From The Grand Rapids Press:

Michigan is guilty of not providing competent counsel for poor defendants in its criminal courts, according to a recently completed report. A year-long study of the state’s public defense systems outlined myriad shortcomings. What’s missing from the report are comprehensive recommendations and solutions to fix those failings.

The National Legal Aid & Defender Association and the Michigan Bar Association conducted the study at the request of the state Senate. The groups should have made specific recommendations about such things as attorney selection, qualifications, workloads and case management.

Only calling for state money and oversight is not enough. Who should be responsible for that oversight? Where would the money come from?

Last year, Michigan’s 83 counties spent $74 million for public defense services. Only six states spent less.

And because public defender services are left to the counties, Michigan has a hodgepodge system. Some counties have public defender offices, others have court-appointed attorneys, some have low-bid contracts. Some pay by the hour, by the case, or a combination of both. Pay varies from county to county and so does the level of service.

Speed in dispatching cases often takes precedence over due process, according to the study. Defendants often only meet their attorney briefly on the eve of trial and hold “confidential” discussions in courtroom corridors or restrooms. Some appear in district courts without ever having seen an attorney. In Ottawa County, one of the 10 counties studied in the survey, district court arraignment days are referred to as “McJustice Days.”

Defendants have complained of being pushed through the court system and pressured to plead guilty by overworked, underpaid lawyers, or assigned lawyers unqualified to represent them. Michigan has no workload standards or oversight measures that make sure public defense attorneys have the proper experience and training to match the cases they get. That’s left to each county. Some do better than others. Kent County limits attorneys to no more than 40 indigent cases. In Detroit, five part-time public defenders handle 2,400 to 2,800 cases each.

Read the entire story

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.

This is one of Donzell’s
black-and-white photos

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.

…

I love a good play on words, so any public defender blogger who calls herself MissTyrios earns a special place in my heart. The name alone makes it special.

But there is a lot more to MissTyrios’ blog than just a cool title. After taking some time off from the blog last year, she has come back like gangbusters, with thoughtful posts on wide-ranging subjects such as attorneys behaving badly and criminal law and prison issues in Massachusetts.

So it is with great pleasure that I present MissTyrios, who was kind enough to offer her unique and strong voice for this Monday Musings interview.

MissTyrios doesn’t have an image on her blog,
but I think this image, found at a
public relations blog, appropriately
captures the concept.

INTRODUCTION

My name is MissTyrios (not really, if that isn’t obvious – say it out loud) and I blog over at misstyrios.com. I’m 27, have an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies, graduated from law school in 2006, and have been a public defender in Massachusetts since last fall. I’m a ridiculous Red Sox fan and also have a slight obsession with Elvis Presley. I can’t get through a day without Dunkin Donuts coffee and my favorite meal is a heaping bowl of freshly steamed clams.

You used to write for suicidegirls.com. What was that like, and how did you get involved with that?

As a warning, Suicide Girls is a website that primarily focuses on nude pin-up photography, so it may not be a good idea to rush over there, particularly if you are at work. I first came across the site in 2003 and was attracted to it because I love tattoos and tattoo art and it focuses on girls who have tattoos. I very quickly realized that the site also has a pretty amazing community of people that tend to be a lot more intelligent, articulate, and interesting than your average website, particularly one that ostensibly focuses on naked girls. Over the years, I have made really fantastic “real life” friends and have watched the site and the community grow and change and become something of a cultural phenomenon. Sometime after I joined, the site created what is known as the “Newswire,” sort of a communal blog that was written and edited by site members and covered topics like Politics, Culture, and Tech. I became an official Newswire editor in 2005 and was in charge of writing posts about Politics and, less often, Culture. I tended to focus on law and other legally-related issues because, well, I was in law school and that’s what I knew best. I would also edit stories submitted by other members because I’m an obsessive grammar, punctuation, and usage stickler. I absolutely loved that gig because it gave me a chance to write, to have a huge audience, and to debate reactions to what I had to say. I did that for about a year, but the site decided to take the Newswire in a different direction, focusing more on featuring writers that had an established base outside of just SG. That turn was the impetus for me starting misstyrios.com – I deeply missed writing and wanted to continue to do so.

What led you to law school, and what inspired you to become a public defender? (And the attitude expressed in the blog can truly be described as “inspired”.)

Thinking back on my life, I think law school was a natural place for me to end up. Since I was a little kid, I have been a voracious reader and writer and have long been focused on issues of injustice and activism. When I was ten, I did my fifth grade science fair project about cosmetic testing on animals and got so into it that I convinced all my friend’s mothers to stop buying products from all the companies that tested their creams and mascaras on bunnies. My dad is also a lawyer (albeit not a criminal lawyer) and I was always fascinated by the work he did, even when I didn’t completely understand it. By the time I was in high school, I was involved in Amnesty International, mock trial, and a whole lot of theatre. I love performing and playing parts and acting and I think the combination of my political, intellectual, and spectacle interests fits perfectly with being a trial lawyer (though I have not actually had a trial yet).

