INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (4 page)

      
“Your Honor!” I cried.

      
“Seven hundred dollars!” he said.

      
“You can’t do that!”

      
“Eleven hundred!”

      
My mind was racing; I didn’t know what to do. My client looked stunned. A uniformed court officer handcuffed him and led him toward the back of the courtroom, through the door that led to the largest penal colony in the world --Rikers Island. I was panicking.

      
“Judge, I’m begging you. Please . . . my client deserves to be released. He’s a college-bound kid. He’ll come back to court. He’s never been arrested before, and he has family here . . . please . . . , Judge!”

      
Tona looked down at me with bovine placidity. “Bail is twenty-five hundred dollars, cash or bond. Anything else, Mr. Feige?”

      
I was trembling. I couldn’t believe it. By pushing the bail amount beyond anything my poor client could hope to post, I had effectively argued him
into
jail. I felt my forehead start to flush; tears welled up in my eyes. The bridge officer called the next case. I turned to the back of the courtroom and, spying the doors, ran.

      
It’s no wonder that Tona haunts my dreams --his bulbous, scowling face cast as the personification of my powerlessness --and no wonder it’s him I’m chasing, swimming to the surface of consciousness on a cold morning ten years later when, despite my passion for criminal defense work, I would relish a little extra time in bed.

- - - -

      
I like the cold --for personal and professional reasons. On cold nights, people stay off the street corners; less corner traffic means fewer arrests, and fewer arrests mean a lighter arraignment load. A light night in arraignments means a little dip in a public defender’s caseload --a moment of respite in a churning sea of relentless criminality. All year long, I sleep with the window open, hoping the air drifting in might signal a frost.

      
The radio mumbles about Iraq as I finally shake off sleep. The news of the moment: two guys stabbed and a little girl caught in a cross-fire shooting. My ears perk up, but both turn out to be in Brooklyn. No news at all from the Bronx. The sky is overcast, a portent of the snow forecast for later in the week. That would be nice.

      
My own law-breaking this morning involves having drilled out the water regulator in my showerhead --a crime for which I feel no remorse whatsoever. Every day I can look forward to about six minutes of illegal, superheated bliss. In the shower, I map out the day’s schedule, trying to imagine which clients will show up on time, which judges I have already pissed off during the week, which courtrooms are going to be glacially slow. When on trial, I visualize my cross-examination, whittling down my important questions to their spare, eviscerating essence. Some of my best summations have been devised or delivered amid the steam and scald. Mickey Richards, Omar Chavez, Juan Torres, and Steven Smith: all owe their freedom in some small measure to my shower inspiration. And it’s always been like that: even back when I couldn’t wait to get to work, couldn’t stand being away from the office and the action, I never passed up my contemplative shower moments. Indeed, they were the only moments of luxury back when I got into all this.

- - - -

      
Oddly, for someone who is, or on occasion has been called, a big, self-righteous blowhard, I did not get my start in the public defender business for righteous reasons. Really it was an accident.

      
It was in the spring of 1985. I was a sophomore in college. And while most of my classmates had summer plans long since settled, I had been too preoccupied eating barbecued beef and trying hard to seduce the woman who won the University of Chicago’s prize for best BA paper in English to bother planning my summer. Of course, the longer I waited, the more likely it seemed that somehow the decision would be made for me rather than by me.

      
Waiting out an April shower, an overstuffed sandwich safely in my stomach, I ducked one afternoon into the damp stone building that housed the university’s career and placement office.
 
Justice couldn’t have been further from my mind, but as I flipped through the postings “Criminal Defense Investigator Wanted” caught my eye. I scanned down the page . .
. investigating criminal cases . . . finding witnesses, serving subpoenas . . . visiting crime scenes
. It all sounded cool to me. And rather than high-toned rhetoric about grade point average, self-motivation, and all the rest of the corporate nonsense, this ad sought people who were adventurous and had good communication skills. The Washington, DC, Public Defender Service, as it turned out, was looking not for brilliant students, but for people who could talk, drive, and take chances, and were willing to work for free. It had my name written all over it. I promptly lined up a public-interest summer grant and fired off an application.

      
The DC PDS investigator internship was exactly as advertised, and within a week I found myself wandering around southeast DC looking for a guy named Slim who had supposedly witnessed a robbery. It was a disaster. Alabama Avenue in the mid1980s might as well have run through Alabama itself. It was rural poverty writ urban --as if the tumbledown homes of the Deep South had been shoved together by some huge earthmover. There were low concrete bunkhouses with doors swinging from one hinge, playgrounds filled with dust or mud depending on when it had rained last, and people everywhere, crowding the little cement slabs that served as ground-level verandas, sitting on decaying chairs or plastic milk crates, huddling around card tables chockablock with dominoes, smoking, drinking, and fanning themselves in the humid summer sun.

      
I stood out.

      
It wasn’t just because I was white, though that certainly helped, but also because I had the stiff walk of the neophyte and the nervous look of the out-of-place kid that I actually was. No one would give me the time of day. Good luck finding Slim.

