After being charged with burglary in 2013, Peter Yepez waited in the Fresno County, California, jail for a month before his assigned public defender came to talk to him. This delay was a sign of what was to come: Between arraignment and sentencing Yepez spent more than a year being shuffled between nine different Fresno County public defenders, who he says told him they did not have time to work his case
By then he'd missed his daughter's graduation and his young son's memorial service, and had fallen into depression.
Though he was originally accused of a domestic burglary, during those many months prosecutors added additional charges to his case, alleging that a victim had been present during burglary even though a police report filed at the time of the crime had claimed no one was there. The new allegations would bump his original charge to a violent felony. Still, Yepez's public defender advised to him to accept all the charges and the punishment that would come—and so he did. Now Yepez's record reflects a felony conviction.
[For more of this story, written by Gabrielle Cannon, go to http://www.motherjones.com/pol...se-fresno-california]
Comments (0)