This is THE best, albeit quite lengthy, informative article on #ShaneshaTaylor and her battle vs. Arizona psychopaths: I can only estimate, but a thinking person can see that right off the top of that $114,000, the crowd funding fee processing and income taxes which are estimated to be 28% – 35%, between $26,900 – $35,000, the net amount that she received was immediately and dramatically reduced to about $68,000. Amanda Bishop handled the crowd funding and reported that after all the adjustments due to insufficient funds, and before income taxes that the amount was about $103,000. Take off another $35,000 for taxes (better to have the higher end estimate than to miss making the payment) and the beginning amount she actually received is nearer to about $68,000 not $114,000. You’d never know that the net amount is nowhere near $100,000 when listening to the power-mad County Attorney Bill Montgomery, spouting his red state rhetoric to shame Taylor, creating the image of her as an irresponsible stereotype. Montgomery has a law degree, holds public office and he can’t do the math that all she ended up with originally was about $68,000 after commissions and taxes? She didn’t want to be homeless again and paid rent, first, last, deposit for 12 months estimated $$14522.45 and I have those receipts. She furnished the home with basics because she had nothing buying beds for the children, setting it up which cost $5,000 approximately. There have been court-mandated classes almost every day, childcare and transportation to meet those requirements which have already cost $3,600 with another four weeks left. This does not include childcare. Buying food, diapers for she and the three children for 20 weeks @ $100 per week is about $2000. She owed back car payments, childcare for two months that her family who all work low wage, full time jobs could not afford to absorb. She has been doing interviews when not in the required classes/counseling/testing. There is a cost to all this childcare. She does not interview for low-paying jobs that can’t cover the $1250 per month that daycare centers in Arizona require. There are legal fees, and she is paying for mandated twice weekly counseling at $110 per session. Realistically,she couldn’t possibly have more than $42,000 left at this point. The expenditures are very responsible even if it was anyone’s business how her gift was spent. So the silver-spoon electeds are disrespecting the intentions of the donors. College for her children 16 years from now is nice, but totally unrealistic for the mother of three who needs to mount a defense for herself. I don’t know of single donor who intended that this money be used in the far off future for college. She would like her children to go to college but that is not more important than providing the basics because she has no government back up now. The moment she was arrested, every form of possible government support was taken away. The people who need it most aren’t getting the public services. She had been into the agencies twice asking for help in the week before the incident and was totally ignored. This is business as usual particularly in red states such as Arizona where they are willing to spend any amount on incarceration, prisons and jails but very little to give moms a hand up. The people who work in the bureaucracies are typically unbearably incompetent and they just do not care. Was the pro bono attorney Benjamin Taylor who surfaced ever really advocating for Shanesha’s right to keep the donated money? At this juncture, well after the money was raised, Benjamin Taylor, a young African American attorney, surfaced and offered to represent Taylor on a pro bono basis. He is one of the lawyers who receives regular paid contracts from Maricopa County to represent the poor when the public defender is overloade. The general public is unaware that lawyers get cases thrown to them only if they don’t fight back too hard against the County Attorney/Prosecutors for their clients. This a terrible practice and the voters need to do serious reform and cause the awarding of county legal contracts to be done independently, so that the County and District Attorneys have no say or power over how well the cases are fought. Attorney Benjamin Taylor may very well have taken Shanesha’s case pro bono, and not been paid by the County for this particular one, but he is an “insider” and worked for the public defender when he was just out of law school in Maricopa County. He also worked for the prosecution side in Pima County at one point, so clearly he is an officer of the court and more on the side of the court from what I can observe. He set up a rinky dink “deal” with the County Attorney Bill Montgomery that charges would be dropped if she locked herself out of the funds that we donated. Benjamin Taylor did not come back and advise the donors that our gift of financial independence was about to be tied up and intentionally placed out of her reach. There appears to be no transcript of the back room, closed door negotiation which Shanesha Taylor was not allowed to attend because she might anger the Montgomery. I’ve been digging around for any evidence of her lawyer standing up for her to keep the donated funds at all. Shanesha trusted her lawyer enough to fight for her and to give her good advice. Benjamin Taylor did not do that and this “lock-yourself-out-of-your-money” deal or “we’ll prosecute you” was weakly contested. It took Shanesha awhile to realize that by locking her funds in a trust for 16 plus years, available then only if her boys go to college, that she was about to be put right back into the same desperate situation as she was before the money was donated. A colleague of Benjamin Taylor and a recent law school graduate wrote up this “trust”, a complicated instrument, and her lawyer encouraged her to go along with it, not acknowledging her protests. As soon as he saw that her money was about to be tied up, he bailed out on her. m.dailykos/story/2014/11/17/1345430/-Good-for-Shanesha-Taylor-for-standing-up-to-Co-Atty-Bill-Montgomery-trying-to-seize-her-donations#comments
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 23:46:01 +0000
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