This happened to my daughter, we are not rich an we spent over $150,000.00 on lawyers. They kept putting it off. or over 2 1/2 years they kept putting the case off. Her father was in an accident at work, he is now permanently disabled an on SS Disability. We went in to court yet again, and she stood up an told them she wanted to plea out since the family was losing the home etc. ,and were broke. The judge said since she had drawn this out so long she gave her the maximum sentence. The lawyer had just asked for another large sum of money to appear again in court. She had been told by the DA that they would lower charges to misdemeanor and time already served. That didn't happen. Finally after serving 4 years she was released. After being out for 2 years 11 months they pick her up again, along with her 11 month old baby and reincarcerate her for 10 months, because they think they calculated wrong and let her out too soon. She has been out for a year and a half now. They put her back on the entire probation period again, even though through everything she has cooperated completely, was a model prisoner and saved the life of one of the guards, because she was the only one in the prison that knew CPR. Oh yes, and when they put her back in she was 2 months into a high risk pregnancy. The person who said she had did the crime has since change his story yet again, meanwhile she has this on her record. for at east 5 more years before we can have it removed. The judge who was running for higher office has now lost 2 times even with her platform of being strong on crime. If we had been very rich this would have went away. She was the 4th judge on this, they kept stepping aside. It was also the 5th DA because as they said they did not think they had enough to go to trial. Yes, the judicial system is really screwed up. We cannot sue until she is off of probation, otherwise we were told that she might have to go back to prison for the duration of that trial. While she was in prison, we met a lot of people who it was insane that they were in prison. But I will talk about that another day.
We had a lawyer the whole time (Lawyer of the year in our State).