Who We Are
Advocacy in the time of COVID
- Defender Dialogues
By Staff Attorney Diana Yu
“How long will I be in jail?”
“When is my trial going to happen?”
“What’s going to happen when we go back to court?”
Every day, several of my clients call me from jail to ask these questions I don’t have the answers to.
And it’s hard to tell them the same thing every day: that I don’t know, and I don’t know when I’ll have answers for them. And there’s a second thought in my brain – that because of the coronavirus lockdown at the jail, my clients are only allowed out of their cell once a day for 30 minutes to make phone calls.
Imagine being locked up in a cage, worried about your family members on the outside, and trying to stay as connected as possible to your loved ones. In a time when people are staying more digitally connected than ever on FaceTime and Zoom, you’re cut off from the outside world more than ever. Maybe you have a family member who is sick or in the hospital. And still, you are using part of your precious 30 minutes a day to call your lawyer, hoping that he or she can give you some information, some hope for what the future holds.
It breaks my heart that I can’t give them that hope.
