Q: My husband is charged with aggravated assault of a family member, he has a lot of mental health issues he needs help
He needs an attorney that will fight to get him mental health help and not being institutionalized because that will do nothing to help him. He has no money and lost his job because of it. I’m not sure what to do because I’m the victim and he cannot have contact with me. His court appointed attorney will not help him with his mental health.
A:
Nobody ever ACTUALLY works for free in any line of work. You can't even mow a yard for free. If you are not being paid for work then you are diverting resources from somewhere else in your life to cover your time and expenses.
Properly defending a second-degree felony charge is expensive because it takes a lot of time and hard work to do it right. Courts do not pay appointed attorneys to defend cases properly, they pay for the minimum amount of work allowed by law, which isn't much. If you ask me to work "pro bono" you are asking me to either pay for it with funds obtained from other paying clients (unethical) or from my own personal savings. In other words, I would pay for it with time and money I would otherwise spend with my kids.
When a person can't afford a proper defense, he should consider spending his own savings, liquidating resources, or asking his own loved ones to help pay for it.
A:
You can go to the court that issued the protective order and tell the judge that you want the portion of that order which prohibits your husband from talking to you removed from the protective order. That way you should be able to speak with him on the phone.
You could also go to the district attorney's office and insist you want to sign an affidavit of non-prosecution. Your husband's lawyer should certainly give you the guidance for how to accomplish speaking to the prosecutor about
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