Is sealing your juvenile record not an option where you live?
I was charged as an adult, so it can't be sealed. Even if I managed to get the records expunged by donating enough money to $partyInPower, it wouldn't matter much because all the data brokers have already bought that information and are under no obligation to remove the information from their databases.
The anxiety of not knowing what the future held made it seem to be a relief to just get things concluded. Also, as an 18-year-old, I wasn't thinking about my future 10 or 20 years in the future
The Jurisdiction was Williamson county, a neighboring county of Austin, TX. They are well-known for their no leniency attitudes.
Here is the minimum for Aggravated Robbery (a first degree felony):
"Sec. 12.32. FIRST DEGREE FELONY PUNISHMENT. (a) An individual adjudged guilty of a felony of the first degree shall be punished by imprisonment in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for life or for any term of not more than 99 years or less than 5 years. (b) In addition to imprisonment, an individual adjudged guilty of a felony of the first degree may be punished by a fine not to exceed $10,000.
Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 883, ch. 399, Sec. 1, eff. Jan. 1, 1974. Renumbered from Penal Code Sec. 12.31 by Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 1124, ch. 426, art. 2, Sec. 2, eff. Jan. 1, 1974. Amended by Acts 1979, 66th Leg., p. 1058, ch. 488, Sec. 1, eff. Sept. 1, 1979; Acts 1993, 73rd Leg., ch. 900, Sec. 1.01, eff. Sept. 1, 1994. Amended by: Acts 2009, 81st Leg., R.S., Ch. 87, Sec. 25.146, eff. September 1, 2009."
I don't know about you, but 5 years seems like a pretty ridiculous risk if 6 months was on the table. That is their game. Prosecutors do not like to go to trial because juries are unpredictable. However, they have the overwhelmingly stronger bargaining position of being able to lock you up and throw away the key.
http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence...
You are absolutely right, he would probably not have spent the rest of his life in jail. However, staring down the barrel of a minimum 5 year imprisonment with the possibility of more, depending on whether or not the judge had a bad day seems way too risky.
In my opinion, there should be no mandatory minimum sentences. Each action is literally taken on a case-by-case basis, so what purpose do they serve other than to force defendants into plea bargains?
According to the model penal code, "burglary" is the charge of attempting a felony by surreptitiously breaking into a building. The unique elements of burglary are all about gaining access to buildings. Like you said, robbery is about theft by force.
For what it's worth, I asked because Texas has three "aggravated" robbery statutes: robbery with concomitant physical harm to people, robbery using threat of deadly force, and robbery targeting the elderly.
A common mugging is a robbery. When I think of crimes that target houses, I think of burglary.
Not criticising here, honestly curious. Lawyer should have shown you sentencing guidelines and talked about averages and probability.
To this day, I do everything within my power to avoid that County. Anecdotal evidence among my friends indicates that I'm not the only one that avoids Williamson County, the county just to the North of Austin, because of a fear of the unchecked legal system there
That's actually not right. If you get a criminal record expunged, the FCRA requires those data brokers to not release those records ever again to whoever runs a background check on you. If they do it, they're in violation of the FCRA.
The thing that sucks is that there is NOT some kind of big hammer that comes out of the sky and smashes them if they screw up in this way. The process is basically that you'd contact them after the fact to let them know the record was expunged and they'd remove it... which doesn't help if you just failed to get a job because of the record. But they're supposed to stay on top of things and preemptively remove records like this before it becomes an issue.
I'd guess it's worth getting an expungement if you're done with your probation. In some places it's easier than others.
It's actually a pretty thoroughly regulated system. You could theoretically start a company like that overseas but you'd be doing it with secondhand data, since none of the state agencies would deal with you. It wouldn't work very well, you wouldn't attract any customers, and you'd end up fielding lawsuits from the state governments whose data you were borrowing. There'd be no profit in it.
It wouldn't hurt to call one of the big companies and just ask what it takes to see your report. (they might try to charge you for it. this is a bummer since different companies might not necessarily create the same report, depending on the quality of their database.) I think in the long run the industry is moving towards something like credit reports, where you can see yours for free periodically, but I don't think they're there yet.
They might also be moving towards getting rid of these big databases altogether (they get sued a lot for inaccurate results) and relying fully on sending runners to individual courts to get searches, but that doesn't scale well enough to cover the entire country every time you do a search on a person. The big databases that pull in records from state, county, muni, DOC, and so on have their problems but it's not hard to see why they came into existence: law enforcement and the courts are not properly centralized. My sense is that the industry is in a state of change but I don't know anything for sure (except that getting an expungement is one of those things you might as well try since taking the shot doesn't cost too much and it might help :) ).
The US federal gov't outsources a large portion of its employment background checks to a company that the FTC has charged with violating FCRA. The contractor settled for $2.6 million and kept its contracts, clearing both NSA leaker Snowden and DC Navy Yard shooter Alexis along the way.
http://www.ccjdigital.com/background-reports-on-navy-yard-sh...
On topic: Even the US trucking industry, which is desperate to hire people desperate enough to put up with ridiculous hours and weeks away from home -- working hours that are nonetheless ridiculously regulated -- is hesitant to hire felons. Accidents, plaintiffs' lawyers, juries, etc.