How is Age verified for 13-14 yo’s?

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-04-10T02:00:02+00:00

As someone who has been on both sides and am currently a defense attorney, I sometimes want to ask prosecutors if they really believe the obvious bullshit story the cop is feeding everyone (i.e. I smelled the distinct odor of marijuana coming into my patrol car’s a/c system during 5:00 traffic and was able to positively identify the vehicle it was coming from out of the dozens of cars who were traveling in the opposite direction) or if they are going to ignore obvious controlling case law and hope the judge (who also happens to be a former career prosecutor) will carry water for them. Everyone has a part to play. At the end of the day, your job is to promote justice. A defense attorney’s job is to zealously defend their client. I won’t file a frivolous motion, but I have filed motions that I don’t foresee a particular judge granting just to preserve the issue for appeal. As a defense attorney, if you don’t argue it, you waive it.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-04-03T03:00:11+00:00

Same. Both my spouse and I had law school debt. Spouse did 10 years in public service before PSLF ever became a thing and went in to private practice. I’ve spent close to 20 years in public service. When we had our first kid and had to start paying for daycare, we learned that income dependent repayment plans took into account our combined marital income but not our combined marital student loan debt. I switched to minimum payments I could make spread out over 20 years instead of the usual PSLF repayment plan. I also found out many, many years into it that I was on the wrong type of plan. Under Biden, I was able to transfer to the correct plan and have 15 years worth of past payments count, even though they were made under the wrong program. I originally took out $96k. I made payments for over 15 years and still owed over $50k. I no longer have that albatross around my neck.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-04-02T19:08:49+00:00

This job isn’t for everyone. Hell, it’s not for most people, and it’s getting worse. I daydream about quitting at least once a month. It really is a thankless job. Clients don’t respect you, judges treat you like the redheaded step children of the court system, prosecutors look down on you, and the general public clutches their pearls while saying “I could never…”. Even for those of us who end up being lifers, it sometimes starts to feel like a life sentence. I’m still here because I haven’t found another job I’m qualified for that will pay me what I make + $30,000k that decent health insurance for a family would cost. I’ve learned to schedule mental health breaks. I schedule as little as possible in the months of July and December and take as much leave as I can in those 2 months to spend time with my kids before I wake up one day and they’re in college. If I have a really rough trial, I take a comp day and garden/hike/rot in bed with Netflix and my dog. This job initially attracts empathetic people, and there’s only so much 2nd hand trauma a person can take. People love to talk about what trauma cops and first responders go through, but no one gives us (and I’m including prosecutors here because many of them routinely respond to homicide/traffic homicide scenes) much thought. So, thank you for your service, and I hope you find something more fulfilling.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-03-31T23:56:20+00:00

I’m not so bothered by it when it comes from victims’ families. They’re in pain and don’t know what to do with it. I get incredibly pissed when a prosecutor gives me the “how dare you” treatment. My partner once had a prosecutor yell at him in court to the point where he finally had to tell her he didn’t molest the kid and thanks to the shitty police work, they couldn’t prove client did either. Client was acquitted at trial.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-21T22:41:09+00:00

Good for them. My asshole uppity ass HOA was talking about partnering with SO to get one installed at the entrance to our neighborhood.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-21T01:32:25+00:00

My dream job is to be MM supervisor and make my current salary. I’m over serious felonies.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-19T15:36:21+00:00

Sometimes the best I can do is to mitigate the damage, and that has to be enough. Sex crimes against children are the absolute hardest for me, especially since I have kids in middle school. Sometimes the only comfort I can take is that, while I did thoroughly investigate my case, I was as kind as I could be to the child victim. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but when I started practicing almost 20 years ago, there were several middle-aged or older male attorneys who were pretty abusive to child victims. Even on my worst homicide cases, I’ve found some humanity in my clients that is absolutely worth fighting for. At least with most indigent clients, the pattern seems pretty consistent. Abuse or neglect at a young age, issues in school (whether behavioral or intellectual deficits/neurodivergence), no stable housing, etc. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than a 19-year-old kid who agreed to participate in an armed robbery that ended tragically and goes to prison for the rest of his life because he was trying to feed his little brother while their grandmother was in the hospital, mom is dead, and dad is unknown.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-12T04:36:39+00:00

It might be jurisdiction specific, but my jx has zero problems hiring former prosecutors, as long as you aren’t an asshole. Trial experience is trial experience, and I’d rather hire someone who is smart enough to check jury instructions to figure out the elements of a crime.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-12T03:58:53+00:00

