.
I'll call you back asap.
Thanks for calling:
(415) 391-4750