Monday Musings: Donzell Of Between A Laugh And A Tear

Donzell’s blog first caught my eye with its title: Between a Laugh and a Tear. Poetic.

The second thing that caught my eye was the photography on the site. What was so eye-catching about it is that he occasionally posts black-and-white photos, something that isn’t seen often enough.

Donzell describes himself below as “a Southerner with a gift for gab.” I think you will appreciate that as much as I do after you read his interview.

INTRODUCTION

I bring you greetings from Georgia. My name is Donzell, your friendly neighborhood public defender. First of all, I want y’all to know that I was born in a small county seat called Lawrenceville, Georgia. That’s 32 miles northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, 858 miles southeast of New York City, and 2213 miles east of Los Angeles, California. It was there I first saw the light of day at the old Button Gwinnett Hospital back in 1972. Oddly enough, it is now a mental hospital and a hospital for drug addicts. However, I digress.

As you can guess, my online moniker is not my real name. Now, how in the world did I come up with a name like Donzell? Actually, the story is rather simple. A client came to my office to meet with me about his case. When he got to the reception area, he asked for Donzell. The receptionist tried to correct him about my name, but he was rather insistent that my name was Donzell because he heard me said that my name was Donzell. My co-workers found this rather amusing and proclaimed this as my nickname. And over the years, I have come to love the name given to me by my wayward client.

I have been an attorney since November 2000, when I survived that last bastion of legalized torture called the bar exam. I have been a criminal defense attorney and a public defender for almost the entire time that I have been an attorney. I have practiced law as a public defender throughout the northern part of the great state of Georgia. However, I do admit to you openly and without shame, that there was a time where I had a momentary lapse of reason and worked at a bankruptcy firm for about six months. Yet, during a rather mundane bankruptcy hearing, I came back to my senses and went back to being a public defender.

Currently, I am now practicing in a country that straddles two worlds: rural and urban. While the county’s populace is becoming more diverse, the ones in authority and power are beholden to the county’s rural past. I handle only felony cases now, and I praise the Lord everyday for this simple pleasure. The primary reason is that my active caseload has dropped significantly to a manageable level.

Now, with that introduction out of the way, let’s do this thing.

THE QUESTIONS

You have written a lot about your job, but have pointedly stated recently that you want to write about other things because you are not defined by your choice of career. How do you balance life and career, and what are some of the things about you would you like people to know besides that you are a public defender?

To be honest, it ain’t easy trying to balance the work that I do with the rest of your life. This line of work is not a strict “9 to 5″ job. Plus, it don’t help when the cases are tough, the clients are ungrateful, popular culture portrays you as incompetent, and the general public is resentful that their tax dollars help pay you to defend the people that rape, rob, steal, et cetera from them.

The catalyst that caused me to find a balance between career and my life was the loss of my sister-in-law and infant niece to a drunk driver on September 13, 2003. I realized then that life is too short to obsess continuously about every facet of a criminal case. Life should be enjoyed with the people that you love and care about.

Furthermore, I learned the hard way that if you do not find a balance between your career and your life, your body will make you find a way because it will turn on you. To illustrate, during my two years in Elberton, I spent nearly every waking moment at the office. What made matters worse was that I neglected my health. I did not go to the doctor, dentist, or eye doctor for two years. Furthermore, I drank a lot of alcohol every night just to relax and go to sleep. Lastly, I ate junk food, fast food and other assorted crap for about two years. Eventually, it caught up with me. I snapped in the summer of 2002. I had a complete and utter meltdown. I was unable to do anything for a while. It was a reason that I had to leave Elberton.

Yet, the foregoing dribble really does not answer the question as to how do I find a balance between the work and my rest of my life. So, here is my secret: Time management and setting boundaries. While at the office, I delegate my time between tasks and live within those time restraints. If I take work home, I dedicate a discreet amount of time that I will work on the case, and after that time is up, I put the file away. In addition, I plan times where I will hang out with friends, family or do things for myself. So far I am doing okay.

