James Forman Jr.
speaker
358 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
James Forman Jr.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And if you're the defense lawyer in this case, you're trying to figure out, well, what kind of plea offer can we get?
Because if you take this case to trial as a defense lawyer, it's what we call a slow guilty plea, right?
You can either plead guilty officially in like 15 minutes at a formal guilty plea, or you can take a case to trial that cannot be won
which is going to be a guilty plea.
It's just going to take three or four days before the guilty plea comes in the form of a jury verdict.
And so this case was unwinnable.
And it was even more unwinnable at the state level because on top of all the things we talked about, you have a federal conviction.
So he's already pled guilty in federal court.
And the fact that he had pled guilty to these crimes in federal court can be and was introduced in the state trial.
So it's overwhelming.
I mean, I don't know that I saw a case in practice with this mountain of evidence.
The only strategy here that I see is a strategy of mitigation, a strategy in which you go to the prosecutor and you basically are asking for mercy, but it's mercy based on something.
So you are telling the prosecutor the story, in some ways the story that comes out over the course of the podcast, and in some ways the story that he tried to tell in the sentencing phase at the state trial, which is how did it come to be that this person did this thing?
Is this person who did this thing the kind of person who is just born to commit crimes and rob banks and will always do it?
Or was it situational?
Were there things that happened in his life, traumas, other events, crises, that put him into a place where he did a thing that was really not his character?
And who are the other people in his life that will be harmed and hurt by his being incarcerated?
All those things are part of the package that you put together to the prosecutor to get them to see that this is a case of somebody who is not a lifetime career criminal.
It's a case of somebody who made a terrible, terrible mistake.
And you try to get them to see the robberies together as one decision, and that's hard.
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