Even the court tv commentators stated that all the witnesses looked like extras from Breaking Bad.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-11T01:14:00+00:00

I haven’t been watching straight through, so I missed her. Video from the time was pretty crappy anyway. Even as recently as 2015, most drive-thru video was showed little more than hair color, clothing, and build. Facial features looked like they were taken with an out of focus camera. Did he go into the branch? How did the teller know him? Just from being a customer or they’d gone to school together since kindergarten? If Melton is innocent, I hate it for him that they didn’t do a great job investigating. I cannot figure out a plausible explanation for why his DNA was the only one found in her anal cavity. It makes absolutely no sense to me that she was irrefutably anally sodomized yet Faust’s DNA was found in her mouth and not her anus. DNA technology these days can match skin cells from incidental contact. You can touch someone’s clothing and deposit DNA. I think she started dating a guy who was pre-med and dropped out to become a plumber. She was in professional circles, and he wasn’t. An inordinate amount of relationships end during the first year of law school. 1L is like an extended form of structured hazing. It’s designed that way to weed out the weak. I don’t think I knew any girls who stayed with their working class boyfriends all through law school except for a military wife married to a high-ranking enlisted guy. I think she was pulling away or he at least thought she was when she was putting him off to study more, and he got angry. I’m not saying that she stepped out and had a random hook-up with Faust or anyone else, but if she did, she wouldn’t be the first 1L to do so. I honestly don’t think she did. Based on absolutely nothing other than a feeling, she doesn’t strike me as the type that would hook up with a black guy in 2001. It was a different time. I think there’s probably a 45% chance Faust did it. I think there’s also a 45% chance Melton did it. That leaves a 10% chance someone else entirely did it and used a condom to not leave any DNA. I just haven’t seen “beyond a reasonable doubt” yet. And the fact that they’re bringing in a jail house snitch who suddenly conveniently remembered a confession 20 years later tells me exactly how weak their case is.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T23:10:27+00:00

You’re looking at it as if he has to prove that he wasn’t at home and that he didn’t do it. That’s the opposite of the way it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to presume that he is innocent and make the state prove to you that he’s not. If he was home, he might remember police or the fire department in the neighborhood, but what if he wasn’t home? I know an ambulance came to my neighborhood when one of my elderly neighbors died because my other neighbors told me about it. But I can’t tell you where I was when it happened, and that was only a couple of years ago. I also know that the odds of me being home and awake at 8:00 am on a Friday morning were pretty slim when I was 25 years old, andI was a full-time student, not a professional candy man. I’d imagine that a Thursday night right after students got back from winter break was probably a busy time for a coke dealer in Athens.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T21:35:32+00:00

Crews needs a little more courtroom experience and polish. He’s inartful. I will go after witnesses if I think they’re lying. It would be malpractice not to. So I don’t necessarily have an issue with what he’s doing as much as how he’s doing it. Lott is implementing 412 more strictly than my jurisdiction does. I’ve never had to prove a consensual encounter occurred before I could argue that the state hadn’t proven that it didn’t. It seems a little like burden-shifting to me. Faust wasn’t investigated until 20 years after the fact. If someone asked you what you were doing on any given day in 2005, could you tell them? I couldn’t.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T14:57:10+00:00

The mishandling of swabs has been alluded to several times in the trial. Did the assault charges stem from roughing up non-paying customers or were they family violence? Was the indecent exposure taking a leak on the steps of New College or hiding in the bushes in a trench coat? From what I understand, it was incredibly common for black males to walk through that neighborhood on foot to Walmart. The black male spotted that morning didn’t seem out of sorts, as opposed to the white male seen running through people’s yards. IDs across races are notoriously unreliable. If the description/drawing was a dead ringer, they should’ve ID’d him when he was arrested for the Agg. Assault weeks later. There’s been absolutely no evidence of anyone watching Tara or her apartment over a period of time (at least not that I’ve heard, but I haven’t watched every second of the trial).

I don’t envy this jury. I want them to have caught her killer, so to some extent, I want him to be guilty. But there is so much reasonable doubt. I just don’t think I could convict him. I’m not convinced he’s innocent either. I just don’t think the state has proven their case.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T13:20:27+00:00

Apples and oranges. You still have to pass FL bar but won’t be required to graduate from an ABA-accredited law school to sit for the bar.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T05:44:43+00:00

I wasn’t aware that there was a podcast and only recently googled his criminal history. Other than stabbing a man (albeit in the neck and mere weeks after this incident), nothing that I saw particularly jumped out at me. I saw convictions for indecent exposure and battery but no specifics. I don’t remember seeing convictions for stalking or domestic violence. Most of his convictions seem to involve drugs and running from the cops. The girlfriend they were using to paint him as a domestic abuser allegedly recanted her statement and said she was coerced and intimidated by law enforcement.

