INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (5 page)

      
It was, in short, my kind of interview. And sitting there in the cramped room stuffed with too many chairs and a table two sizes too big, staring out a window that looked out into a sooty airshaft, I understood, implicitly, that this was my home and these were my people.

      
“Here,” said one of my interlocutors, pushing a set of stapled papers across the table at me like a detective presenting a prepared confession. “We’d like to have you back for a second interview. You’ll need to deliver a summation. This is the fact pattern.”

      
“Work out your summation during Thanksgiving,” said another, “and we’ll see you back here at ten thirty Friday morning.” Her tone left no doubt that I’d be there at 10:30 and be prepared.

      
And so while grandma was basting the turkey and my mother and sisters squabbled over mundane Thanksgiving-related matters, I was given the gift of homework. More than content to skip everything about Thanksgiving other than the meal, I holed up in a small bedroom poring over the facts of a faux robbery case, preparing my very first faux summation.

      
I was back at the offices first thing Friday morning, my heart pounding, certain I was actually going to die as I stood to face my four-person jury. But despite my nerves, my voice was strong and clear as I explained with a few rhetorical flourishes and dramatic gestures why my imaginary client was innocent. The summation lasted about twelve minutes, each one of them floating by me like an iceberg off the bow of a lumbering ship, each moment crystalline, weighty, and portentous. It was the first time, but by no means the last, that I heard myself sum up without understanding a word that I said, some deep part of my limbic system taking over the words while the conscious part of me was left abstractly appreciating the rhythms and sounds, completely divorced from the meaning of any of it. I supposed this was what it was like when an athlete spoke of being in the zone, of doing without thinking, of a deep and golden attention to one’s heartbeat, the smell of the arena, the chill of the late fall, the ball slowing as if thrown through honey.

      
Once done, I was led around to an office on the other side of the building and ceremoniously introduced to Ivar Goldart. Ivar wasn’t actually the big boss --that was a guy named Bob Baum. But Bob was out of the office, as was one of his deputies, and so, for my third interview, I got Ivar. Ivar was a lanky man who walked with a pronounced limp --the uneven lope gave him a weird gravitas, as if somehow no guy with such an affliction would ever say anything frivolous or stupid.

      
“What can we do,” Ivar asked me, “to get you to come work for us?” There was a long pause. In truth, it had never occurred to me that I’d get to ask for anything, and I was utterly unprepared for the question. But as I sat there in Ivar’s office, with its partially obstructed views and proximity to city hall, it was instantly clear to me that there was really only one thing I wanted. “Being from Wisconsin,” I explained, “I always kind of envisioned New York as being bound by the East River and the Hudson, and I’d really like to stay in the city I imagined.” In other words: Manhattan. Ivar fixed me with an ingratiating smile: “Oh, no problem,” he said. “That’s where we send most of our out-of-state people.”

      
And with that, then and there, in the narrow Park Row building across from city hall in downtown New York City, on the Friday after Thanksgiving 1990, I made up my mind: I’d turn my back on the filthy lucre of Wall Street and spend my life being down, dirty, and righteous with the Legal Aid Society of New York.

      
Ivar and I shook on it.

      
Less than six months later, after the bar exam, along with seventy-one other newly minted legal aid lawyers from around the country, I shuffled in and out of the College of Insurance Building (around the corner from the World Trade Center), where I learned things like “how to win speedy trial motions” and “just how much community service is a misdemeanor worth?” I went through day after day of lectures, demonstrations, and exercises designed to ensure that when we actually strode into court on behalf of indigent clients, we wouldn’t hurt them too badly. Six weeks came and went in a haze of astonishingly cool topics --each more real and practical than the next --all things I was desperate to learn. And like a kid in a samurai film who yearns for the day he can trade the bamboo stick for the tempered-steel sword, I gobbled up every day’s lessons hungry for the moment they’d finally cut me loose to do some real battle.

      
When it was finally assignment day, the Friday before we were to head to our waiting offices, one of our instructors wandered down the aisles calling out names and handing out our assignment slips.

      
“Enjoy,” John said, handing me my little white slip.

      
I took the little piece of paper and unfolded it distractedly. AP-3 --Brooklyn.
Brooklyn
? I felt a little rush. Surely there’s some mistake, I thought. Me . . . Brooklyn . . . impossible. They promised to send me to Manhattan
. I don’t even know where Brooklyn is!
I felt my face start to flush. I looked up. John was grinning at me.

      
“See you across the river,” he said, hooking a thumb east over his shoulder.

      
At that point, everything I knew about Brooklyn I had learned from
Welcome Back, Kotter
. But despite my ignorance and my horror at being relegated to what I considered a third-rate borough (the Bronx was at least sexy in a hard-core kind of way), my first year across the river was revelatory. Unlike almost all the other lawyers I knew back then --the ones I’d left in the towers of Wall Street, the smart people elbowing to succeed at big law firms --when I arrived at work every single morning of that first year, I was utterly happy. The host of
Morning Edition
had barely gotten to his last name by the time the covers were flung aside and I was headed for my tiny bathroom, almost skipping with the realization that I was headed
back
to work. The sheer exhilaration of knowing that in an hour or so I’d be in court, standing beside the poor and bedraggled, the violent and the innocent, the people who never wanted me as their lawyer in the first place was intoxicating. That the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society would even pay me to do the work seemed, at the time, like a gift.

