Saul Goodman - Don't Go to Jail! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Keeping the Cuffs Off

Look, as long as you aren’t one of those pig fuckers who knowingly solicits sex with someone who’s underage, here’s the good news: it’s usually a misdemeanor. Soliciting a murder is definitely a felony, but soliciting a chance to grope the grapefruit with a consenting stranger for pay—class B or C, usually.

I say good news, but it’s only good news if you are convicted of the crime. You don’t have to accept that it’s just going to go that way, because I sure don’t.

Let me tell you about a few possible defenses an attorney might pull out of his or her hat to defend an accused patron of the curbside circuit.

• The “there’s no way this is actually a crime” defense.It states it just isn’t legally feasible to say you committed a crime. This is merely an okay solution, for my money. Well, your money. In a prostitution case it might be tough to prove. I mean, attorneys have to say stuff all the time that looks kind of ridiculous to the casual observer, but here, especially if you set the meeting up online, it’d be tough for me to keep a straight face when telling the court, “My client did nothing wrong, he set up that meeting in an anonymous no-tell motel with a sexy-sounding stranger to play a round of gin rummy.” This is an approach to try with some other forms of solicitation, I guess, but it could seem pretty weak here.

Here’s the frustrating deal about solicitation: from the defendant’s perspective it can be hard to understand exactly why this is illegal. Seriously, you only talked about getting it on for the price of a large pancake house meal for two, but you didn’t even get to sniff the syrup. You could, if you wanted to play paranoid conspiracy theorist for a moment, almost think of this kind of thing as a thought crime.

You thought about it, kind of talked about it, but you certainly didn’t do anything.

Yeah, it’s a bitch, but sometimes a crime can be half-baked and the law still calls it fully done. There are three main kinds of these lukewarm, semi-crimes: a crime of conspiracy, attempted crime, and—that’s right—solicitation. Any of the three can really deflate your swaggering soufflé into a slice of humble pie.

Infuriating as it may be, the fact that conspiracy and criminal attempts are under the half-crime umbrella should explain why solicitation is there as well. If a political figure is assassinated and one guy pulled the trigger, but he did it after talking about how it would go down at length with two others and they egged him on and gave him ideas on how to do it—well, it’s pretty easy to see how they would get taken in by investigators, too, right? Scheduling a date in your day planner with a prostitute is both a bit of an attempted crime and a crime of solicitation. You tried, after all, and didn’t get that sweet cigar! And in trying, the law sees what you did as soliciting the person you wanted to pay for sex to break the law as well. You had a specific intention of doing that thing.

• If you make it in the door before getting busted, you could try the “Look, I totally stopped before it happened” defense.It says you abandoned the effort. It’s the sort of defense that might work if you were conspiring to commit a crime, then tipped the cops to bust the other conspirators. It’s bad here because it implies you intended to do the booty boogie for the agreed-upon song fee, but said, “whooooaaa, partner” when the music started. It’d be hard to make that defense stack up, though I wouldn’t be opposed to trying. And don’t always take my word for it, there are as many perspectives on valid defenses out there as there are attorneys. I just wouldn’t give it a go unless I thought I had a slam-dunk case of police forcing the issue, true entrapment.

• “Man, I didn’t even know this was a crime!”There might be something to this one. And the cool thing is, especially in the case of online or phone contact with the undercover officer prior to the arrest, the cops might have given you the defense themselves. That’s because when the vice meatballs post their ads, they avoid obvious wording like, “Totally looking to sex up a lonely man for money, let me make your penis happy.” They have to use suggestive hints and euphemisms. How this defense could work: it’s dirt common for prostitution to be disguised, in all sorts of settings, as “massage” services. It’s the kind of thing most of us wink at each other about, sure. “Oh, yeah, ‘deep massage,’ I get it.”

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still one guy out there who might see an ad on a website or something and say, “Golly, I sure am tense! I could use a nice Swedish!”

That guy could be you. And then your defense is straightforward. “Your honor, I was just as shocked as anyone that the arresting officers believed I wanted my penis massaged. I have tight hamstrings!”

As with so many of the topics we’re blazing through, there are aspects of this one I haven’t even come close to addressing. There’s the whole entrapment issue, for example. This is a common defense against a prostitution arrest, and it’s usually valid. But vice squads get major coaching in how to avoid any appearance of having lured you into their loving embrace. Still, entrapment can happen, so if you’re ever unfortunate enough to be in this situation remember to run through the experience in detail with your attorney, who will certainly know all the telltale signs of you having been suckered into a jam.

Let’s imagine that in spite of being aware of the risks inherent in this kind of thing, your inner thrill seeker still pushes you to ring up your local Heidi Fleiss. Hopefully you have a better idea of what to say and do to keep the cops from taking your booty call and handing your ass right back to you.

The best advice is: don’t do it. The Internet is just raring to delight your senses with all sorts of debauchery, and adult bookstores are stocked to the ceiling with artificial tools to help bring you real gratification. There are much better ways to get your name in the local newspaper.

Like discovering a tube of pineapple-flavored lubricant next to a copy of the 1985 NBA Guide in your grandfather’s bedside table, murder is a bell that you can’t unring. Don’t do it.

The end.

Well, it’s the end of your life outside the stone house, anyway. So far we’ve been tripping the light fantastic, for the most part, talking about legal issues that seem downright fluffy compared to this one. But I didn’t become a lawyer to avoid the heavy lifting. Hand me the barbells, because we’re about to get weighty.

So… murder. Homicide.

Did you know those are two different things? They are. What’s homicide? It’s basically one person causing another person’s death. It isn’t always a criminal act. Homicide comes in many flavors. Intentional manslaughter: killing someone on purpose, perhaps because you were provoked into doing it. Unintentional manslaughter: accidentally running someone down with a vehicle, which is—you guessed it—vehicular manslaughter, for instance.

There are what’s known as affirmative defenses to some homicides, too. Being insane at the time is one. Not insane in the eyes of the medical community necessarily, but legally insane, usually under the good old M’Naghten Rule, which asks if the killer knew that what they were doing was wrong when they did it. Another affirmative defense, of course, is being able to prove you acted in self-defense.

How is murder different?

Oh, man, let me count the ways. I’ll try to avoid making your eyes cross, but it’s worth digging into it a little bit just so you have a relatively clear idea as to what you might be up against if somehow you ever find yourself on the receiving end of a murder charge. Which, let’s not pussyfoot around, would be a seriously shitty place to be. We’re talking flash flood at the KOA, spontaneous slab avalanche on Everest, super-typhoon in Margaritaville.