newstart18
Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Ohio. My 17 year old son was at a local church festival with one of his friends a few weeks ago. The two of them were walking down the street, away from the festival, at the end of the evening when one boy in another group of kids tossed a traffic warning light he had picked up in the street to my son. At first, my son did not even know what the light was. He and his friend walked a few steps, and (like a foolish teenager) my son put the light partly down the front of his pants to see the light glowing through his shirt - trying to be like ET or whatever - again, teenagers acting foolish. He heard a deputy yelling to him and approaching from behind, turned and walked toward the deputy to hand the light to him, and was put in handcuffs. The deputy asked my son a few questions about why he had the light, put him in the back of his cruiser, and called me. I knew nothing of what happened other than what the deputy told me when I arrived. He said my son was very cooperative. We discussed the fact that my son has never been in any trouble, and the deputy told me that he would not be filing a report or pressing any charges, as long as I called the police sargent he told me to call the next day. He said my son could go through a diversion program and avoid charges. I called the sargent 3 times and left messages before I got a call back. The sargent left me a message that a diversion program is not available where I live, and that the deputy would be filing a report and we would have to go to court. It was not until our preliminary hearing yesterday that I realized the seriousness of what is going on, that my son is being charged with receiving stolen property. His options were to plead guilty or not guilty, with a guilty plea meaning that my son would have a criminal record - receiving stolen property. I had him plead not guilty. He now has a pretrial scheduled for 9/21. Call me naive, I nor my son have ever been in legal trouble of any kind so the treatment we received at the courthouse was surprising to me. I went in not knowing what to expect. My son did not steal the light and did not intend to do so. When he got in the car with me, he immediately called the kid he was with to talk to me and verify he was telling the truth (the officer took my son's cell phone when he cuffed him, and unlike my son this other kid ran away when the officer approached, so the two of them had no opportunity to create "matching stories.") I was more than willing to have my son go through this diversion program, but these charges and a criminal record seem way too much for what happened that evening, especially for a kid who has never been in trouble. And, as far as I am concerned, the deputy lied to me that evening about no charges being filed. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should do? (I already called an attorney, money I don't need to be spending on something like this.) What is happening seems very extreme to me.