I did not go to law school with an eye towards being a public defender, but again, I think it’s natural that I ended up here. I never had any interest whatsoever in doing Big Law and I knew I wanted something to do with criminal law, something that would keep me in constant motion and contact with people and with court. But being a prosecutor, though it is glamorized and generally revered in popular culture, made me slightly nauseous once I actually thought about doing it. I quickly realized that being a public defender was the best fit for me and, once that revelation occurred, I focused on it entirely. I got an internship at a PD office and found that everything I learned and experienced just re-enforced the notion that this was what I was meant to do.

I admit, though, that I sometimes cringe at myself when I express sentiments like that. I am not a person who embraces trite notions of inspiration. But I can’t help it when I talk about what I do – I’m a so-called “true believer” in this work and I do really feel like I’ve found what I’m supposed to be doing.

Your blog has a good-sized gap between when you passed the bar and when you started as a public defender. What is it about blogging that brought you back to it, and how hard is it to balance that with the job, life, etc?

Like I said, I started the blog after losing the SG writing gig because I just missed writing so intensely. But it came at an inopportune time – when studying for the bar, I sometimes forgot to make time to take a shower, let alone to pratter around the internet and write about something. I also had a hard time adjusting to the change in level of readership and response. My articles for SG would generate dozens and sometimes hundreds of comments, whereas my site was getting only a few hits and even fewer comments. I got a little discouraged and was not as enthusiastic as I had been previously. And then when I started working, I had a new set of challenges to adjust to in my life. I was going from a student’s schedule to a work schedule, facing a long commute, and getting used to court, clients, and caseloads. It consumed me and my blog fell way to the back of my mind. But, once I got used to the schedule and work, I discovered PD Stuff and some of the other PD blogs and realized that there may be an audience out there for my writing after all. I also realized that actually becoming a PD gave me a wealth of new material to write about. And I was always reading about various goings-on in criminal law and realized I had a lot of things to say about those as well. I re-started it and am immensely happy that I did. Lately, work has been really busy and I am not posting as much as I want to, but I see the blog as an outlet for things that I think about all the time anyway. I consider the time I spend on it to be a valuable use of my “free time.”

Although you blog anonymously, you identify (at least generally) where you work. Do you worry about having your cover blown, and does it impact how you approach the blog?

Ha. Funny you should mention this, as my cover has been blown recently. But I didn’t get in trouble or admonished. I am always very careful not to reveal any client confidences or anything that would identify another lawyer or a particular judge or anything. I sort of expected that someone would be able to identify me eventually, but when it happened, I still felt like a kid called to the principal’s office.

You have now been a PD for about 8 months. How would you describe the job to law students/potential public defenders, and what words of wisdom would you give to new public defenders to help them in their first months on the job?

First of all, make sure you are doing this because you love it. Because if you don’t love it and aren’t prepared to love it, you will immediately become overwhelmed by this job’s demands and stresses and very few victories. And then, if you do love it, always keep that in mind so as to overcome to demands and stresses and very few victories. I have had glimpses of burn out after just these months of being a PD and know how easily it can occur if you allow it to.

Second, even though you come into this job knowing you are going to be making very little money, the reality of that can be extremely difficult. It is very frustrating when you are brown-bagging peanut butter and jelly because that $4 deli sandwich may mean the difference between being able to pay both your rent and your loans this month. Meanwhile, your friends in Big Law will be buying condos, throwing lavish weddings, and getting their debt levels to zero. Just accept the fact that you are going to continue to live like a student, keep your loans paid, and remember that your job is so much better than having a Blackberry buzz in the middle of the night in regards to some document review emergency.

And third, be as nice and respectful as possible to the other people in court, particularly the court officers and clerks. They run the courtrooms and can be your greatest allies or worst enemies; their importance and power cannot be underestimated. If you get on one person’s bad side, you can be miserable for months. Don’t make that mistake. And the same thing goes for prosecutors and probation officers – you have to work with them over and over again on cases and, while you may disagree with them a lot, being able to do so respectfully and keeping the disagreement in its proper place in formal proceedings will make your life and your clients’ lives a lot better. They are the ones you sometimes need to get a good deal and you don’t want to end up screwing your clients just because you don’t like a particular person.

THE PD STUFF FIVE QUESTIONS

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

I’m sure I would be doing something as equally bleeding heart and poorly paying, like being a social worker or a teacher in an inner city school. If I had any knack for science and math (and any tolerance for blood), I would probably be a doctor in a free clinic. I just can’t remove that part of myself that gravitates to the poor. I probably sound like I have a lot of liberal guilt, but I am completely cognizant of the fact that I’ve been privileged and fortunate enough to have access to an amazing education and I would never want to use that for anything other than chasing the notion of changing the world.

Best moment on the job?

There have been a lot of moments when I have felt completely triumphant about getting a judge to accept some deal I thought I had no chance at getting, or getting someone out on personal recognizance against all odds. But the best moment was, the day after selling what I thought was an impossible deal, my client came to my office and hand-delivered a basket of flowers as thanks for it. It was so touching to see him so grateful to be out of jail and able to go to the store to even get flowers. And, while I know a lot of my clients are thankful and know how I hard I work for them, that extra step of someone buying me a little gift to express that was very appreciated.

