Yesterday morning I had a juvenile hearing. We call it a “Disposition.” The term shares a relationship, via Latin, with “dispose,” as in “dispose of.”
It is nevertheless appropriate, given what usually happens. (more…)
There are days when I feel like tossing in the towel. The system we’ve built — the one I work in, the one we’ve arbitrarily decided to call the “justice” system — is so utterly destructive of our society that it almost feels criminal to do anything at all that allows it to continue to exist. It does not feel fixable. It feels very much like the only real option is to either move on in the realization that I will never recover from law school, that the money spent on that “education” is gone, and there is nothing I can do about it.
Will it matter when I’m gone that I fought a case to a pointless and unfair conviction? I don’t know.
Certainly, I’m not the only attorney out there doing what I do. At least, I don’t think I am. But sometimes I wonder.
As usual lately, reading this post on Scott Greenfield’s blog provokes me to a post of my own. Sure, I could just leave a really long comment over on his blog, but lately I hardly get enough time to write, so aside from not wanting to leave an over-long comment, I wouldn’t get a post up on my blog if I didn’t “respond” here. This post is already going to pre-empt another I was working on regarding the (really high) number of police misconduct stories in the newspaper the other day.
Also, this is kind of a follow-up to my last post. Besides, some of what I’m responding to isn’t the post, as much as comments that followed it, including many which I read on Twitter.
Scott Greenfield’s blog, Simple Justice, is probably the only legal blog where I try never to miss a post. If I fall behind, it bugs me, and when I get the chance, I’ll catch up by spending an hour or more reading every post I’ve missed. One of these days, I’m going to continue digging back into the older posts, from before I knew about his blog, and read all those, too. This is not to say that I agree with everything he says, but everything he says definitely makes me think. And I agree with enough of it that I wish there was someone like him in my jurisdiction to mentor me. (Scott’s been practicing a lot longer than I have.)
One of his posts from today — A Blog That Shouldn’t — gives me the chance to talk more about something that matters very much to me. It concerns the question of defending guilty people.
Concerning the difficulty of researching and writing historical ethnographies, the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, states:
[I]t ought to make us self-conscious about our vulnerability. And the fact that we are not on very solid ground also ought to make us ethically and politically sensitive when we write about other cultures. In historical ethnography, it should alert us to several acute methodological problems when we deal with archival and documentary material written before modern ethnography even got off the ground. … “Any ontology we use to ground the human sciences must ultimately be based on ‘faith’ since any ontology of even minimal significance must derive from a variety of sources, including the scholar’s religious and cultural heritage; and any ontology that we employ can never be final since the very historicity of our being prevents that.” (Gananath Obeyesekere,The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (1997) 200.)
Well, what’s that got to do with criminal law?
Nearly fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that all people — even poor people — are entitled to be defended by competent counsel. Anyone who watches television knows that “if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to represent you.”
What they don’t tell you on television is that, increasingly, the attorney appointed to represent you will also be representing possibly as many as 200 other people at the same time.
Meanwhile, Fresno County continues to decrease the number of Public Defenders and necessarily therefore increases the caseload of those poor souls remaining.
Look, we don’t see eye to eye. I get that. You have your view of the world; I have mine. And our jobs require us to be key components in an adversarial system.
And even though it’s sometimes fun, or funny, to joke about it, “adversarial” doesn’t mean we’re enemies.
For eight years, off and on, I had a relationship with — lived with — someone. It was a toxic relationship. She not infrequently berated me for what were really insignificant and only actually perceived slights. She was a wonderful woman.
I have a memory from high school of a friend who engaged in what today would be considered an act of felony vandalism. It may have been then, too, but in those days we understood that sometimes kids did destructive things, because, by definition, they’re immature. We didn’t saddle them with felonies because of it. But I digress (as I am unfortunately wont to do). He was a great guy.
These days, I ostensibly make my living as a criminal defense lawyer in Fresno, California. As you might imagine, I rub elbows with a number of deputy district attorneys. Not infrequently, I’m mystified by their attitudes towards people accused of crimes where there is little (or even no) evidence beyond innuendo and supposition to support the charge. These DDAs forge full steam ahead towards a conviction, sometimes stretching the law — in some cases even breaking the law — in order to obtain a conviction. The majority of them are pretty nice people.
Here we have another example of how the courts have decided that the quaint concept of “justice” is no longer compatible with modern life. The court in Pace v. United States Automobile Ass’n, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 49425, 9-10 (D. Colo. 2007) has held that because the courts decided to put themselves in the same class as pornographic spammers and stop using the United States Postal Service with its more than two centuries of service, law firms and their clients will be punished.
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