imapd's Xanga

News...

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:55:39 GMT

Passed the bar here in my state. Yay!

In other news, I was browsing through some other pd's blogs today and realized that some pd's are having to take down their sites because people (mucky-mucks, I am guessing) are discovering their work and getting nervous. I didn't get a chance to read the sites that were taken down, so who knows what they were saying, but I can't imagine that they were much different from mine, which, nine times out of ten, runs along these lines:

everyone else is ignorant
i am humbled by my lack of legal knowledge/trial skill
today i subjected myself to public humiliation
today i subjected someone else to public humiliation (and enjoyed it)
i am shocked by the sheltered stupidity of people who should know better
i am shocked by my own sheltered stupidity
i cannot understand my role in society
cops/judges/prosecutors make me angry
i feel guilty for judging cops/judges/prosecutors
i feel more justifiably angry than guilty about my attitude re: c/j/p
i believe the system could afford to show people a lot more respect at every stage of their case and incarceration/"rehabilitation"
i hope i'm not an idealistic fool

In my opinion, the above-listed things are simple facts of my working life, and I can't see what's wrong with reporting them. I try not to name names, or say things that will allow crazy, bored people to deduce who I might be talking about, but something about having to take down a perfectly good pd-blog really chaps my hide. We are so few, why should we be forced to shut up?

Boooo. Booooooo on that. Kudos to everyone who posted stuff that was so true that it made people nervous, though! That's squarely within the best of the pd traditions.

I hope to keep posting what I see, and I hope that I post a whole lotta sh*t that makes the enforcers want to shut me down!

Some Things Just Don't Change...

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:41:17 GMT

Clients are still ridiculously amusing/frustrating/endearing/wretched/inspiring/strange.
Prosecutors still rub me the wrong way.

    A client called the office and said he absolutely couldn't make it to court because he was in Maine. When advised that a rearrest warrant would be issued if he didn't get to court in twenty minutes, the line went dead. Twenty minutes later, he arrived, breathless, in court. When asked how he had traveled hundreds of miles in so short a time, he said--serious as a heart attack: "I took a helicopter." Only a PD's client could walk in and tell his lawyer a fib like that with a straight face.
    Another client, unarmed but crazy-ish, went into a bank and robbed it by passing a note that said something like, "Gimme some money or I'll shoot." The teller gave him the cash, and our silly client walked out the door believing he had pulled it off, scott free. He might have had a much better chance at getting away with it, if he hadn't written the robbery demand on the back of his probation appointment card: complete with his name, his probation officer's name, the contact number, and his DOC number. We get all the good cases....

    A prosecutor came in my office the other day and expressed shock at the fact that I was pulling cases from Lexis and reading caselaw. "What are you doing that for?," demanded the grumpy old prosecutor, "No one here follows the law anyway!" He snickered knowingly and went on embarrassing himself. "You know, if we followed all the rules, the system would come to a grinding halt!" He stood there in my doorway, as if he was waiting for me to fold up my books and just go home.
   "I have a lot to learn," I replied vaguely, wishing he would get the eff out of my office.
    With a patronizing snort, he squinted his eyes at me and proceeded to insult me. "You know...the two people in the room who never know the rules are judges and defense attorneys." He paused and stared me down. I waited for him to say that he was just joking, or to admit that his effing prosecutors were the ones who didn't know ass from subsection. He didn't back down, of course, so I sat there, staring back into his wrinkled, belligerent face until he wandered out of my office looking for someone else to browbeat with the myths that make his career worthwhile...Only a prosecutor could trespass into the new PD's office to intimidate her with his shocking commitment to ignoring the law at the expense of our "guilty-as-soon-as-they-walk-in-the-door" clients.

Some things just don't change...

Back in the Saddle (Sort of)...

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:06:06 GMT

I am in a new city, with a chance to get started with the local public defender--if I pass the bar. I get results in about a month or so, but in the mean time, I've been able to shadow folks in the office.

It is very strange to feel like I've come home...to the criminal courthouse. Weird to feel comfortable...in the tank. Odd to sense nostalgia about standing at the podium in court...next to a guy in shackles.

Ahh, the PD's life!

NPR Talks About Us!...

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 13:56:36 GMT

June 20, 2007: Talk of the Nation talks to the author of "Defending the Damned: Inside the Cook County Public Defender's Office," Kevin Davis.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11215001

Comments by listeners to the program on "Blog of the Nation:"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2007/06/defending_the_damned.html

PD Blog Awards...

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:01:26 GMT

Thank you, thank you!

*curtsey*

http://pdstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/and-winners-are.html

Public Defender Recidivism...

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 22:38:24 GMT

I just re-read my last post, and I'm choking back tears. I feel like crying because it's been a long time since I've felt that driving sense of purpose in my career. I almost don't recognize my own voice.

