Daily Archives: August 17, 2007

Prison > Homelessness

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A Pennsylvania man has made an unusual request: He wants to be given the maximum sentence after pleading guilty to giving a false name to police. This is after the prosecutor dropped the failure to register charge because he didn’t have a “domicile” as he was homeless. This is what it has come to.

Lareau J. Laube, 55, told Judge Stephen G. Baratta today he wanted the maximum sentence of a year in prison for giving police a false name. Baratta said Laube was one of the most unusual defendants with whom he’d ever dealt. He asked Baratta to impose the maximum penalty because he didn’t want to be released.

The judge sentenced Laube to six to 12 months and ordered that Laube be furloughed. However, he said county probation officials are to prepare a plan to assure Laube has a place to go. He asked Laube why he had been sleeping at the library.

“I didn’t have a place,” Laube said. “I’m homeless.”

Baratta said of state prison officials: “They dumped him out. There’s no social net anywhere to catch him.”

Yep. Score one for safety.

Of Counsel

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There’s a new criminal law blawg on the scene: Of Counsel. Written by “Maggie”: a former public defender now engaged in private practice.

Describing her motivations, she writes:

I’ve been lurking around the Criminal Law blogs for some time now, and I’ve finally decided to go ahead and throw my hat in. I’m doing this for a few reasons, but mostly to do my best to keep up to date with appellate rulings. In my former days as a Public Defender, it was virtually impossible for me to find the time to keep up with rulings. So I see these reviews as a service of sorts to my many PD friends still out there toiling away thanklessly. (Hopefully not completely thanklessly. During my own time in the public sector I got one thank you card from the mother of a client who’d always been rather rude and a variety of letters from inmates which mostly said, “You have a nice smile.”)

Ideally, I’d like to add other Southern states to the roundup, and would be welcome to add other contributors who wouldn’t mind helping out. I’ll try and figure out how to throw in other rulings of note. But I do feel that particularly public criminal defense in the South is having a rough time of it these days and needs more visibility. I’ll certainly be checking in on the new PD system in New Orleans and the ongoing funding issues for PD’s in Georgia.

Go say hello! The blog’s been added to the blogroll.