INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (35 page)

      
Five days later, I saw James again. He was in the basement of the criminal court building, in a section usually reserved for high-security inmates. It was instantly clear, though, that James was not a security risk: he was a target. He was covered from head to toe in long dark-blue and purple bruises.

      
“What the fuck?” I asked a corrections officer.

      
“A fellow inmate,” the officer explained drolly. “Kid kept screaming racial epithets. Didn’t make him too popular inside.”

      
I was horrified, and guilty --I should have asked for protective custody immediately. That I didn’t, that I focused just on the evaluation and the medication, meant James resembled an albino dragged through a blackberry patch.

      
Even the judge winced when he saw James, but he didn’t wince enough to let him out. Mom wanted him in jail, the prosecutors wanted him to pay for what he’d done, I wanted him in treatment, and James just wanted to go home. As obliged, I championed James’s position while also trying to set up the treatment I thought he’d eventually need; the prosecutors did what their victim wanted, advocating for a long jail sentence; and the judge did what judges do, eventually offering James a plea and sentence, after which, to no one’s surprise and despite an order of protection, James headed right back to his mother’s house --the simple in-or-out polarities of the criminal justice system having solved absolutely nothing.

- - - -
 

      
After getting off the phone with Gerald I turn my attention to my “immediate action” files. I realize that there are three motions that are already past due. Deadlines are fairly flexible in criminal court, but if I don’t get them in by the end of the week, I could be in trouble.

      
Figuring I’ll bang out a motion or two, I fire up the computer and ignore the steady accretion of e-mails in my in-box. Calling up my Supreme Court motion template, I fill in the particulars of the case --indictment number, court part, charge (in this case, attempted murder). The process takes no more than ten minutes, and I’m flipping through my file, deciding what hearings to ask for, when the phone rings again.

      
It’s Alvin --again.

      
“I can’t talk now,” I say in the singsongy voice that an exasperated parent uses with a child.

      
People in the office tease Robin and me about Alvin Hastings. He’s like our crazy, impossible, mentally ill adopted son. We have represented him since he was fifteen and got arrested after running away from a group home. Once again he is in jail.

      
One of the things Alvin is obsessed with is his birth certificate, both because it causes him constant problems and because it is a perfect metaphor for the rest of his existence. When Alvin’s drug-addicted mother gave birth to him, she didn’t get around to naming him for months, and so his birth certificate only says “Hastings --boy.” This made it hard for him to get an ID, which he desperately wants. Combine that with an itinerant childhood, and Alvin has constant trouble just proving that he’s himself.

      
To make that easier, Alvin conscientiously collects letters from his lawyers. For some reason --probably because he lost the original --Alvin decided he needed another copy of a particular letter from his old family court lawyer. So he did what he always does --started calling obsessively and then, when he didn’t hear back in time, just showed up and demanded his letter. This wasn’t a good strategy, and when a court officer told him he wasn’t welcome at family court, Alvin got insistent.

      
“I have a right to see my lawyer,” Alvin protested.

      
“Get out” was the court officer’s simple position, and when Alvin hesitated, the officer grabbed him in an attempt to steer him out of the building.

      
Alvin reacts badly to anyone touching him. Fifteen years in group homes can do that to a kid, and when the officer took hold of him, Alvin spun around and pushed him down. In seconds, he was tackled, beaten, and arrested --charged with a felony assault on a court officer. Hence his current indictment.

      
For Alvin, bail was out of the question --he had no money. And even though the injuries to the officer were negligible, a trial would take a long time, and it might be hard to persuade a jury to acquit someone charged with hurting a court officer. As so often happens, a plea was the only answer. And since the judge could give Alvin pretty much anything, including a sentence of time already served, we set about trying to get him a decent deal.

      
Writing sentencing letters is a miserable task. They seldom work to moderate harsh sentences, and writing them usually ends up feeling like pissing into the wind. But Alvin is before a judge who we think might actually listen, and maybe, just maybe, a sentencing letter will help. It’s been a long day, and all I’ve really done is adjourn a bunch of cases. Maybe this will make a difference, I think, as I start to hammer out an abbreviated list of Alvin’s group homes, psychiatric diagnoses, medications, and tragic circumstances. And the more I type, the more I find myself amazed at the resilience of the human character, astonished not that Alvin is in jail, but that he manages to wake up every morning and continue to face the prospect of his life. I’m also shocked not by how horrible his circumstances are, but how typical, and sitting there, behind the green glow of the computer screen, my suit jacket carelessly draped over the back of my chair, I take a moment to consider that behind the faces of the people I pass in the courthouse day after day there are stories of nearly incomprehensible pain and loss. It dawns on me, as it often does, just how much compassion it takes to begin to understand the psychic damage wreaked by an abusive, drug-addled parent, by a procession of alien group homes, by knowing that your own mother lost her rights to you and that somewhere you have siblings you never knew. In a certain way, it is no wonder the system just tunes all of this out. Listening would be deafening.