The job search in New State was "successful," in that I did end up getting a job as a commercial litigation associate at a New State firm. I was doing it all--getting the big salary, logging hours in my execute slave register, pretending to care about fighting for money, overlooking the ethical dilemmas inherent in our legal positions, and justifying all the time spent away from my wonderful spouse--but, surprise-surprise, I hated it. I hated every second of it. Luckily, I was able to leave that position gracefully.

I am now living in Another State with a Old State bar number and the feeling that I should return to being a PD. (My husband and I moved here a month ago when he got transferred by his office.) To be honest, I don't even know whether this region has a public defender system. I do know, however, that I have to stop doing "work" that has no significance outside a few privileged people's bank accounts (including my own).

Of course, I have reservations about returning to the job. Only an insane person wouldn't. My friend, Steve, who's still in the office, assures me that the job still takes as much out of him as it ever did, but he says he's learning to cope. For instance, he has begun to see his work as a mere job, and not his path to redemption. He is beyond worrying about burning out. He thinks a lot more about office politics and retirement options. The phrase, "f*ck it," comes up a lot more in conversations about work. That phrase is interchanged with "f*ck them"--and he doesn't always mean the cops, the judges, or the D.A.'s. These things, he assures me, are all good.

At first, his admissions made me worried that he, too, had fallen prey to PD-burnout syndrome, but then he said something that astonished and encouraged me.

I told him that one of the core sources of my anxiety about being a PD is that there's no objective way of measuring whether you are 'good' at doing your work. You expect to lose cases; you expect your clients to hate you and do an unreasonable amount of time; you expect judges to yell at you; you expect polite society to suspect that you are a naive enabler of evil in the world. What you don't expect is the sinking and persistent feeling that you are actually bad at what you do.

My whole life, I've worked toward a certain, easy kind of "excellence" defined by point systems, promotions, grades, or awards, but as a PD, there is no such simple measure of performance. Rather, on your way home, stuck in traffic, sweating into your suit, you must try in utter solitude to fathom the question, "Did I do everything that I could have done for my clients today?" This blog is a shallow, but truthful testament to how deep and murky those waters are.

After spending a lot of the past year thinking about this, I have come to realize that this lack of objective criteria forms the basis for most of my anxiety about the work. I went and got a job in private practice because I thought I could learn an objective measure there, then superimpose it over my past (and possibly future) career as a PD. All I found there were billable hours requirements. Not a lot of cross-over utility in that.

Yesterday, on the phone with Steve, I tried to find out how he navigates the question. I expected us to get twisted up in a deep conversation about jobs, life, purpose, etc., but
Steve interrupted me and told me simply that he never questions whether he's a good lawyer anymore. He just knows he is. He doesn't re-evaluate every day on the way home. He doesn't got back through some personal checklist with every verdict. He doesn't question himself every time a sentence is pronounced. He is sure, and that's all there is to it.

[You might assume that means that he doesn't care about screwing his clients if he's lazy, or that he's just incredibly arrogant, but you'll just have to take my word that he's not that kind of guy. Not only is he incredibly smart and dedicated, but he is a deeply good and humble person who would quit his job before he started harming his clients to save his own skin.]

His confidence is astonishing because it's so hard to believe that an over-achiever like Steve (Ivy League undergrad, Top 20 law school grad) could be so sure that all of the necessary work is getting done on such a huge mountain of cases. His statement is encouraging because it means that I, too, might be able to work my way toward that kind of peace.

Most importantly, it means that for those of us who have lived for/with objective, measurable standards for so long, there is hope that we, too, can be PD's and be good at it. It is a matter of accepting the fact there is no credible list of the attributes of a "good PD" in any handbook in any PD office in the world. The work that PD's do is beyond checklists, and the assurance that I seek about the value of the work that I did won't come from the outside. That assurance must be the blessing of experience, or the gift of time. It appears there is no easy way to get it.

The question is, knowing what I know about the inevitable heartbreak, the unavoidable anger, and the ephemeral rewards, should I try?

Monday, September 26, 2005

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:06:52 GMT

Post-PD-Stress Disorder...

I am having the same anxiety dreams again--the one where I am about to graduate from school, but there is a math class that I forgot to go to, and the final exam is now. I don't know the math. I'm going to fail. They're going to retroactively revoke my diploma.

I used to have these dreams on nights before a trial that was actually going to go. They are back.

No one seems to understand my anxiety. Most people tell me I should relax and take a break. I worked hard, they say, and I should make sure I'm ready to go back to work before I sign up for a new job. Even so, I keep plugging away at looking for a new job.

There are many mornings when I wake up about 9:30 and think about how many cases must have been processed in the courts during the hour that I was asleep, how many people found out they wouldn't be OR'd, how many people found out the charges were worse than they were told by the cops, how many people were remanded, and how many people were told to come back in the afternoon for jury selection. Hundreds of manila folders, organized chronologically in large grey file cabinets pop up in my mind. I wonder if anything I do will ever be that significant, and I wonder if anything I ever did there even mattered.

