r/news • u/FreeChickenDinner • 4d ago

West Virginia couple charged with trafficking their adopted Black children to be used as ‘slaves,’ authorities allege

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/us/west-virginia-adopted-black-children-slaves-reaj/index.html
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u/Different-Estate747 4d ago

So their defense is that they can't be bad people because they adopted 5 black children?

Yeah... we know you adopted 5 black children. And unfortunately we know why you adopted 5 black children too.

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u/brookelynfd 4d ago edited 4d ago

According to this USA Today article his lawyer really tried to imply this was all a misunderstanding and the teens like it. Smh

”During the June 11 arraignment hearing, Whitefeather's attorney, Mark Plants, called the barn where the 14 and 16-year-old were found locked in a “teenage clubhouse”

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u/stdexception 4d ago

Being a defense attorney for these cases must be tough. They are obligated to defend them as best as they can, even if the evidence is overwhelming. Pleading insanity might have been a better call, though.

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u/QuitWhinging 4d ago

Yeah, even the scum of the Earth deserve to have some kind of legal representation; otherwise, the system becomes even more unfair than it already is, and innocent people begin to suffer alongside the guilty. I'm not in criminal defense, but I am a defense attorney who has had to defend people I strongly disagree with, and it's definitely tough because you have to come up with some argument in their defense, even if it's not necessarily a good one. And you have to work with your clients' wishes. I imagine these two are not the best clients. They easily could have rejected the first few arguments the defense attorney would have offered up before arriving at this one.

As far as I know, pleading insanity isn't always a great strategy either. It rarely works (especially if your clients are bad actors, which most people are) and, even when successful, people often spend more time locked up in a mental hospital than they would have spent in prison. Prison at least offers a fairly definite sentence; a mental hospital keeps you until they decide that you're healthy, which may never happen.

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u/Nebbii 4d ago

I heard something that makes sense is that they try their best on this case to leave absolutely no grounds or doubt they weren't represented fairly so if they go to jail, they deserve it absolutely

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u/theblackchin 4d ago

Well you don’t have to, unless you’re court appointed you choose your clients

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u/rice_not_wheat 4d ago

True, but you also have to put food on the table. If you're a criminal defense attorney, you're not going to maintain your practice if you only represent the truly innocent. Even the guilty aren't particularly difficult to accept as clients, because the prosecutors frequently over-charge defendants. (Escalate a standard tavern brawl to attempted murder for instance). Negotiating jail time down is 90% of an attorney's job.

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u/lonnie123 4d ago

I was under the impression you couldn’t outright lie though. Provided the best defense means making sure the prosecution was following the rules of evidence, the cops did their job properly, trying to get the best deal you can… but you can’t just bullshit and hope you fool the judge.

See: trumps lawyers for all his election cases. In public he says it was all rigged and stolen, in court they explicitly say that’s not their case and they are just trying to have XYZ looked at to see if it followed the law

If these kids are found in the barn chained up and said they were kidnapped basically, you can’t just lie and say they wanted to be there because it was their clubhouse

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u/AshleyNeku 4d ago

It's a little more complicated than that. You can't lie as to the facts, but a state of mind is not treated as a fact of evidence. He's suggesting that as far as the parents are aware, the children liked the barn. He's not directly claiming he knows the children did, since he has no expert that can attest to that. 

Either way, people should be glad his defense is shit. He has to do his best. This is his best. And if this is their best shot, they're fucked. 

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u/Suraru 4d ago

A defense attorney's job isn't to fight for guilty people to go free.

It's to make sure guilty people are treated fairly.

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u/CLE-local-1997 4d ago

There's no way in hell this would be applicable for an insanity defense.