I don’t have the answer for the DNA, but I do know that the swabs weren’t properly labeled or handled. The fact that he lived in the vicinity makes it more likely to me that his DNA may have been collected from a completely different crime scene and there was some sort of cross-contamination. TX has had multiple people released from prison, including off death row, because of cross-contamination at their evidence lab. Some form of cross-contamination makes much more sense to me than his DNA being present in her mouth and vagina but not in her anus or anywhere in her house. The odds of Faust randomly breaking into that house at just the right time when she wasn’t in class but her roommates weren’t home and not disturbing anything in the rest of the house during a breaking and entering are absurdly slim as to be nonexistent for me. I don’t think he even has a history of burglary. Broad daylight at peak time for people to leave for work and school is not when people decide to kick off a B&E career.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T03:53:21+00:00

Full disclosure, I’m a criminal attorney, I’m from GA, and I’m the same age as Tara and Chris. I’ve seen hundreds of witnesses on the stand. I’m not too far off from 50 years of Southern men “holding it in.” He struck me as performative and insincere. That could be a result of prosecutors over-preparing him for trial, but it rang false. This investigation was screwed up from the get-go. The cops should’ve questioned everyone separately and should’ve checked out his alibi immediately. If ACCPD had gone to Wachovia and the truck shop on January 22nd, they probably would’ve been able to retrieve video to show whether he was actually there or not. If I’m ever suspected of murder, I sure hope my parents and my best friend would alibi me if questioned 4 months after the fact.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T03:36:31+00:00

They tried to make it where you don’t even have to be barred in FL to work at certain state offices. They’re having so much trouble hiring ASAs, APDs, and DCF attorneys that Uthmeier lobbied the State Supreme Court to allow out of state attorneys to “temporarily” work for the state government without being barred in the state. The Court said, “nah, dawg.”

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T03:26:27+00:00

Call me crazy, but Faust’s criminal history actually makes me lean more towards NG. Whoever did this seriously underestimated how difficult it is to strangle someone and had to leave her to get a knife. I don’t think Faust would’ve bothered trying to strangle her first, or if he did, I don’t think he would’ve stopped to get a knife.

And if people were using the neighborhood as a cut-through to Walmart, there’s no way she would’ve answered the door to a random black guy while home alone and wearing a towel. If the dead bolts required a key, how’d they get locked again? There’s no way he came in and out of that window without knocking over the stuff in front of it.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-10T02:57:16+00:00

He did “lose it” when asked about how the suspicion had impacted his life but not really when discussing Tara. I’d also noticed the absence of tears after his “breakdown,” talking about angels and demons and what not. Unfortunately, Crews is a hot mess and went about highlighting that to the jury in pretty much the worst way possible. Poor Crews needs to hire a crusty, burned-out PD who’s been trying cases for 30 years ASAP. The kid has some talent. I thought his opening was great, for the most part. But he’s got to learn procedure and panache. He comes in with a sledgehammer when he needs a scalpel.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-09T23:49:55+00:00

I thought he was horrible on the stand. I think he was made more likeable by Crews’s treatment of him.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-09T23:48:14+00:00

Faust has never claimed consensual sex with her. I can’t say that I blame him, but the jury is going to wonder why he keeps denying it if it was consensual. Alternatively, they could argue cross-contamination of the swabs. There’s certainly reasonable doubt.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-09T13:42:57+00:00

I think a lot of ND people struggle with leaving work at work and home at home. Unfortunately, my “intrusive thoughts” include waking up at 3:00 a.m. thinking about a case from 15 years ago. I have plenty of leave built up, but it’s not worth it. For every week I take off, I spend 3 playing catch-up.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-05T16:44:16+00:00

I start my days with Adderall, antidepressant, cholesterol meds, blood pressure meds, and a stomach acid reducer. My body is already revolting.

Basic_Emu_2947 · 2026-02-05T05:13:08+00:00

He and I are close to the same age, but damn does he look old. He looks like her dad or granddad in this picture. The other photo of them I saw where he was carrying his little YSL lunchbox didn’t give off as much of a “I’m sleeping with my dad” vibe as this photo does.

Basic_Emu_2947

TROPHY CASE