Hello again, Hackernews.
I tried to post this on HN but the limit is 2000 characters.
Two weeks ago to the day I asked for your help in finding a lawyer for a HN’er that was about to be arraigned in front of a Delhi judge.
The original thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4739649
To say that the results were overwhelming would be an understatement but I don’t have more superlative words in my vocabulary.
We got offers from people for shelter, legal advice, money and all kinds of other help and most importantly, several pointers on how to quickly obtain a good lawyer.
A special mention for Shubham Goel who found us Rohit Kaliyar, advocate in Delhi.
Rohit met with his newfound customer on arrival in Delhi (our friend was snatched from her home in Pune in a bogus criminal case) so instead of facing a scared single young person the opposition faced a legal team that was briefed as good as time permitted and the result of that was that all efforts to keep our friend under some form of custody fell flat.
Right now she’s free, still there are people trying hard to ruin her life but at least for now the main threat is under control and a sense of normalcy has returned.
In the original thread there were a lot of requests for more details, we gambled on our combined reputations to keep these details from you but still ask for your help. That gamble paid off, and if at some point this story is to be told then we’ll leave that to the protagonist, rest assured that you won’t be bored if and when it ever comes to that. But for now the details of the background behind this will have to remain out of the public eye. Our friends’ peace of mind and safety depends on keeping her identity and circumstances as much of a secret as we can.
So, thank you Hacker News, for trusting us about the urgency of the request in spite of the lack of details and for pulling together when it really mattered. On behalf of our friend: “Thank you so much for being there for me and for helping to keep me safe.”.
We hope that there will not be any re-runs of this, and that our friend is now safe from further bogus prosecution but in India not much is sure in this respect, especially not when the opposition has significant clout with the police who will apparently not be deterred by such simple things as laws. Fortunately, with the help of a competent lawyer and a somewhat more solid judiciary it seems you can get a semblance of justice. But that does mean having to live a life on the run and in hiding, which isn’t much of a life at all. Working on that.
best regards to all & thank you again,
Jacques Mattheij (jacquesm) and Daniel Tenner (swombat)