I handle primarily lower-level felonies, and I represent people charged with crimes on their criminal cases who can’t afford lawyers.
I am an Assistant Public Defender at the Wake County Public Defender’s office in Raleigh, North Carolina. What that means is, if you’ve been charged with a crime, if you can’t afford a lawyer, the Constitution says the state has to provide you with one. One of the ways that that can happen is that some jurisdictions have public defender offices, which are law firms that essentially just do criminal defense, and then work on cases for people who have a court-appointed attorney. We’re state employees, and that’s all we do all day, every day.
I’m one of the line assistant public defenders in my office. I’m one of, I think it’s a little over 30 attorneys at this point. I handle primarily lower-level felonies, and I represent people charged with crimes on their criminal cases who can’t afford lawyers. That’s what I do all day, every day.
We’re the second largest office in the state, behind Charlotte. I used to work in the public defender’s office in a more rural jurisdiction, and there we only had 10. So, here, we’re on the bigger end. As these things go, we don’t exactly call ourselves a law firm, but, like, we are a law firm, just a weird one, and, by the standards of this kind of thing, we’re on the big side.
Most of the day, on a day-to-day basis, I come in, and I have at least one thing in court. But a lot of the time, that’s something pretty brief, or not very complicated. Most of what I spend my time doing is talking to clients, talking to prosecutors. Reading discovery, you know, that kind of thing. You know, you work within this system that very heavily encourages plea negotiation and plea bargaining. Most of what I’m doing most of the time is plea bargaining, trying to get a better plea from the prosecutor, talking to the client to learn about the client’s understanding of the facts and what happened, reading discovery to see what the state is coming at us with, and then trying to get the prosecutor to agree to this kind of a plea offer, or that kind of a plea offer, like, that’s most of it. But even though most cases plea, and even though the pressure to get people to take pleas is very strong, that’s not every case. Mixed in there with plea bargaining, there’s working on pleas that have been negotiated, and you have some time that you spend in court either like doing litigation or a motion or doing trials.
Probably the most common in-court litigating I do has to do with bond motions. Certainly with the cases I get, most of my clients, most of the time, have to pay a bondsman to get out of jail when they get charged. If you can’t do that, then you sit in jail until your case is resolved, or until your bond gets reduced or whatever, and because the nature of most of the charges that I have, it’s pretty common to have a situation where if my client were to go to trial and lose, the sentence that they would be facing would be shorter than the expected delay that they would have waiting for trial. If you said, “No, no, no, I can’t post my bond, but I want a trial”, and then you sat in jail long enough to get in front of a jury and lost, you’d be at time served. You would have already done a lot more time than whatever you would have gotten if you’d have taken a plea in the first place. So, as a practical matter, if it’s going to be a 2 1/2 year wait for a jury trial date and they’re offering you 8 months, then if you can’t post bond, you’re going to take the 8 months, right? Virtually every time. So we do a lot of fighting about that, if you have somebody that either does not want to get out of jail by taking a plea, or can’t get out of jail by taking a plea, but wants to get out of jail and fight it, you have an argument in front of the judge about what your client’s bond should be. You try to get it reduced so your client can get out. We do that a lot. From time to time you have more complicated things, either full-on jury trials, or suppression hearings, where you’re trying to get a judge to do something more complicated for you that might set yourself up to win the case, or force them to dismiss the case, or, you know, knock things loose in terms of like getting a more favorable plea deal or whatever it might be. Beyond that, you have jury trials. But those are pretty rare.
I just wanted to do public service, defending poor people charged with crimes all day, every day
I’m in that generation of people, where I graduated from undergrad in 2009 and was living with my parents and waiting tables for minimum wage. I was kind of stuck there for a little while, before I decided that I wanted to go to law school. When I went to law school, I didn’t really know when I started what kind of a lawyer I wanted to be. I was just like, “Well, I’d rather go to law school than keep waiting tables at a country club, and I think I’d probably be okay at it”. By the time I graduated, I knew that I wanted to be like a litigator. I wanted to be in a courtroom, fighting. I was pretty sure — but not entirely sure — that I wanted to do criminal defense. If you want to be in a courtroom doing trial-level stuff, there’s only a few different things you can be as a lawyer, where that’s going to be most of what you’re doing all day. Most lawyer jobs are in an office, dealing with contracts or this boring stuff that I stopped thinking about after I passed the bar. With criminal law, there’s a lot of, like, trial-level litigation in criminal law, but I was mostly, like, “I’m going to be a defense attorney or I’m going to be a prosecutor”. I hadn’t completely shut the door on being a prosecutor, but I had mostly shut the door on being a prosecutor because, even then, I had opinions about the criminal justice system and mass incarceration. I was more interested in the defense side than the prosecution side. I got out of law school and didn’t really have my act together, in terms of how to get a job or where to get a job in the state, and so I kind of struggled for a couple of years and did document review and this or that.
