This is what happened to my father about thirty years ago. While he was naive about a lot of things and didn't have good legal representation, he knew enough to

This is what happened to my father about thirty years ago. While he was naive about a lot of things and didn't have good legal representation, he knew enough to refuse to plead guilty. The "compromise" that prosecutors arrived at was to threaten him with a massive prison sentence, and mislead him about what an Alford plea is. "We're not asking you to plead guilty, and you wont spend any time in jail! Just sign this!" My father avoided jail time but was branded a felon. Every couple of years since I was little I'd see him spend a few thousand dollars on attorneys trying to rewrite history or fix a new fire resulting from that plea. It took the whole family 30 years, unspeakable amounts of money and a really empathetic journalist but we managed to convince the governor of Missouri to pardon him a few years ago. A regular person who doesn't have the inhuman qualities my father does would have been ground up and destroyed. He managed to work 35 years at the same company even though a population of "vigilantes" wanted to find any reason they could to get him fired or just make him miserable. Every once in a while he'd let a story leak about how someone had rubbed grease on his work steering wheel or we'd have to go to the DMV to get new license plates because someone managed to get past his locking screws. My dad responded to this shit in a dispassionate way that still impresses me to reflect on. Someone might break into his locker and cut up his boots. If he said anything about it, it would be like "I should have known better than to use my locker." Then he'd treat going to the shoe store like going to the post office. It's just part of the chores one deals with. If I were in his shoes I wouldn't have made it.