Worst moment on the job?

The worst moment was when I cried in court. I am not proud of this at all. It was only a couple of months after I started working and I was on arraignment duty (which I have written about a couple of times in my blog). It had been a long, arduous day (as they almost always are) and I was exhausted and looking forward to just being able to go home. But then the court officers handed me a note saying a female had been brought in for a section 35 – in Massachusetts, there’s a law that states that a doctor, family member, or the court can petition to have an individual involuntarily committed to a 30-day substance abuse treatment program if they are a danger to themselves or to others due to their drug and/or alcohol abuse. It is technically a civil commitment, not a criminal one, but because there is a loss of liberty at stake, the individual is entitled to counsel in the proceedings. They are almost impossible to “win.” After I spoke to this woman, sat with her during the interview with the court psychologist, and talked to her boyfriend on the phone, I really thought commitment was inappropriate. But the doctor concluded otherwise and, after the hearing in which I fought with all my heart against her commitment, the judge ruled with the doctor and she was ordered committed. I couldn’t help it, but tears just started streaming down my face and I felt like I had just completely failed. Luckily, the only people in the courtroom were a few court officers and the judge, all of whom knew I was fairly new and totally exhausted. The judge was exceptionally kind to me and told me that, while he had ruled against me, he sincerely appreciated the fight I had put up and my clear dedication to my clients. I was supremely embarrassed, but learned after that how to better control my emotions, at least while in the actual courtroom.

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

I hope he would say something like, “Hey, all your childhood dogs are here, playing with your grandpa, and Elvis Presley is giving a concert tonight!”

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

Besides my dad (who is the best person on the planet as far as I am concerned), I would have to pick Father Robert Drinan. Father Drinan passed away recently, but he dedicated his life and career to the Jesuit tradition of helping the less fortunate. In addition to being a priest, he was a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, and a US Representative. In Congress, he was staunchly anti-war and pro-life, sometimes to the ire of the Roman Catholic Church. He is the ultimate example of truly living and working for your ideals and delivered his message of passion and of dedication to the poor and less fortunate right up until he died. He was also a very funny man. I was lucky enough to see him speak at my law school a couple of years ago, after I had decided to become a public defender, and he told us all to just eschew the money that was being thrown at us and to use our skills to help those who truly needed help. His words made me swell with pride and validated, once and for all, the path I had decided to take.

Thank you very much, MissTyrios, for an insightful and thoughtful interview.

Next week’s guest on Monday Musings is Donzell from Between a Laugh and a Tear. If you have any questions you would like me to consider for Donzell, please email them to me before Tuesday night.

…

It’s an issue that faces many public defenders and support staff throughout the country: salaries, resources, and other things money could buy for the best defense money can’t buy. These are the issues (or, more specifically, the issue of pay parity for public defenders) that led TexPD4Parity to create Public Defenders & Parity.

Recently Tex took the time to answer some questions for Monday Musings, and to shed some light on an issue that often flies under the radar.

Introduction

I’m ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille. Oh, we’re rolling? Is this mike on? ::taptap::

It is? Okay, then. :::clears throat:::

Good morning, my fellow PD- philes! I’m TexPD4Parity, author of the narrowest, driest, most unread blog in cyberworld! (Hint-There may be an idea for a new Rodney Award category here.) I’m really glad I got the opportunity to be interviewed for Monday Musings. I think the questions are extremely well crafted and better than the take-home exams I had in law school. Despite an occasional lapse into attempted levity, I did my best to answer the questions as thoughtfully and fully as possible. Regardless of whether you live in Texas or not, this is an issue that affects many of us both on and off the job.

For those who haven’t dropped by the ol’ blogstead, Public Defenders & Parity doesn’t deal with intense legal analysis of appellate decisions, nor does it delve into the day to day victories and horrors of a public defender’s life. I write about the issue of the inadequacy of funding whether it be salaries, training, or support. Not very sexy, I admit. Let’s get on with the interview.

You eloquently explain your blog’s purpose and goals in your first post. What more can you tell us about why you’ve chosen to focus on the issue of pay parity for public defenders?

My increasing radicalization on this issue began about four years ago when a document was circulating showing the salaries of all supervisory staff in the DA’s and PD’s offices. Courthouse folklore had it that it had been requested under public information laws by one of the county criminal court judges. I believe that it was also the source for The Spangenberg Group’s data on salaries for it’s 2004 report on indigent defense in Dallas County.

About a year later, then DA Bill Hill went to the commissioners and asked for this huge raise for his prosecutors. The media quoted some pitiful ADA complaining that his wife had to work so he could where the white hat. The commissioners cut the requested amount about a third and gave raises to both the ADAs and PDs. Of course, the ADAs’ raises were worth more in real dollars than the PDs’ because they were already making significantly more than PDs. And, of course, the media didn’t cover that.

