Hello world!

I’ll never forget my introduction to life as a public defender. I’d been working in insurance defense for six months, my first job out of law school, and I’d pretty much decided that I was working for the devil. Either the plaintiff had a genuine case and I had to stoop to the sleaziest means the law allowed, or the plaintiff was a total crook, trying to get something for nothing. And by the way, the devil is boring to work for. I had no interest in convincing a court, through a series of briefs, that my client was not primary or secondary, but tertiary in the stack of uninsured motorist carriers. I’d gone to law school to be like Perry Mason or Clarence Darrow, strutting around court, getting somebody out of jail, and celebrating with steak and martinis.

And lucky me, through connections on a mock trial team I coached, I was going to do just that. Within a series of days, I applied for a job at a local public defender’s office, was interviewed while driving home for Easter weekend, and got hired during the same phone interview. I arrived at my mother’s house, thrilled that I was going to do God’s work. My mother, a romantic to the core, was equally elated. She’d been against my becoming a lawyer in the first place, for fear I’d become “a shyster.” Now there was no chance of that. Public defenders do not use legal shenanigans to kick families off their farms, or steal from widows. On the contrary, they help poor people in big trouble. She couldn’t wait to tell her friends at church. And the next day, we got the chance.

During the reception after service, I was approached by a smiling man in his mid-sixties or so who greeted me warmly and asked how work was going. I told him how happy I was to be leaving insurance defense, where I’d always represented money interests, and going to a public defender’s office, where I’d be working more in line with my values, helping “the least among us.” I finished paraphrasing the Gospels, smiled, and waited to be congratulated.

He turned around and walked away.

My mother was devastated when I told her, laughing. I explained that ninety percent of everyone thinks that criminal defense lawyers are scum and that she might as well get used to it. Personally, that’s part of how I knew I was doing the right thing. The sheen of respectability was part of what disgusted me about my last job. I am respectable; I don’t have to look over my shoulder afraid that I don’t appear that way. And refusing to do important work, just because it’s unsavory, is frankly beneath me. I couldn’t wait to push back my sleeves, go to jail, and work in nasty circumstances to help people who had nothing to give me for it. I couldn’t wait to take some of the load off my clients, fight for the underdog, and do good.

A year later, I found myself bitching with a priest in Sunday school about “The Poor.” One of my hapless classmates had posed a rhetorical question that occurred to her when driving home from the homeless shelter where she sometimes volunteered. “How did they end up there and I ended up here?” she wondered. I jumped in: “I’ll tell you how!” expounding that based on my experience, the young ones live (or “stay”) with whatever girlfriend or female relative will let them, leaving when said female gets sick of them, rarely working any job other than day labor or occasional landscaping, until they’ve burned every bridge they ever had. “They piss away every opportunity they’re given,” I heartlessly summed.

The priest commiserated that he used to romanticize “The Poor” and the impact he could have on their lives, until he realized that they can be just as mean, bitter, and impossible to like as anyone else. We were never able to resolve that, not that we attempted. We pretty much contented ourselves with taking the wind out of the sails of the other bleeding hearts in the class, the ones who work and live in pleasant surroundings and feel a little guilty about it.

Fast forward another year. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve learned everything that I’m going to learn in this job. Initially I meant technical knowledge: I’ve tried jury trials and bench trials, argued motions, found my way around the Fulton County Courthouse and several of the jails, met two hip-hop artists and one former NBA player, and almost grown comfortable saying “baby mama.” I can sense trouble like you wouldn’t believe, and I know when to get the hell away or when to stand up straight and look someone square in the eye. What I’ve come to realize is that my knowledge is deeper than that. I’ve learned, but not articulated, even to myself, why I’ve quit giving money to panhandlers, why there are some people I dismiss out of hand when I meet them as people I will never understand or trust, and how I know now that people are not all the same, and that maybe it’s wrong for the law to treat us as though we were.

That’s why I’m writing this. I need to articulate what I’ve learned, for myself and for its relevance in our society. It isn’t about whether the system works or doesn’t work. There is no system that works or doesn’t work, just specific goals that we meet or fail to meet. As for me, I’ve met my goals. All of them. That’s when it’s time to move on, mainly because there’s nothing left to do but get bored, disillusioned, and bitter. Every day I see people without goals. Their lives shouldn’t even be called lives. And it’s hit me that if I stick around, having no long-term goals left, then I’ll become like them. Like the defendants, who refuse to think about their pending criminal cases beyond the issue of bond. Like the lazier solicitors, who are so preoccupied with staying off their boss’s radar that they risk damaging their credibility rather than dismiss a case. Or more to the point, like the burnt out public defenders, who took the job as a stepping stone and then got too scared to step off of it, and end up going through the motions rather than zealously advocating.

So this, then, is my last goal, and my purpose here: tell the story, as many sides as I know, find the common themes, and see what I’ve learned.