What do I want my fellow public defenders to know about me? First, I am an avid fan of the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team, since the days of my youth. My heart and my blood bleed red and black. To quote a famous Georgia humorist, “I am Bulldog born, I am Bulldog bred, and when I died, I will be by God, Bulldog Dead.” Second, I am an amateur photographer. Here is a sample of my work. Third, I have a warped sense of humor. However, here are some real interesting tidbits about yours truly:

a.) I was close to death before I turned a year old. There was a weakness in the muscle lining between my crotch and my right leg. It was allowing my guts to protrude out. If I did not have a hernia surgery, I would have died.

b.) There is a tip of a metal sewing needle inside of my right big toe.

c.) I have only flown in an airplane once in my life. It was back in 1991 to go to the National High School Mock Trial Competition in New Orleans.

In November you wrote that you were keeping a low profile because you thought your boss might be onto your blog. How difficult is it to balance what you want to write with keeping your anonymity?

To protect my anonymity, I forego telling many of the stories of my day-to-day existence on my blog, and share them only with my friends and family. It is hard for me to do this because I come from a long line of southerners with the gift of gab. So, this is one of the reasons that I wanted to start writing about the things other than being a public defender.

One of your posts really writes its own question: “There are days when I wonder why the hell did I ever get into this line of work or come back to it.” And the answer is???

Well, here goes nothing.

When I was a 2L at UGA Law, I had Professor Coenen for Constitutional Law. Professor Coenen was really concerned that his students remember that they were human beings, people, individuals before they came to law school and they would be remain human beings, people and individuals when they left law school. To that end, toward the end of the semester, he gave a lecture about gave a lecture about how attorneys had a high rate of alcoholism, drug abuse, and divorce among people with professional degrees. His theory was that most lawyers saw the practice of law as a job or as a career. Professor Coenen believed that the practice of law was a calling, similar to the calling some people have to go into the ministry. He wanted us to believe that we were called to the practice of law and to help our fellow man.

Professor Coenen’s lecture resonated with me because of my upbringing. I was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical, independent Baptist church. While I am not an adherent of the faith anymore, some of those lessons still stay with me to this very day. As I was preparing for this interview, what Professor Coenen had said came back to the forefront of my mind, and I had a revelation. This is my calling. This is where I belong. This is where the man upstairs wants me to be. While there are a lot of trials and tribulations with this line of work, I have faith that the big man will give me the grace necessary to carry me through.

You recently moved your blog from Blogger to WordPress. How was the change, and what difference has it made for you and/or for the blog?

The change over to WordPress was easy. I had to change the coding on some of my blog entries to get them to work, but I did not mind it. For, I am geek, dork, and all around tech junkie.

The move to WordPress has not made a big difference on the content of my blog. Yet, WordPress gives me information about how many people have come by my blog, and what they have been reading. Also, WordPress gives me more flexibility with my blog than Blogger would ever do. Again, with me being a geek, this flexibility is a joy.

The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council recently announced it is terminating a total of 41 positions throughout the state, including 14 attorney jobs. How would you describe the current state of indigent defense in Georgia, and how do you think the future looks?

The state of indigent defense before the creation of the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council (GPDSC) was abysmal. The creation of the GPDSC was a miracle because it was created with a “tough on crime” Republican controlled legislature and a Republican governor with the same attitude.

Yet, in the short time the GPDSC has existed, it has exhibited everything people hate about government bureaucracies. First, it spends money on trite things that had no real value to the state of indigent defense, such as bumper stickers and tote bags. Second, it paid some staff attorneys at the downtown office over $100,000 a year. This is rather disturbing when the maximum pay for a circuit public defender is around $88,000. Third, the GPDSC absorbed the Fulton County Conflict Defender’s office (the office that handles cases when the Public Defender’s office had a conflict of interest). Yet, in one budget year, the conflict office lost $3 million dollars out of their budget, then claimed that they found it, but then, whoops, realized that they had already spend the money. However, the most glaring example of mismanagement by the GPDSC was the Brian Nicholas case. The GPDSC got an attorney who stated to the local news media that his defense to the case was to break the bank, i.e. spend so much money that the State would cry Uncle. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and got the Legislature pissed off with the GPDSC. I think that the root of the problem was that too many of the people at the GPDSC never had to run an office under the old system, and had the mentality that the Legislature had to fund our office no matter what. The resignation of the director of the GPDSC, Mike Mears, and the firing of other key people at the Atlanta office was the political price to get the Legislature to give us most of the funds that we needed.