During this same period of time a memo was issued from “on high” to the tenor that most PDs did this for idealistic purposes and not the money and that since we didn’t have lobbyists to get us nifty things like longevity pay, we should just shut up and do our jobs. This seemed to me to smack of “learned helplessness” and defeatism. So I started germinating ideas on what might be done to correct the status quo.

Also playing into this was the 2001 Fair Defense Act and the creation of the Task Force on Indigent Defense both of which have failed to address compensation, training, and support funding. It is as though PDs don’t exist as human beings in Texas, but are rather viewed as an amorphous commodity.

The launching of Public Defenders & Parity was in anticipation of this legislative session. I hadn’t intended on tracking legislation as much as I’ve done until I started seeing the bills being filed that directly or indirectly relate to the issue. I actually intended for there to be more discussion and hopefully generate ideas on how to go about getting what we need.

I overestimated the amount of interest I could generate on parity issues. As Lewis Black would say, I must have been “delooooooosional.” Whether I over-estimated the number of Texas PDs in the blogosphere or whether I just suck (can I say “suck?”) as a blogger, I’ve been really disappointed at the number of comments I’ve received.

As you point out in your first post, the concept of indigent defense is still in its infancy in Texas. How would you describe the growing pains and its current development?

I’m afraid the infant is being raised in a dysfunctional family. Long before I became torqued-up over the funding issue, I thought the authorizing statue, article 26.044 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, represented a fundamentally flawed model. Defense counsel should have sufficient independence to zealously represent their clients without having to worry about the political consequences to themselves or the office. Nor should they have to forfeit their right to free speech.

A chief public defender serves at the sufferance of the commissioners. His or her assistants, at least in Dallas County, are not protected by civil service and are employed at the pleasure of the chief public defender.

A judge has the discretion to use public defenders in his or her court or not and if PDs are allowed in the court, the judge is able to determine who that PD is. And, just as easily, throw him or her out of the court.

I have seen judges agree to take on additional PDs on the condition that “X” be hired to fill the position. I have known of a PD who was banned from a courtroom for, as was commonly believed around the courthouse, writing a letter to the editor in support of the judge’s primary opponent. I have heard of PDs being shuffled from one court to another when a judge complained they “set too many cases for trial.”

The TFID has done a lot of good with the use of discretionary grants to start new PD offices, expand existing programs, and provide some tools of the trade in the form of computers and case management software, but discretionary grants cannot be used to pay the salaries of existing positions and formula grants to the counties are basically to reimburse them for the costs of implementing the Fair Defense Act.

Until the state legislature builds independence into the model, provide direct funding or legislates parity trough unfunded mandates, creating and expanding PD offices with a flawed framework is simply “crap breeding crap.” I’ll explain the origin of that phrase in a future post.

The lack of funding of indigent defense has been national news lately, with the problems in New Orleans plus the funding-related delays in the Brian Nichols trial in Atlanta. Have you seen an increase in awareness of the problem, and what impact do you think it could have on the question of pay parity?

Let’s not forget the cuts forced down the throats of public defenders in Cook County, Illinois. That just sickens me.

To answer your question, I’d like to think these stories could have an impact, but this is Texas, after all. This is where the death penalty is being adopted for sex offenders, the “duty to retreat” before using deadly force is being abandoned, and the Court of Criminal Appeals just got “dope slapped” on the back of its collective head on three death penalty cases.

As reported wonderfully in Grits for Breakfast and The Wretched of the Earth, the Court of Criminal Appeals is not particularly “defendant friendly” and its chief justice chairs the TFID. Is it any surprise that compensation or funding standards for existing programs haven’t been addressed in the over five years of its existence and that these issues aren’t even on the table in its strategic plan for the next 4 or 5 years?

I don’t think state or local policy makers care one wit about what’s going on beyond the state line. At least they don’t seem to care with regards to this issue. Occasionally, the papers will pick up on what’s going on in Louisiana due, I suppose, to its proximity, but the issue is largely ignored in the media, including the so-called liberal publications.

You have detailed some of the Texas Legislature’s activities, especially those related to judge and prosecutor longevity pay issues. How would you describe your impressions of the legislative process and trying to get things done through that process?

My general impression has left me feeling like being trapped inside a Lewis Black routine. There are two issues here. One is the frustration of trying to achieve some when one doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. That can be fixed. Starting early in the process is a must. We’ll also need to try to line up support not only to introduce legislation, but to get the appropriations committee to provide for it in the appropriations bill. It also wouldn’t hurt to have an ally on the calendars committee so that legislation gets heard.

The other is realizing that even when one has all the ducks in a row, there are pitfalls everywhere. A former staffer told me that it’s always a long shot to get something passed as there are “a thousand ways to kill a bill.”

In one of your posts you point out that indigent defense/public defender offices are a cost-efficiency solution rather than an attempt to “fulfill some lofty Gideonesque ideal.” Is there a hostility towards the very concept of indigent defense that affects the goal of parity? If so, how is it possible to get past any reluctance inherent in such hostility?

It’s not just hostility; it’s also indifference, ignorance, and benign neglect. We, as public defenders, have to educate policy makers about why under-funding defense affects the appearance of fairness in the system. We have to get the numbers and show them what we’re talking about. Chief public defenders need to actually meet with legislators in Austin and explain what they need and why.