      
Satisfied with my little catharsis, I print the letter onto letterhead, sign it, and head around the corner so that Robin can sign as well. Reading it over, she shakes her head, understanding exactly what I’m thinking.

      
“You know she’ll never do it, right?”

      
I just nod.

      
Sure enough, the thirty-minute investment in a sentencing letter for Alvin makes no difference whatsoever. Judge White sentences Alvin to nine months in jail, leaving him to rot at Rikers for a few more months.

- - - -
 

      
It’s almost 5:00 when Lisa comes in with a pained expression on her face. Lisa Hoyes is tiny and very pretty, with soft dark eyes and ringlets of long brown hair. Since graduating from NYU Law School she’s been a community organizer, an advocate for troubled kids, and, finally, a public defender. Lisa has a sentencing tomorrow before Judge Massaro --one of the most odd and temperamental judges in the Bronx. He has already remanded her client, and she’s praying he’ll let her out tomorrow.

      
The crime: assault on a police officer.

      
Lisa’s client is a young girl who had never been arrested before. An orphan, she was trying to get her little fourteen-yearold brother registered for school. Thanks to school bureaucrats, she’d tried and failed to do this three times already, having been turned away for providing insufficient or incorrect paperwork. On their way out of the school, two truancy cops tried to detain her brother, claiming that he had no right to be in the school in which he was trying to register. The cops grabbed the kid, and she tried to snatch him back. They pounced, and one of them hurt his finger. Sis got arrested. And now Judge Massaro may send her to state prison.

      
“I swear I’ll kill myself if he sends her upstate,” Lisa says gravely.

      
Burnout is stealthy. It rarely arrives with the bang of revelation; rather it’s the creeping suspicion that maybe everyone around you is right --your clients really are scum, the system really is completely broken, and you can’t really touch anyone’s life anyway. It is the sneaking sense of futility that undermines your resilience, that makes you unable to wake up the morning after a defeat, ready to fight twice as hard. Burnout sets in when outrage ends. It happens over time, and it hastens with every cataclysmic conviction. My personal theory is that most public defenders can’t survive much more than three of these before they start to fry.

      
The ones we plead guilty don’t count. Neither does the incarceration of clients we care about --that stuff happens every day, and if we only had three of those in us, we’d last about a week in the work. By cataclysmic convictions, I mean the unjust conviction of beloved clients at trial.

      
The first time it’s a shock. Watching them drag William away, I was utterly uncomprehending.
There must be something I can do
, I kept thinking to myself. The finality of the judgment hadn’t yet set in. But as hard as that was to survive, I came back stronger after William --more determined than ever to be sure that it never happened again.

      
Then I lost Juan. I sobbed uncontrollably after they took him away. And for a while afterward, I thought I’d never be able to go back to work. Juan was a big, slow goofball of a client who’d been present at a fight between two groups of kids in which one kid took another kid’s jacket. All were charged with armed robbery. All of them were convicted. The kid who took the jacket got fourteen years. Juan got the minimum --two to six years --but he should have been acquitted.

      
I felt it acutely after Juan. It was, at that point, the worst conviction of my life. I began to despair. The system was grinding on, and I was being ground down. Exhausted and overwhelmed by the futility of my struggles, I began to take it out on my clients. I stopped listening, stopped feeling, and lost the ability to muster the wherewithal and compassion that a defender depends upon.

      
It took me months to get over it, to find my way back. But eventually, after some drinking, some sleeping, some soul-searching, and a little vacation, I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and devised the three rules that I decided could ensure my longevity as a public defender: trust yourself, pace yourself, forgive yourself.

      
Given the volume of cases, a public defender has to make an almost unfathomable number of snap decisions during the course of the day --take the plea or get a trial date, deal with the DA or go straight to the judge, send a client to the grand jury or just wait for trial. Every one of those decisions has potentially catastrophic consequences for a client, and being an effective decision maker requires a preternatural confidence. That’s the first part --
trust yourself
, trust your instincts. Generally they’re good.

      
Second, remember that no matter how hard you work and no matter how efficient you are, no amount of work will ever be enough. There is an inexhaustible supply of clients, and almost every single one of them will need more than you have to give. There is never going to be enough money, enough time, or enough compassion to do much more than triage. Even when you do focus on someone, their needs are usually so beyond your capacities that no good will come of the effort. Accept this as a condition of your life and work as hard as you can for as long as you can every single day, and then when it’s finally time to go home, accept that you’ve done all you can do --
pace yourself
.

      
The problem is that with all that volume, with all those decisions, you will screw up. It’s inevitable. Every public defender is going to make mistakes, and those mistakes are going to take a terrible, inexcusable, and unforgivable toll on the lives of the clients you love. It’s just going to happen. You will err, and someone will go to jail because of it. Somehow, to survive in the work, you need to find a way to forgive the unforgivable, to accept and acknowledge that you’ve screwed up, and to recognize the price of that screwup without becoming so paralyzed that you can no longer do the work. As bad as you may think you are, clients need you --they are desperate for decent lawyers. Don’t be your own worst enemy.
Forgive yourself
--or you’ll burn out in two years.