Legal Question in Criminal Law in Michigan

Is This Legal?

The ''victim'' in our case was company and after years of pretrial preparation for the case, they decided they didn't want to go to trial. They tried for half a year to talk the gov. into dropping the case and explained to them how much a trial would hurt their company. The gov. didn't care and were going to force them to go to trial and subpoena them. We knew all of this was happening because our attorneys were friends with and old co-workers with the company's private attorneys. A few months later, our attorneys advised us that we should plead instead of go to trial. They also said that if we made an agreement to the company not to talk about or publish anything about the case or what had happened, that the company would write a letter to the court that they have moved on and don't want a custodial sentence imposed in the case. In the end, the judge didn't care about the letter because they ''just didn't want publicity''. Was this so-called ''agreement'' even legal in the first place though? Was it unethical for our attorneys to ask us to agree to this? Even though our case had other problems, I sometimes wonder if they used the value of that letter to leverage us into pleading, since they exhausted efforts with the Gov.


Asked on 5/10/09, 8:23 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys
Timothy Klisz Klisz Law Office, PLLC

Re: Is This Legal?

You sound like you are having second thoughts about a plea, but I assume the letter was explained to you as a piece of material the Judge could consider, but you certainly didn't have a "sentence agreement" in place. Without more facts, it is hard to assess you situation fully. Visit www.kliszlaw.com to discuss more fully. Tim Klisz

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Answered on 5/10/09, 8:46 pm


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