The media needs to be cultivated in Texas and, in turn, the voting public. As one comment on my blog suggested, it’s not enough to write letters to the editor. We need to get individual reporters interested in writing about this issue. We need to be willing to provide them with the information or be able to show them where to find it themselves.

The first step, though, is to get public defenders in this state to realize that nothing happens if they remain complacent with the status quo.

When I was thinking about this question, I remembered the character, Howard Beale in the film Network:

“All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.

You’ve gotta say, “I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!”

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!!””

THE PD STUFF FIVE QUESTIONS

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

I’ve thought about this a great deal over the years. If I had it to do over again, I might like to try being a writer or a photographer, but I feel I’m merely competent at one and not particularly talented at the other. Having an artistic profession requires an obsessive drive I’ve never really developed.

I’ve thought about teaching, but my law school performance was less than stellar.

Lately I’ve become quite interested in learning to build off-the-grid homes that use straw bale and adobe. If I had to work as a laborer, that’s an area I’d like to be involved in.

Best moment on the job?

I have to tell the first story as a contrast to the second one.

I had been with the PD’s office for over a year and was still assigned to the misdemeanor section. Although I truly enjoyed working with this particular judge, he frequently helped out the State more than I thought was in good taste. For example, I was trying this DWI case to a jury and I moved for an instructed verdict due to the persecutor’s failure to prove up a necessary element. The judge let them reopen. The State screwed it up again. Again, I moved for an instructed verdict. Again he allowed them to reopen. I stood to object and he cut me off, “I know, you’re gonna object cuz I’m helping them! I don’t blame you! OVERRULED!

Still assigned to the same court about a year later, I had a week where I had overlapping jury trials. By overlapping, I mean while the first jury was deliberating, we started picking the second jury. We stopped to take the verdict. Guilty. State put on it’ punishment case. Jury goes out to deliberate and we go back to voir diring (yes, voir dire, pronounced “voh-dyre” in Texas, is frequently used as a verb here.) the panel.

I had another case set that week which had been being passed every month for over a year. It was a bond case with a civilian complainant and, thus, low priority for the ADAs who were allowed to run the docket and announce ready on the .029 blood test DWIs with multiple priors. The judge had this obscure rule that if defense counsel and the State announced ready on different cases, the State would be allowed to try its preference first, but would have to try whatever defense counsel had announced on after that. I had made my announcement of ready (knowing it meant jury trial number three for the week) and the judge told the prosecution they were going to trial.

The ADAs roared their terrible roars, rolled their terrible eyes, gnashed their terrible teeth (apologies to Maurice Sendak), and filed a motion for continuance.

It was agonizing watching one ADA examine another ADA on the stand trying to prove up their motion followed by my cross. At least for the judge. Finally, he said, “Mr. X, c’mere,” motion to the side of the bench. When I got there he leaned down out of ear shot of the rest of the courtroom. He said, “There’s an easier way to do this. Go back to counsel table and request leave of the court to file a Motion to Dismiss for lack of a speedy trial. You’ll WIN!.

And I did.

Worst moment on the job?

Other than the day an irate family member screamed at me in a hallway crowded with people, “The Lord is gonna set this right and He’s gonna start with YOU!”, I’d have to say it’s not so much a moment as an extended period of time when I found myself in a particular judge’s cross hairs. It seemed every day I had to appear in that court, as a prelude to the morning’s colitis attack, I would have to play “twenty questions” with the judge until I answered one not to her satisfaction. Then I would be treated to a seeming eternity of berating in front of a packed courtroom. It only ended when I learned to remain absolutely still. The judge sniffed at me and, thinking I was dead, moved on to fresher prey.

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

I don’t subscribe to the traditional concepts of Heaven and Hell, but in the event I’m wrong I think He or She’ll say, “Boy, ya look rode hard and put up wet. C’mon in and rest a spell.”

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

I’m way too cynical about human nature to believe in the archetypal “hero” or “heroine’, although I do believe people are capable of incredibly heroic acts. I think there are many people act heroically everyday when they intervene on behalf of the helpless at great risk to their own well-being, whether that be the “hero’s” physical safety, liberty, or political survival. I think the person who epitomizes this in recent events is Liviu Librescu, the Virginia Tech professor who bought time for his students to escape at the cost of his own life. My runner up is Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, the chopper pilot who had ordered his gunners to train their guns on the American forces at My Lai in order to stop the massacre of civilians and reported the incident.

Thank you, Tex, for taking the time to so eloquently and excellently shed some light on this important issue.

Next week’s Monday Musings guest is MissTyrios. If you have some questions you’d like me to consider for her interview please email me.

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Last year, on October 27, the world was greeted with a simple announcement: “I PASSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!” The word came from blogger Frolics and Detours, and with that announcement, and the beginning of a career in public defense, a new public defender blogger was born.

The blog has actually been active since F&D’s law school days, and is a mix of current events (both personal and worldly) as well as recent posts about her (relatively) new job.

