Someone you love has been charged

The first day

1. 1

   Find the case before you do anything else

   Pennsylvania publishes case information on the courts' public docket portal at ujsportal.pacourts.us. A search by name will usually show the charges, the court, the docket number and the next scheduled date. Write the docket number down. Everything after this runs off it, and it is the first thing an attorney will ask you for.

2. 2

   Assume every call from a jail is recorded

   Because it is, and the recordings are routinely obtained by prosecutors. Tell them you love them. Tell them you are working on it. Do not let them explain what happened, apologize, argue about the facts, or talk about the other people involved — not on the phone, not in a jail email, not in a visit, not in a letter.

3. 3

   Keep every piece of paper

   The citation, the criminal complaint, the bail paperwork, the property receipt, anything handed over on the way out the door. Photograph all of it. Paperwork goes missing in the first week more often than anything else.

4. 4

   Do not contact the other side

   Not the complainant, not their family, not through a friend, and not to apologize or 'clear it up.' Well-meaning contact from a defendant's family is one of the fastest ways to turn one case into two, and it can violate a bail condition the person did not know they had.

5. 5

   Do not post about it — and do not delete anything either

   Nothing on social media helps, and deleting messages or accounts after a charge can look far worse than what was there. Leave it alone and tell the attorney what exists.

6. 6

   Write down what you remember now

   Names, times, who was present, what was said, who called whom. Memory is at its best today. Give those notes to the attorney rather than to anyone else — your notes are not protected the way your loved one's conversation with their lawyer is.

Where you fit — and where you don't

This is the part families are rarely told plainly, so it gets said here first. If your adult son, daughter or spouse is the one charged, they are the client — even when you are the one paying. The attorney's confidentiality and loyalty run to them. What you are told about the case is their decision to make, not the attorney's and not yours.

That is not a wall put up against you. It is the same protection that keeps the Commonwealth from learning what was said in that room. It is also why some conversations happen one-to-one: privilege can be weakened when a third person sits in, so having a parent in every meeting is not always the favor it appears to be. Most families, once they hear the reason, prefer it this way.

Within those lines, families are genuinely useful — often decisively so:

• · You have the paperwork, the timeline, and the phone numbers nobody else has.
• · You know what was going on in their life, which matters at sentencing and in negotiations long before that.
• · You can gather employment records, school records, service records and letters that take weeks to collect.
• · You are, very often, the person who makes sure they are awake, dressed and at the courthouse on the right morning.
• · You can be the steady one. A case that runs for months is exhausting, and that steadiness is worth more than it sounds.

Some situations of their own