I spent several weeks locked down in a solitary cell in the Special Housing Unit at Tallahassee FCI, after which time I was transported by the DEA to a local county jail in adjacent Wakulla County, where I ran into a number of my clients, as well as one of those individuals who had testified against me. Most of them were there in the event that they were needed to testify at the trials of a couple of subsequently-arrested defendants in our case that had elected to go to trial, rather than plead out. To obtain that prized sentence reduction, they would either testify against a former associate, or the prosecutors believed that their mere presence and announced availability to testify was responsible for another defendant deciding to change his or her plea to guilty. I had not seen some of these clients for a couple of years, ever since their arrest before the first major trial in the case. At least there, I had the small comfort of others that I knew intimately to talk to. My prior experience in Federal and state custody was not with clients, with rare exceptions. Also, I was able to be briefed on who was a fugitive overseas, who fled to avoid prosecution, and who was already doing time in other cases when arrested; All the sad details.

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