      
The limits of that gift soon became apparent. I got a raise for passing the bar and in one fell swoop went from making a paltry $29,500 a year to a whopping $31,000. I celebrated this by treating myself to coffee in the morning and toppings on my pizza at night. That ate up the raise.

      
My nutrient-deficient diet was just one of the scary aspects of my new life. Frankly, everything was terrifying. Every day of walking to court; finding my way around; memorizing the names of the judges, the assistant DAs, the court clerks; questioning whether I pled someone too soon or too late, whether the fine was too high, or whether I’d needlessly ruined someone’s life by giving them a criminal record --it was constant stress and confusion. And every day was a battle. Some were mere skirmishes, others Iwo Jima. Sometimes I saw them coming; other times I was blindsided like an American pedestrian crossing a London street against the light.

- - - -

      
Survival was something Eddie Mayr knew a little something about. Eddie had spent three tours in Vietnam and considered all of life to be just another form of jungle combat. Every Friday afternoon he’d march the first-year lawyers into his office to do “simulations.” Lecturing us on the need to keep attacking, even when he’d angrily shot us down, he’d torture us for hours, making us get up and deliver opening statements, formulate cross-examination questions, or try our hand at voir dire (the questioning of potential jurors before a trial). I happened to like this sort of trial-by-fire approach, and I often stayed after school along with most of the other lawyers to decompress --that is, drink heavily --in Eddie’s office. As the evenings progressed, the conversation usually turned to who did well and who fucked up during the week. This was often unpleasant. After all, Eddie’s thousand-yard stare and vicious nature lent a certain harshness to his critiques. But it was an effective way to learn to be a better lawyer, and I wanted very much to be a better lawyer.

      
And so, in Brooklyn, under Eddie’s watchful eye, I learned to be a public defender --mostly by supplying him with Budweisers and listening to him rant. It was the best sort of law school I could imagine. At the time, I was juggling between 100 and 125 cases --an ocean of pleas, arraignments, motions, and trials. Every day I traversed the monolithic gray stone court building on Schermerhorn Street, defending poor people charged with misdemeanors --train hopping, pot smoking, meat boosting (meat, along with batteries, aspirin, and Pampers, is often stolen because it’s easy to resell), or prostitution. Misdemeanors help you get your court legs, help you learn the mechanics --where to stand, what to say, how to read a judge. The legal aspects of the misdemeanor cases that occupied all of my time were seldom complicated, which was good since the judges who presided over them seemed to have only a rudimentary understanding of the law.

      
Once a young lawyer has been mired in misdemeanors for a year or so, having handled between four hundred and a thousand or so of them, a supervisor can begin the process of “felony certification.” With this supervisory approval, one can start doing low-level felonies, cases in which people are looking at a few years (rather than ten or twenty) --purse snatches, gun possession, car theft.

      
Although the certification system is fairly rigid, the actual assignment system is very porous, and enthusiastic kid that I was, I soon began sneaking felony cases --something my overworked felony-certified colleagues were more than happy to ignore. With felonies, I got to go to Supreme Court, where courtrooms are bigger, cases are fewer, and the tone of the proceedings is much more formal. Because Supreme Court adjudicated more serious cases, the standard bargaining unit jumped from days in jail to years in prison, and I began meeting new and different kinds of clients and spending more time in jail cells.

- - - -

      
Just behind an unmarked door on the ground floor of the Supreme Court of Kings County there was a nondescript corridor that led to the “pens” --courthouse slang for jail cells. The corridor ended at a door, conspicuous for its weight, with a small window cut at eye level and a red-and-white sign that made clear that you were now entering a secure area. The sign also listed a large number of potential infractions --any of which could get you banned from the pens, arrested, or, if you were an inmate, additional time behind bars.

      
Just behind the door was a corrections officer who, nearly every day, perfunctorily examined my Legal Aid Society ID and motioned me lazily toward the back. Around the corner were the pens themselves, three huge cells, each the size of a racquetball court and crammed with prisoners waiting to be seen. The men were standing, sitting, or sleeping under the steel benches bolted to the walls.

      
Supreme Court cases usually last longer than misdemeanors, and therefore they afford a lawyer a greater opportunity to form a long-term relationship with a client. From the beginning I loved most of the people I represented. There was the defiant Hasidic Jew from Borough Park who tried to refuse a dismissal, screaming at me, his peyos bouncing in consternation. “I don’t want ACD,” he told me. (ACD is an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal --the closest thing there is to an outright victory and something almost no one, and certainly not this guy, should turn down.) “I want full vindication at trial! Nothing but full vindication at trial!” And there was the Rastafarian client who promised me that when he got out I could come to his house in Flatbush to “it sam fine-food, mon.” Almost every day brought me into contact with an astonishing array of people, all of whom desperately needed my help.

      
Oddly, the fact that they were needy seldom translated into gratitude for being helped. That was something I had to get used to. It took a while to really, viscerally understand that helping people has to be its own reward --that if, as a public defender, you expect any appreciation from your clients you’ll never survive, because the unfortunate truth is you’ll rarely get it. This was a lesson made explicit for me one Thursday night in the back of Callahan’s Bar and Grill, the Irish dive bar next to the office. The bar was split the usual way --prosecutors in the front room, defense lawyers in the back, and there was almost no movement between rooms, except to get to the turkey. The turkey --usually a twenty-plus-pound behemoth --was set out around 7:30 p.m. and usually rendered a bony, picked-over carcass by 7:37. For a bunch of underpaid prosecutors and legal aid lawyers, Callahan’s turkey was a way to spend some limited resources on liquor and still get some food in your stomach.