Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Eric Wyatt was looking forward to his upcoming release from Georgia’s Douglas County Jail one day in March last year. With past convictions for thefts, traffic offenses, and a probation violation, he had an insider’s knowledge of the criminal-justice system; so when the day came, he was more than a little surprised when the authorities, instead of setting him free, escorted him over to Ben Hill County, where he was served with an old arrest warrant for borrowing a truck and failing to return it on time. Wyatt was very familiar with this theft charge: He had already been arrested, roughly three years earlier, for the crime. In fact, he had already served 179 days in jail in Clayton County as punishment for it. Obviously, somebody had made a mistake.
But no one was treating it like a mistake. When Wyatt appeared before a Ben Hill County magistrate three days later, he was denied bond. According to Wyatt’s sworn affidavit, he was called out of his cell the following day to meet with a lawyer from the public defender’s office and fill out an application saying that he couldn’t afford counsel and was thereby eligible for free criminal representation. Wyatt said that when he tried to talk about the gross mix-up, the public defender stopped him cold: “I am not going to be your attorney,” he said. The whole encounter lasted five minutes.
Credit:
This Man Sat in Jail for 110 Days—After He Already Did His Time