Once in a while, during the interview process, I'll meet a former prosecutor. Strangely enough, I feel a simultaneous distrust and affinity with them. Of all the people in the legal world outside a PD's office, they're the only ones who might understand where I'm coming from--what it was like to have a huge, faceless caseload, to stand up in front of a jury, to actually use the rule of law to solve immediate and pressing conflicts, to deal with the terrifying parts of society that most people only see on tv.

When we talk about these things and use the words and phrases particular to that world, I am surprised to feel my sense of self returning. I begin to feel that I know who I am again, and that for all their blustering, civil attorneys are not as bad-ass as they would have you think. I can feel myself starting to stand on the foundations that I came to know so well--that there is the real world of crime, redemption, incarceration, and the fight for human dignity, and then there is everything else.

As I sit across from someone who's been there, I begin to understand why people create fraternities, support groups, and secret societies--because for everyone who does something life-changing, there is the world "out-there" and the world among the like-minded--and you must return to the familiar once in a while to remember who you once were before everything shifted.

Being a PD was one of the most challenging and exhausting things I've ever done, and it's both uplifting and terrifying to think that maybe I'm meant to do that for the rest of my career.

The question is, what's more terrifying? Working at a job I know means something to me, but will wear me down to nothing? Or doing a job that I know means nothing?

I probably know the answer to this question already, but it's too hard to think about right now, when the I can still hear the distant sound of the struggle happening in far-off court rooms. It doesn't help me to sit across the table from attorneys who have no concept of where I've been and what I've seen. They remind me of those silly aristocrats who followed the wars around having balls and clinking their champangne glasses upon hearing good news from the front. If i get an invitation to their party, I can't imagine myself doing anything but making fun of their festivities and getting drunk in the corner.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 19:44:20 GMT

Post PD Job Search...

I knew this already, but now it's been made very clear to me--that we are lucky to have jobs that mean something to us. I quit in April to move to New State. Circumstances make it difficult for me to sign up with the PD's office again at this particular juncture. I am left with throwing my hat back in the "private sector."

Unfortunately, I have only one hat that I really like to wear very much--my idealistic, freedom-fighting, get out of my way, "newbie PD" hat, and most people in the private sector don't like that look.

The big question is how in the world am I going to go back to life in the private sector, where I have to watch my back and bill my hours and be a good little stooge trying my darndest to make another buck (for someone else)? Where's the glory in it? Where's the joy?

The recruiter I'm working with (like most people) assumed that I only became a PD because I couldn't get another job. She was surprised to find out that I went to an Ivy League college, a top 20 law school, and had offers from several "big deal" -- oops, i mean "big firm" -- type firms...

Luckily, she used to be a litigator and knows the inherent value of my having spent so much time in court and in trial. She's going to try to "do her best" to "help me" get over the "inherent weakness" in my resume.

Actually she's wasn't as mean about it as I'm making it sound, she's actually pretty positive.

I couldn't help but ask her whether it would have mattered if I had been a prosecutor. I giggled hysterically when she said, "Public sector is still public sector. It might have helped, but I doubt it."

So there. All the TV shows are about them, but they're the same as us.

What do I do with myself? Plaintiff side civil litigation? White collar defense? Ambulance chasing? Slip and Fall?

Friday, June 24, 2005

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:16:14 GMT

In the midst of wedding planning, I have to say that you guys are really sweet! Will check back in later...j

Monday, June 13, 2005

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 05:16:25 GMT

Reflection Part 1...

I haven't posted in a while because I quit my job. Thankfully, I didn't quit because I couldn't take it anymore, nor was I fired. I'm getting married in July, then moving to New State with my new husband. The wedding planning is almost as crazy as a morning in court.

I am not ready to sum up this experience or reflect on it, yet. I am too much changed, too quickly, to know what has happened to me.

I will say, however, that since I stopped working there, I feel sure that a part of my identity has gone dormant. When people ask me what I do, I say, "I used to be a lawyer," and as I say it, I feel a distinct sense of emptiness in not being able to talk about the law, my clients, or our society in the way that I used to--as someone who felt herself to be on the front-lines of the law. It is a rare and precious thing that a job can challenge you and change you on a daily basis in a way that makes you feel both alive and useful to the world. That is what being a public defender was to me.

As each day passes, my former clients' trial dates come and go, and I wonder for a moment what's happening with their cases. The fact patters are fading in my mind as each one of their stories begins to blend into the general idea that people are suffering in the world today. I worry that I won't remember, but that was what this Xanga was supposed to be for. I only hope that what I recorded here will remind me of all the things that happened around me. We'll see how good a writer I am in a few months, when I re-read this stuff and try to remember who I was and what I did. Will I read it as a public defender, still? Or will it strike me as terribly naive or idealistic, the way it does those on the outside?

For now, I'm thankful for what God has shown me through all of these people, and hopeful that what I saw will make me a stronger, wiser, more loving person. I hope that I will remain a pd at heart, but only time will tell.