In my opinion, the state of indigent defense in Georgia is at a crossroads. Our office is under the auspices of the Governor and not the Judiciary any more. To be honest, we ain’t on Sonny’s “To Do” list. The Republican controlled Legislature is watching us like a hawk, and looking for any excuse to cut our budget more or getting rid of the GPDSC altogether. So, we will see.

The PD Stuff Five Questions

If you weren’t an attorney, what other job would you like to try and why?

If I wasn’t attorney, I would be in some computer or technology related field. I remember having so much fun playing on the Apple IIe when it first came out and into my sixth grade class. God, I am really dating myself with this admission.

Best moment on the job?

My best moment was winning my first rape trial, after returning to the public defender fold. The case was not the best. While the victim’s story had changed drastically and there were three separate versions of what happened, my client agreed to take a stipulated polygraph test. He flunked it. To make matters worse, my client gave a statement detailing an incident where he attempted to rape the victim that no one knew about. I had to get a polygraph expert to refute the results from the stipulated test. I had to get my client ready for trial in less than two weeks, and hunt down witnesses that heard the victim say that my client did not rape her. It was an old fashioned, knock out, drag out brawl kind of a trial. However, it was so worth it when the judge published the verdict: Rape – Not Guilty, Statutory Rape – Not Guilty, Child Molestation – Not Guilty. Furthermore, it was sheer rapture to see the looks of horror on the faces of the entire DA’s office, when the jury acquitted my client, especially after how hard they rode me about how guilty my client was.

Worst moment on the job?

That’s an easy one. In March 2006, I had a client charged with Vehicular Homicide. The case was an ugly one. The client did not have his commercial load secured properly (or at least, not secured enough). This was not my client’s first arrest for vehicular homicide. He had a prior arrest for it from another county where a mother and her toddler daughter died. The trial judge allowed this prior arrest to come into evidence as a similar transaction. The prosecutor was out for blood. The victim’s family and their attorney were hounding me about why my client was going to trial. The client was someone I really liked.

I had put a lot of time into this case. I tracked down eyewitnesses from the incident and from the similar transaction that were helpful to the client. I was flying one of the eyewitnesses in from out of state to testify. I had been out to the scene a number of times. I was working with my client’s civil attorney to better prepare for the trial.

On the day of jury selection, my client asked me my honest opinion on the case. I told him that I was afraid that the jury would not acquit my client because they would feel that client should have been more careful, after his prior arrest for vehicular homicide. My client consulted his family and told me he wanted to enter a guilty plea. He did so, and the trial judge hammered him. The trial judge gave my client a 15-year sentence with the first 3 years to serve in confinement.

I felt horrible about what happened to my client and happened to him afterward. My client’s wife filed for divorce and would not let client see their daughter. My client lost his home. I felt that I let my client down, and I lost a lot of my confidence and swagger. That case has been a thorn in my side since then. I have endured so much grief on this case that there are times that I wish I had just tried the damn case, regardless of the outcome.

If Heaven exists, what do you think God will say to you when you arrive?

To be honest, I just don’t want him to say, “Depart from me, ye that work iniquity for I never knew you.”

If you could only pick one, who is your hero/heroine?

Harry S Truman. I have read the David McCullough biography of Truman numerous times. No matter the setbacks that Truman suffered in his personal or political life, he stayed true to his family, his friends, and his beliefs and to himself. This is rarity in our modern world.

Post-Script

I wanted to give a “shout-out” to Miss Tyrios. I have known her for almost four years. We met in the Legal Peoples group at Suicidegirls.com. She has a been a wonderful friend and source of inspiration to me.

Thank you, Donzell, for taking the time to write a very thoughtful interview.

For now this is the final Monday Musings interview. The timing is very good, because I have some changes occurring that will impact what I can commit to here at PD Stuff. Specifically I’ve accepted a job in another state (still as an investigator). I’ll see about the possibility of writing something about it in the future.

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