Wednesday, February 10, 2010

How can I fight this false accusation of harassment?

I had been working for my previous employer for almost 2 years. In addition, I have been renting a house from him for the past 8 months. We had not been seeing eye to eye recently and I was terminated on 8/21. The following evening, I called my previous employer and current landlord and asked him to come down to my property and unlock a storage shed that he had changed the lock on. I wanted to remove some personal property from the shed as I felt like I was being illegally denied access to my own stuff.





He was drunk when I called him (which is a normal evening activity for him) and he refused to grant me the access. I admit that I was upset and both of us were yelling at each other. He hung up on me and I called him right back. He answered and the conversation picked up where it left off. He hung up again and I called back again. We continued the same process until the fifth time he hung up. When I tried to call back he did not answer and I stopped calling.





A few hours later the police showed up and issued me a ticket for criminal harassment. Apparently my previous employer accused me of threatening him over the phone which I DID NOT do. The officers said they either had to issue me a ticket or arrest me, so I was issued a ticket to appear in court on 8/28 at 130PM.





I showed up to court yesterday at 115PM and after waiting in the courtroom for an hour and a half I was informed that my name was called before I entered the courtroom and a bench warrent was issued for me. Apparantly the officer wrote down the wrong time (should have been 1:00 instead of 1:30 on the ticket). The courts said they reversed the warrant, allowed me to plead not guilty, gave me a court appointed attorney and set a date for trial.





As soon as I left the courthouse I called the court appointed attorney and was told that he did not need to meet with me until the date set for the pretrial conference. I was under the impression that I would have an opportunity to discuss my case with him before we met with the procecuting attorney. I have never been charged with a crime before and now have a criminal charge pending and a bench warrant on my record. It seems like there should be more I can do but without being able to afford a lawer I am at the mercy of our legal system. How can I fight this false accusation of harassment?
A criminal harassment ticket is hard to fight... especially with the phone records showing that you indeed did call him 6 times within a short period of time.How can I fight this false accusation of harassment?
Getting verbal with someone like your situation caused you to get a harassment charge against you..settle this in court and you can take the people/landlord to civil court to have access to your personal property and think about moving on of his property and not having any kind of communication with him at this point.

No comments:

Post a Comment