Please join me in welcoming Frolics and Detours to Monday Musings.

INTRODUCTION

An introduction. Let’s see. I’m your typical 20-something single girl. I love hanging out with my friends, catching up on sleep, checking out guys, laying around the house, and reading. Although I never expected it, my job defines me. Luckily, I love my job, so I don’t mind the definition!

Although you’ve been blogging since late 2004, you are a relatively new public defender blogger. How has the transition to full-time public defender affected your blogging?

Obviously, I post about my job more and not law school. Becoming a PD has definitely given me a bit more focus for my blog. While I still post frivolous and meaningless things, the job always gives me an interesting story I can post. (Lots of times I choose not to b/c I’m afraid of being identified.) That’s one of the perks of the job — more interesting stories than anybody else has.

When did you know you wanted to be a public defender, and was there a specific event or person behind the inspiration?

The funny thing is that I never wanted to be a public defender. Since I was about 8 years old, I wanted to be a prosecutor because I wanted to “help people”. The summer after my first year of law school I worked at a friend’s father’s workers comp/personal injury firm. It was interesting, but not what I wanted to do. The next year I actually tried on campus interviewing for the next summer. The local PD’s office was doing OCI and they didn’t require a specific grade percentile, so I sent in my resume and got an interview. As I prepped for my interview, I thought about how PD’s help people too, just in a different way that I had never realized or even considered. My interview kicked arse and I knew I would get an offer. After waiting six weeks for the offer letter to come in the mail, it finally arrived and I was stoked.

Once I started in the office, I knew it was where I wanted to be. Everyone in my office was so nice and helpful. They all cared about their clients and their rights. Everybody was in the courtroom all the time. There was always something interesting to talk about. By the end of that summer, I knew that this office was where I wanted to be. Of course, there was one major problem — the budget. My boss told me he wanted to give me an offer for after graduation, but there wasn’t money at the time. I did a bunch of interviewing the next school year, mostly for judges, other PD offices, and some prosecutors as well. Finally, right after graduation, my job offer came in the mail. The rest, as they say, is history…

Your blog is the only one I’ve seen with a “case load” number in the “About Me” section of the sidebar. What gave you the idea to include that, and what does it mean to you?

My case load is something that I check at work every day. Our office used to have a policy that for one month certain people would get all the cases and then we wouldn’t get any more cases for three months. It was a rotation system. Checking my case load daily showed my progress. Alas, this system has gone down the tubes because we had a mass exodus from my office and we don’t have enough senior attorneys to keep the rotation up. Now my case load stays pretty stagnant. Every day I close a couple of files, the next day a few more have been opened up to me.

Short and sweet: I think the case load number is an interesting little tidbit.

You recently had problems with the judge in your first trial and raised questions about whether you are cut out for the job. How would you describe the process of getting past that, and what advice would you give other new public defenders about dealing with judges and overcoming self-doubt, based on your experience?

I haven’t gotten past it at all. This job has such a steep learning curve that I feel like I will never know enough to feel completely confident in front of a judge — whether it’s in magistrate court, a plea, or a trial. Luckily, the people in my office are wonderful and let me know when I have done well and what I can improve upon. With our jobs, we have to develop a thick skin (which I’m in the process of) and learn how to take constructive criticism.

With a couple of felony jury trials under your belt you are quickly becoming a veteran public defender. How do you feel about the realities of the job, including how they match up to your expectations, now that you are fully immersed?

I’m overworked and underpaid. That was expected and it is reality.

There are good days and there are bad days. When days are bad, they are absolutely horrible. When I call home crying, my dad gives me unsolicited advice that I hate, but he’s right. “There are going to be plenty of crappy days. Suck it up and get over it.” I’d rather get a hug though.

Some judges are great, others notsomuch.

Some prosecutors really care about getting our clients the help they need, others won’t work with me at all. Dealing with the prosecutors has to be the aspect of the job that I didn’t really know what to expect. I just assumed we would always be fighting and arguing and that they would be horrible to work with. I didn’t think that I would end up liking a lot of them and hanging out with them outside of the office.

THE PD STUFF FIVE QUESTIONS

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

If I didn’t have a mental block for science, I would be a marine biologist. I’ve always loved any sea creature. Sharks are my absolute favorite and you can barely pull me away from the television during Shark Week. The ocean is such a vast expanse and the amazing variety of organisms that live there is ridiculous. It’s hard to get my head around it, but I love it.

Best moment on the job?

My not guilty verdict was pretty sweet. Getting silly charges dismissed is also nice and a relief for the client. Being able to get people the help they need is probably the best part of the job. Honestly, I guess I don’t really have a best moment yet. I have had some good moments and some exciting moments, but I don’t know which one I would classify as the best yet. If I had been at work when bar results came out, that would have been it easily.

Worst moment on the job?

That’s easy. Being berated by the judge during my first trial. Being talked down to is one thing, but getting absolutely obliterated by the judge in front of my client on the record is horrible. I just had to take it and say “Yes, your honor.” I wasn’t able to stick up for myself or my client.

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

Welcome. You had some fun down there, didn’t you?

