If A Person Is Detained Will Noll Law Office Still Represent Them?
By Dan Noll on December 17th, 2014 in
Quite often when an individual is detained, at least within the Central District of Illinois, be it in Champaign, Urbana, Peoria, Springfield, Rock Island, the individual will be housed in a county jail. In Springfield it would be Sangamon County, in some of the counties contiguous. Basically, the federal government does not have a federal lock up in the Central District of Illinois. In Chicago they do. It’s called a metropolitan correctional center. It’s about a 20 story building and it’s just a giant jail where people can be held.
Here locally, the feds will subcontract with the counties. The client, if they are detained, is held in that county jail pending disposition of the case. The county jails are very good for our office to work with. We know all the jailers, we know all the clerks and that makes a big difference. If there’s a problem with our client, the US Marshals office is good to work with.
We can go and visit our clients which we do normally on the weekend. We do that for a very simple reason that the jailers are not pressed to have people present in court, they don’t have a lot of visitation going on. We’ll visit on a Saturday morning or Sunday morning when the least pressures are on the institution. It’s relaxed for us too so we can sit down, spend some time with our clients, show them discovery, discuss their options in the case, talk about witnesses, things of that nature. Those are important things.
Somebody’s detained, we know it’s not the best situation for them. But at the same time, it affords us an opportunity to get to know them, get to know them on a personal basis as opposed to just setting up an appointment, having them come in. I think that our clients really appreciate the fact that we visit our clients who are incarcerated or who cannot make bond vastly more than other law firms who, once the person’s incarcerated, just don’t like the inconvenience of going to see the person. They’d much rather be playing golf on the weekend than seeing people who are incarcerated.
It’s important to that defendant that they know what the status of the case is and they have a good sense that their attorney’s on their side and vigorously advocating for them.