The first question to jump into my mind: "How the hell does a legal aid attorney afford to live on the Upper West side?" There are a large number of people in New York whom I refer to as career hobbyists. They are either directly receiving money from more successful parents or living off of an I heritence. We aren't talking the kids of billionaires here. Some of them got themselves established with a few hundred million in the bank that they spend slowly hoping that they will outlive the money. So living amongst the wealthy and the successful is this large group of people who simply dont, won't or can't work. When you start robbing banks and pleading amnesia I'd guess there are some mental issues at play as well. Unfortunately for this woman the affluenza defense has never really flown in New York courts. We will lock up anyone.
So a lawyer finally decided to stop robbing the hard way through overpriced billable hours and just go straight to the source. Brilliant!
Apparently by robbing banks. :tongue: Remember what the famous bank robber, Willie Sutton, said when asked why he robbed banks; "Because that's where the money is". Bank robbery is no longer the lucrative and glamorous thing it used to be. The overwhelming majority of bank robberies are by note-passers, who are very rarely armed, and the take is usually less than $5,000, sometimes with a dye-pack or GPS tracker as a parting gift. That's peanuts to risk a Federal prison sentence, which are about double what a state sentence would be, at least around here. Most of the bank robbers we have are desperate junkies. Robbing armored transport trucks is where the real money is. The big roadblock there is that your targets have guns too, and will shoot back. Greater risk, greater reward.
Hoping that they will outlive the money? Hmm. I thought that they would hope not to outlive their money.
You are correct. The other error in my post was that I erroneously said "hundreds of millions" when I meant "hundreds of thousands."
One of the news stories stated she was a former public defender in the Bronx, but currently unemployed and had been fighting eviction from her residence.
Public defenders get paid crap, and usually work on a fee-for-service basis. Combine that with the astronomical cost of law school and the cost of living in NYC, it's not surprising that she got to that point of desperation. However, it also wouldn't surprise me if drugs were somehow involved.
