Here’s another perspective on Leticia Astacio and her recent run through a Rochester courtroom.
On Monday, she showed up in jailhouse orange, pled away a stack of probation violations with an insincere guilty plea to the least significant of them, and sashayed past the television cameras like the cat that ate the canary.
It was kind of a big middle finger in the face of what seems like justice.
But maybe it wasn’t.
After speaking to a variety of people who work in criminal courtrooms in various jurisdictions, another possible interpretation emerges, as something of the consensus speculation of people in that line of work.
And it comes down to this: On TV, Astacio is a probation violator, scofflaw and gold brick. In the courtroom, she is a drunk driver.
Watching from our living rooms, we want her held accountable for mockingly ignoring probation and getting paid $174,000 a year while refusing to do even the simplest of duties. We are pissed off, and we want something done about it.
The people who work in courtrooms are sympathetic to that, but they’re really not in that business.
They are functionaries within a system of legal processes. Central to that is a clear understanding of what process is afoot and what everyone’s role in that process is.
What is Leticia Astacio’s role in the particular legal process through which she is passing?
She is a drunk driver.
She was driving to work early one Saturday morning, to arraign the drunk people in lockup, and she smashed the hell out of her car because she was herself drunk as hell.
That will get you a visit to court.
And what will the court’s interest in you be?
The court, and all the people in it, will be focused on punishing your past drunk driving and preventing your future drunk driving.
Period.
That’s what those of us watching in the living room may lose sight of. As Astacio has melted down in a cascading series of personal peculiarities, we’ve been distracted by the peculiarities. Yes, she skipped the country.Yes, she was doing something funky last Thanksgiving. Yes, she was lying about the foot peel. Yes, her description of all this as racial and gender prejudice is pulled right out of her hind end.
But, no, none of those things are what – to the court – this is really about.
The court is there to handle a drunk driving incident.
The court wants to reduce the likelihood that she ever drives drunk again.
This isn’t about her attitudes toward probation or her job responsibilities – no matter how reprehensible we may find them.
Her obligation before the court is to address and resolve the matter arising from the charge of a New York state trooper that she was driving drunk.
It’s likely that the prosecutor and judge did what they did Monday because their eye was on that prize.
Which gets us back to some realities.
As a person guilty of a misdemeanor, Leticia Astacio can be jailed for up to one year. With mandatory good time, that means eight months. She has thus far, because of probation violations, been jailed for about a month and a half. So, theoretically, the court could continue to wage the battle of probation violations by imposing the sanction of incarceration, but when that runs down, that runs down. When a total of eight months are spent in jail, that will be all that can be imposed and this matter will be done. She will be free and clear.
That might send some message about violating probation, but it won’t do anything about keeping Leticia Astacio from being a drunk driver.
Remember that her second set of lawyers told the court that Astacio preferred to do straight jail time to resolve the matter, and did not want to do probation, and would not comply with probation if it was imposed.
As a person guilty of a misdemeanor, Leticia Astacio can be given as much as three years of probation. Probation can include requirements like wearing an alcohol bracelet and having an interlock device on her car. It can also include alcohol addiction counseling.
Those things help keep somebody from returning to drunk driving, and three years of probation protects longer than eight months of jail.
That means the most useful tool the prosecutor or judge have to address Leticia Astacio’s drunk driving is probation. And what happened in the courtroom Monday preserves that tool for the court.
Astacio has asked that her probation be thrown out, claiming that it was improperly imposed. Almost no one in the legal community thinks that effort will be successful. Almost everyone in the legal community thinks she will remain on probation.
And many feel that the best way to manager her as a drunk driver is through probation, not incarceration.
And that may well explain why what happened Monday happened.
Inside the courtroom, they don’t care what she says on Facebook or to the TV cameras, they just don’t want to wake up to the news that she has killed somebody by driving drunk.
And they are doing what they can to keep that from happening.