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

This is not a fair question. Because I can only pick one, I can’t choose my mom and dad. They have risen up from pretty humble means to become extremely successful and very respected in the community. They are the sweetest and most caring people in the world. They are the reason I am who I am. Plus, they did manage to have a great kid — ME!

If I have to choose only one, right now I think my hero would be my boss. He has been doing this job for 25 years and has not lost one bit of passion for it. When talking about defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he tears up a little. Not to mention, he is absolutely brilliant. He immediately knows the answer to any question you have, and if he doesn’t, he does the research and comes up with the answer within ten minutes. Now, he may not be the most touchy-feely guy or wear his emotions on his sleeve, but if someone gives any of us PDs any trouble, he stands up for us in a heartbeat. My boss is the type of person that I aspire to become.

Thanks, F & D, for a fun interview.

Next week’s guest on Monday Musings is the author of Public Defenders & Parity. If there are any questions you’d like me to consider for TexPD4Parity, please email me. Also, feel free to drop me an email to schedule your own Monday Musings interview.

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INTRODUCTION

Thanks for the chance to participate in Monday Musings. As a non-lawyer, I’m glad to be considered sort of an honorary member of the PD blogging community. As of just a few weeks ago, I’m officially an unemployed blogger, so you’ve caught me when I have plenty of time to participate!

As a brief introduction, I left college without a degree to take a job as an investigative reporter with The Texas Observer, and have basically been selling the same skill set to one employer or another ever since. I performed opposition research for 68 candidate campaigns between 1992 and 2004, including 22 judicial races. Before Texas changed its law to restrict such jobs to private investigators, I also used to pick up work doing paper trail-type investigations for attorneys, including on two or three capital appeals. From 2000 – 2006 I was Director of the Police Accountability Project at the ACLU of Texas, where I worked on many of the issues I write about on Grits. Our biggest success while I was there was the political dissolution of Texas‘ scandal-ridden drug task force system in the wake of the “Tulia”episode. But I’ve also been involved in everything from analyzing racial profiling data at traffic stops to bigger picture issues of mass incarceration of nonviolent offenders, etc.

Grits has always been a side project, nothing anybody has ever paid me to do. Last year I left ACLU and am currently unemployed, considering several near-term options, and enjoying the extra time to write on Grits during the legislative session. Grits’ future largely depends on where I land in my professional life, but for now I’m enjoying the blog quite a bit and I’ve been committed to these issues for more than a decade, so I doubt it’s going anywhere anytime soon.

Grits covers a lot of ground and is one of the most prolific blogs focusing on legal issues. Can you describe for us how you collect your information and how you decide what makes it onto the blog?

As for how I collect information, I use the personalized Google News function a lot, and during the legislative session also use the state capitol, house and senate websites frequently. I use the state list of newspapers at newslink.org to look for local, regional stories on the themes and issues I discuss. I have a Bloglines account, but the sites and blogs on my blogroll basically represent the main websites I visit – I use my own website as a research center, in a lot of ways, and link to all my favorite sources there. I should also mention that at this point readers send me quite a bit of stuff, which is great. Legislative hearings and meetings of other government bodies generate a lot of new information, and also gather all the players in a room for easy access, so those types of events can produce quite a bit of blogging material. I always love to hear government has spent money on a consultant or staff research on my topics or produced some extensive report, because reading and analyzing those things frequently generates multiple posts and information that’s not reported elsewhere. Ditto, on occasion, for law review and academic articles – I’m a big fan of SSRN. I also file open records requests with state and local government agencies for blogging material (though less often than when I was employed), and pretty much dedicate what little revenue Google ads generate to paying for records requests.

As for what goes on Grits for Breakfast, with few exceptions I start with the assumption that people do not read blogs looking for information, they read blogs because they want to know what that information means. Everybody else has Google News, too – for the most part they don’t need me for links. There’s too much information out there, is the problem, and lots of criminal justice issues are quite complex and multi-layered. So a news item earns a spot on Grits not just because it’s news, or even interesting news (usually) but because I have either new information or a perspective to offer that wasn’t provided in the mainstream coverage – I ask myself whether what I have to say “adds value” to the debate, and if so it goes up.

On subjects I’m focused on over the long-term – jail and prison overcrowding, drug war overreach, pretrial diversion, snitching etc. – I sometimes post items with statistics or anecdotes simply because I want to preserve the information for myself for future use. I’ll include enough of a citation to use later as a footnote if need be and all the money quotes I find interesting or useful. Then, later, when it’s time to prepare testimony or accumulate research for some specific purpose, everything I or anybody else would need to make the arguments are available on the blog without going into newspaper archives, etc., or reinventing the wheel. I’m a fairly prolific and facile writer so those sort of posts don’t take much time and have great benefit, for me and I hope others, down the line.

