Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

If you do ever get out, you will lose it, but you will always come back to it, or it to you. If you don't get out, then you will have to learn the hard way that what makes life worth living runs so deep in you that nothing can take it away, that you keep it with you wherever you go. Either way, you will never be quite the same again. You will be stronger, or broken.

At some point, hopefully, you will get bailed out, although if your charges are serious

enough or your bail is high enough you may not. If at all possible, regardless of who

puts up the money or how it is raised, get the bond posted in your name only, so if you

bounce they can't come after your people. If that big old square-headed guard does come

Surviving a Felony Trial ^^ ^° ^^^^ ^^^ *^^* you're going home, then you will witness the amusing spectacle of

S40 every hard-ass on your block divvying up your paper, pencils, toothpaste, pillows, towels,

blankets, Ramen noodles, toenail clippers, and anything else of value, smiling like kids at Christmas, thrilled to see you leave. Rico will make you promise to smoke a fat-ass blunt for him, kid, and will want you to call his boy Carlos for him. Nothing vvall ever have been finer than the moment when you finally step outside into the sun, but in some ways getting out is harder than being in, because once you get out you are afraid of going back.

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to bring up a most irksome and vexatious subject?^your lawyer. Under the best of circumstances your relationship vidth this person will be more infuriating and frustrating than just about anything else. You may go through more than one before you settle on the one that will go to trial with you. You don't really need anything more than the public defender for your arraignment, but you need to be getting dovm to business by the time your preliminary hearing rolls around. Well-meaning activists?^who, incidentally, are not facing prison terms?^will be quick to point you to all sorts of sympathetic movement lawyers that your judge will probably hate. Now I'm not saying that it's a bad thing for your lavsyer to sympathize with you to at least some degree politically, but that is absolutely not your top concern. All lawyers, even activist lawyers, are mercenaries. You have plenty of friends. You don't need a friend; you need a gunslinger. Your top concern is not your lawyer's politics?although you certainly don't want one who is actively opposed to your own?^but his or her trial record, past performance, relationship with judges and prosecutors, and so on. It's a horrible little world to find yourself involved with, but you are, so act accordingly. This is not the time to fuck around. You and your people need to do all of the research you possibly can, and you need to hire yourself the best bastard that you can afford. Obviously, the poorer you are the more thoroughly fucked over you are going to get here. Borrow money from everyone you have ever known if you have to. It completely blows, but it's

Preparing/or Trial

Surviving a Felony Trial 541

how the system works. If you are facing serious felony charges, you want the cat who knows where bodies are buried and who has gotten people off death row.

Other well-meaning activists will tell you all about how you should put the system on trial, represent yourself, use the trial as a forum, denounce capitalism and Western civilization before the court, act wild, and so on. All of that pacifist talk about speaking truth to power has its time and place, but I suggest that you think long and hard before you decide to speechify for the benefit of the district attorney, the judge, and the court reporter. Strange courtroom antics are usually only wise for someone who is not facing particularly serious charges and thus has less to lose, or for someone who is either so obviously getting railroaded or is so inarguably guilty by legal standards that something out of left field is the most viable option. Now, there have been times where this sort of thing has worked, but they have been the exceptions to the rule. The MOVE organization's fearless, uncompromising, and often victorious battles with the law are one extremely inspiring example. If you are going to go down that road, you have got to go aU the way, and you had better do it well.