Lawyer waiting in court offers $1K to defendant facing a felony if he didn't pay restitution
Photo from Shutterstock.
A Portland, Oregon, business lawyer waiting in court last week was moved by the plight of a criminal defendant who faced a felony if he didn’t pay $983 in restitution for buying a stolen truck.
The lawyer, Colin Murphy, offered to pay the money, stunning defense lawyer Lawrence Taylor, report the Oregonian, KOIN 6 and Willamette Week.
“I’ve practiced for 22 years,” Taylor told the Oregonian, “and I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t expect to again.”
The defendant, 27-year-old Castor Majuro Conley, told police he paid $150 to $200 for the truck, then sold it to another man for $275, the Oregonian says. He pleaded guilty in Multnomah County court to unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. The prosecutor offered to classify the conviction as a misdemeanor if Conley paid restitution. Conley, however, couldn’t come up with the money.
Conley, who is married and the father of a toddler, has just one prior conviction on his record for misdemeanor assault.
Murphy, a 2011 law grad, told the Oregonian that it would be great if the defendant paid him back, but if he doesn’t, “no problem. I’m not going to hold the kid to it.”
“All of us sometime in our lives have done something we would rather not have done,” Murphy told The Oregonian. “And the time will come when perhaps we are going to be held accountable. And I think at that point we would like to have somebody show us mercy.”
