Originally Posted by Brian Carlton

Like everything else in this world, you get what you pay for. She'll be assigned a legal aid attorney who will barely represent her interests and won't make any kind of decent argument for leniency. She's at the mercy of the court system............not a good thing under any circumstances.

If she had the funds for a decent attorney, her prospects improve dramatically. He frames the case for the prosecutor/judge to show her in the best possible light and, hopefully, gets a much reduced (maybe suspended???) sentence.