During that time I made up my mind to do criminal defense, indigent defense. I didn’t want to start my own firm, or whatever. I just wanted to do public service, defending poor people charged with crimes all day, every day, and I put in an application for a job in this rural jurisdiction where I had never lived and that I would have to relocate to. In part because it’s really hard to get lawyers to come and stay someplace like that, they took me in and I learned on the job. When I started, there was this really, really fantastic attorney that I was shadowing for the first few weeks that I was on the job before I started getting my own cases, and they have since moved on and are now in the district of DC’s public defender office, which I think is really fantastic for them, because, at the time, they were a trans person in a very rural conservative jurisdiction in eastern North Carolina. They were doing amazing work, but that’s a tough way to live, right?
Any criminal charge is a big deal. Any kind of incarceration is a big deal.
Through my boss at an old gig, I got connected with this professional development nonprofit that supports public defenders in the South called Gideon’s Promise. They do this 2-week, very intense, defense attorney boot camp. You walk through trying to simulate every step in a homicide case from start to finish. It’s kind of hard to describe in detail, and I think that they probably wouldn’t want me to describe everything they do in detail, because they want to be able to surprise people that are coming in with some of the stuff that they do. But this program works on building trial skills and connects you with a mentor, and it has all this stuff around motivation, and addressing burnout, and all that kind of thing, which are, you know, problems that come up a lot. So I did that, and I cut my teeth doing misdemeanors on my own in these, like, single courtrooms and small towns in eastern North Carolina, and you go out there and you do cases and you learn from your mistakes, and you get better over time. I mean, it’s still a big deal. Any criminal charge is a big deal. Any kind of incarceration is a big deal. But, for example, I still clearly remember this case where we called for a trial. I had prepped the client beforehand and gone through what the client was going to have to testify to, and I thought the client was going to get on the stand and want to say one thing, and the client got up on the stand and basically just confessed. I had to stand up and come up with some kind of a closing argument.
It’s very human, there’s some stuff that’s more mechanical, like, how this rule works and what are the implications if you do this, but a lot of it is just like, you know, “What will this judge think of this?” “What will this prosecutor agree to?” “This client that I’m talking to? What’s important to them and how does their brain work and what do they want out of this? How are they going to respond to this?” or whatever. When you have a bad result, it’s almost always this weird mix of wondering whether it’s fair for you to blame yourself or not. But you get used to it over time. You learn the skills over time. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve worked in offices where people are willing to give you the time of day.
When I have a good day at work, I get to know that I protected somebody from the system being cruel and racist and unfair and poised to screw up their life, in whatever way it’s poised to screw up their life.
This is the kind of job where the reasons for doing it, and the things that are hard about it are very obvious. To be interested in doing this work, despite the things that are hard about it, you have to be some kind of like a weirdo, or a maniac, or a fanatic, and I’m a fanatic, so, I come in here and I see how the system works and what the cops are doing every day, what the judges are doing every day, and what the prosecutors are doing. I see them come in every day, and do things that I think are stupid, or unfair, or racist, or cruel. When I have a good day at work, I get to know that I protected somebody from the system being cruel and racist and unfair and poised to screw up their life, in whatever way it’s poised to screw up their life. That can mean a lot of different things, because there’s a lot of different ways to have a good outcome in a case. But, when you’re having a good day, you get to call and tell somebody who you’re sympathetic to, like, “Hey, man, the prosecutor’s dismissing your case, this is over. You’re not convicted of anything. You’re not going to jail. You get to move on with your life.” When you get to have that happen, it’s fantastic.
One last thing; Google “jury nullification”.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 