      
Nevertheless, as the summer wore on I began to take to the work. It was endlessly fascinating, exposing me to a world I had never really known --a world where people lived by street names, where drug commerce and violence lived cheek by jowl with working families and hopscotching children, where the first assumption was that I was a cop; the second, a rich junkie looking for a fix; the third, a parole officer; and beyond that the hopped-up kids of Alabama Avenue had no idea what to make of me. In time, as I adjusted to the expectations of Southeast, I began to both love it and understand it. By the middle of the summer I’d learned how to track down witnesses, ask questions, and dig up information that would prove useful in the rapes and murders and robberies I was investigating. I’d learned every street and alley in the Quadrant, and could talk my way into almost any house. And most every night I brought home the fruits of my investigations to the lawyers I worked for --hard-charging, dedicated defenders whose passion for their work inspired me every day to find more, and to dig deeper.

      
My time in DC transformed me. It turned a college kid’s diffuse sense of right and wrong into a focused and rigid moral framework. That first exposure --to the criminal justice system, to poverty, and to the macabre hierarchy of criminal defense lawyers --radically altered the next two decades of my life. It gave me a purpose.

      
Law school was, for the most part, full of overindulged kids looking to become lawyers either to please daddy or to bring home the big paycheck. Worse, with
L.A. Law
sexing up corporate work every week (Arnie Becker got laid twice a show), the fetid focus of law school life became who could get a job at the fanciest firm. This only compounded the pathological competitiveness of the entire law school experience.

      
I didn’t bother to talk to law firms during my first year. I knew exactly where I was headed for the summer: back to the streets of DC and the Public Defender Service. My second summer, though, was different. My dad, who dreamed of telling his friends about how his son was going to work for a Wall Street law firm, argued stridently that before I went off to spend (read: “waste”) my life being a public defender, I should at least explore the opportunity costs.

      
And that’s what I did: Dewey Ballantine is about as fancy and white-shoe as a law firm can be. It also had the distinction, in 1990, of being among the highest-paying law firms in the country. That summer, from my aerie on the forty-fifth floor with the commanding view of midtown Manhattan, I got my first taste of what “legitimate” success felt like --and it felt good. Plied with expensive food and name-brand liquor, I spent a summer wrestling with my identity as I shuttled between Wall Street, Broadway shows, and Yankee games. It’s not bad being treated like a king. And as it turned out, I didn’t mind making an ocean of money. But the vertiginous experience of being a bit player in the big world of commerce never quite sat right. Partly it was my insufferable lack of deference, partly it was my defiant streak, and partly it was just because, looking around the firm at my high-powered colleagues, with their sophisticated airs and entitled perspective, all I saw were slaves.

      
In
Discipline and Punish,
the brilliant meditation on the history of penology, Michel Foucault suggests that the more advanced a society is, the more subtle the modes and means of penal control. If a summer at Dewey Ballantine showed me anything, it was just how controlling an advanced society like a law firm could be and how brilliantly, brutally subtle penal control could be. Almost every day, one or another of my bright-eyed colleagues would rush into my office detailing in a barely controlled whisper what partner had assigned what task to what associate, who had gone where, and whose fortunes were rising and whose were falling. It was as if we were back in junior high school, except that instead of gossiping about whether Nadjia Neherniak really made out with Mark Burnett, we spent every minute trying to ensure that no one else was making corporate inroads any faster or more effectively than anyone else. To keep tabs on this, summer associates spent an inordinate amount of energy considering how much “face time” was optimal --“face time” being time spent in the office irrespective of whether or not one had work to do.

      
In between visits to client-subsidized shrimp bowls, Broadway shows, and box seats at ball games, I reflected on the meaning of the experience. I concluded that though it was undeniably tasty and lucrative, to me it was all lifestyle and no life.

      
It was that realization that animated my stride in November of 1990 as I walked into the offices of the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society of New York City and announced, with more confidence than I felt, that I was there for an interview.

      
“Second or third?”

      
The woman behind the desk glanced up for a fraction of a second, taking my measure with practiced disdain. The question completely puzzled me, and at first I wasn’t even sure what she was talking about.

      
“There are three?” I asked, my too-cool-for-school laconic delivery quickly giving way to a more familiar boyhood schoolyard panic.

      
“Yeah . . . three,” said the receptionist, not at all impressed with my performance so far. “Who did you interview with on campus?”

      
“Ahhhh . . .” I stalled. “I don’t think you come to Wisconsin. I just sent in a letter and résumé and was told to show up today.”

      
This unusual way of doing things seemed to flummox her, but after taking my name, motioning me to a chair, and muttering into a telephone for a few seconds, she managed to say what I’d hoped to hear at the beginning of our conversation: “Someone will be right with you.”

      
The “someone” quickly morphed into four people, who led me into a nondescript room and mercilessly fired contentious questions at me for forty-five minutes. It was utterly unlike the law firm interviews, which seemed to be structured around the idea that no question was too stupid and no topic too inane to elicit a warm smile and a firm handshake. The people around the table (half of them in jeans) seemed to suggest that I had a lotta gall comin’ in to their office on Park Row in New York City and asking them for a job.
Who the hell was I
?
 
each one of them wanted to know.