I’m facing serious criminal charges. What does the trial process look like?

If you’re facing serious criminal charges, the trial process begins after you’re released on bond. You have an initial appearance where you have to appear in court essentially to show that you have a lawyer. If we represent you, we get you excused from that. You have a second appearance which is probably about 90 days after your arrest; you have to go for that. That’s really more of just a roll call gathering; people think it’s court but it isn’t. It’s an opportunity to go meet with the DA, look at the discovery on your case and sometimes get a plea offer.

Beyond that, there’s just negotiations. There are no necessarily court appearances and that’s where, in our system, it’s a little bit unusual because the prosecutor can dismiss the case at that point, they can call you back in, they can call you into negotiate and sometimes they bring people in for an arraignment where they basically put the person in front of the court and say, this person has this plea offer, we think it’s fair. The person is refusing to accept the plea therefore we’re going to give them this warning that if they don’t take the plea offer that’s issued by the DA that they’ll be set for trial and it’s kind of supposed to be a point of no return.

In terms of appearances, sometimes people have to appear just once or twice, sometimes people have to appear multiple times over the course of months and sometimes years.