Legal Juice
You have to give the lady credit. It was an interesting approach to getting your bond reduced. But did it work? As reported by The Florida Sun Sentinel:
Felicia Underwood faced a $76,000 bond when she made her first court appearance before Judge John “Jay” Hurley Monday during a particularly interesting docket of cases.
Underwood, 38, was charged by Fort Lauderdale Police with distributing/delivering cannabis and trafficking in more than 10 and less than 200 grams of MDMA, a drug that is also called phenethylamines in a state statute.
Underwood told the judge she did not know what phenethylamines are. She also told Hurley she has two jobs and asked for a reduction in the bond amount, for which she would be responsible for 10 percent.
Of course that’s not the novel request. How did the judge respond to this first request?
Hurley ordered a reduced bond of $10,000, but Underwood, who told the judge she had no money and that her mother was not working right now, was hoping she’d get to pay even less to get of jail before her trial.
Wow, from $76,000 down to $10,000? She asked for a reduction, and got a huge one. So what was her next move?
“You can’t make it a little lower, hon?” Underwood seems to say on the Sun Sentinel live stream video.
Say what? You did not just call the judge “hon.”
[Judge] Hurley appears shocked for a moment.
“Did she just refer to the court as ‘honey’?” Hurley asked, while the voice of a woman in the courtroom who was off camera can also be heard asking, “Did she just say honey?”
Yup. So now what?
Said Hurley, “Oh well, hon or honey, it’s all part of the same…Ma’am, I’m going to leave your bond where it is today, alright?”
You’ll find the source, and a video, here.