Does Aisha Bowen have a lawyer?

This weekend I saw something remarkable. I remember back to when the national media got some mileage out of a client of mine, accusing her of putting her baby in the oven and turning it on. Nancy Grace of CNN got all over it.

The problem was, and is, that it never happened. She never put her baby in the oven and turned it on. Didn't happen. Since then the family has been successfully reunited and the dependency case closed to the satisfaction of everyone, including DCF and the judge.

My client didn't give interviews. You want to know why? She had a lawyer -- me. There was no good reason to give interviews to the media. We had work to do -- to prove our case and get on with what it would take to get her kids back to her, and that's what we did.

So this weekend I saw on the local news a story out of Ocala. It seems that there is cell phone video footage of, as the news says, the following:
According to authorities, on Jan. 13, a resident went to the Ocala Police Department with a Sprint Treo cell phone that he recently had purchased and showed them a video clip of the woman hitting the child. The police report notes that the video shows the child being struck multiple times while being picked up by his arm, and shows him being carried to a bedroom and placed in a playpen, where he was again hit before being forced to lie down.

Now that may or may not be child abuse rising to the level of needing both an arrest and the removal of the child to be placed in foster care. Let me be clear: I don't know. I haven't seen the actual video. I don't know if the mother was offered services to rehabilitate herself and still keep the family together. I don't know if this was her first case of this sort or if there had been previous reports. I don't know if she is someone who ought to be eventually reunified with her child or not. I simply don't know much, and neither do the news outlets who are reporting this.

I do know this: She gave interviews to at least three media sources from jail, one print, and two television. From the text of the various articles, it seems clear that she's not yet spoken to an attorney, and that is the point of this post.

From the news stories, we know that Ms. Bowen was arrested on Friday, January 20. The Marion County Clerk of Court website has not yet caught up to the event, so there is no online record of it there at the time of this posting. Assuming that the removal of the child by DCF took place at the same time as the arrest as reported by the news, there should have been a shelter hearing on Friday. It seems that there was not one, the matter was heard by a judge pulling weekend duty, and a shelter review hearing will be heard tomorrow, on the Tuesday after the MLK holiday.

Now that the Regional Counsel Offices have won their victory at the Florida Supreme Court and have had the stay reinstated and have the green light to do their jobs, my question is this: will Aisha Bowen have a lawyer from the 5th Regional Counsel tomorrow, to advise her about talking to the media, to argue about imminent harm, to argue about the non-punitive and rehabilitative nature of Chapter 39 (the alleged excessive spanking took place three months ago) and to argue about the harm to the child by being placed in foster care with an order allowing no contact with his mother?