Finally, I try when possible to provide information at a point in time when people can use it to participate in the process, which often is well before the MSM notice it. E.g., most reporters cover committee hearings after the fact at the Lege, but I preview bills in committee in case people have concerns about them or see bills they want to support. The tactic also has the intangible benefit of framing the issues for insiders (even, perhaps especially, for MSM reporters themselves) instead of just reacting and counterpunching. Blogs are not for the masses – blogs are for elites and information seekers. (Half my traffic, ~ 1,100 per day, comes from Google searches.) I know most people don’t participate in the process at that level, but for those who do, such information can matter a great deal. What’s more, I suspect that more would become involved if they understood how it worked and knew when and where those opportunities arose. At least, those are the assumptions that underlie what I’m doing, whether they’re true or not.

Between Grits for Breakfast and The Wretched of the Earth, the blawgging world gets quite a detailed look at the Texas justice system, often in a very unfavorable light. We posed this question to Wretched, and it would be good to hear your take as well: What do you see going on that gives you hope for the future of the system?

Lots, actually. It’s not that much worse here than elsewhere, I’m just exposing the warts. But in the big picture both parties are split on these issues, which politically leaves lots of room to maneuver for reform. In Texas there’s a working coalition of moderate reformers on criminal justice that’s made up of about 2/3 of the Democrats and 1/3 or so of Republicans who can be counted on to back first steps toward fixing the biggest problems. The Governor has been the bigger barrier. E.g., Texas will likely enact major probation and parole reforms this session to avoid building new prisons, but Gov. Perry vetoed similar measures last session to precipitate the current prison overcrowding crisis. And both chambers in 2005 passed a bill requiring written consent at traffic stops that the Governor also vetoed, but its passage certainly bodes well for other possible legislative reforms. Criminal justice has been one of the only areas where legislators in Texas appear able to work together in a bipartisan way.

If you were given the power and an unlimited budget, what are the first things you would change in the Texas justice system, and why?

The three big ticket items I’d fund with such power and budget are training 10,000 teachers to deal with dyslexic kids and illiterate adults, dramatically expanding community-based mental health treatment, and focusing evidence-based programming on children of incarcerated parents. The reason: those are the biggest categories where funding would make a difference to prevent crime rather than react to it. Dyslexics are three times as likely as others to enter prison, children of incarcerated parents 6-8 times more likely, and the mentally ill are being warehoused in Texas prisons in huge numbers – the state estimates 30% of inmates are past clients of the indigent mental health system. If you can stop people in those categories either from committing crimes or immediately entering prison when they screw up, it would do more to improve public safety than the current lock-em-up approach.

Otherwise, nearly everything I’d do for the criminal justice system would save money – probably enough to cover costs of the above proposals. Half of Texas prisoners are nonviolent offenders, and most shouldn’t be there. Texas should shift resources from incarceration to community supervision, restorative justice and treatment for nonviolent and low-level offenders, especially ratcheting down offense levels for those crimes to more reasonable levels. Another key reform: Shortening community supervision terms to let offenders earn their way off paper through good behavior. On jail overcrowding, I’d make every county have a pretrial services division that evaluated defendants’ suitablity for personal bond, and create a statutory presumption that petty offenders would get one unless a judge identified reasons why not.

Also, make me philosopher-king for a day and I’d also do something radical to reinforce sagging Fourth Amendment rights, which I think have been essentially dismantled by the US Supreme Court. I’d like to see the legislative branch step up to defend those rights since the courts won’t..

How would you describe Texas ‘ approach to indigent defense, and are there ways you can think of to improve upon it?

Our system is fragmented and locally controlled, with a few statewide standards implemented for the first time earlier this decade that are still receiving significant pushback. One bright spot has been that rising indigent defense costs are causing more counties to turn to public defender offices, especially for misdemeanor cases and also for specialized caseloads (Austin just established a dedicated mental health public defender). A statewide task force was established that’s been funding PD office startups with 4-year grants that has spurred quite a few new counties to go that route, and several more are studying whether to follow suit.

You also have a personal blog, Huevos Rancheros, where the tone is certainly lighter. Why did you start Huevos, and do you find it helps to have such a creative outlet?

I used to put more personal or off-topic stuff on Grits, but I decided it didn’t “fit,” whatever that means, either with my own expectations, readers’ or both. Who knows? Anyway, I generate a lot of prose – those who know me would say I compulsively do so – and historically I’ve written on many topics besides just criminal justice. (E.g., for about five years I had a magazine column on healthcare politics.) As a writer I like to explore different kinds of writing, so there’s some fiction on Huevos Rancheros, some sportswriting, travelogues, etc. After the legislative session is over, e.g., I’m considering doing some exercises on Huevos Rancheros to practice generating prose that mimics sentence structure and grammar of some of my favorite authors, but that’d be an odd thing to read on Grits – simply playing around with rhythm and sentence structure without regard to content.

On both Grits and Huevos sometimes I’ll write about something just to learn more about it, following my nose, accumulating links and information on a topic I’ve not examined closely before. In those instances I probably learn more from the article than do my readers. But on Huevos those topics might be movie reviews, sports discussions (though sports bloggers are sticklers as commenters), Texas winemaking or prehistoric archaeology. On Grits, according to a recent site survey, 53% of visitors are there for “professional” reasons, and another 21% because they or a family member are caught up in the criminal justice system. So they probably don’t really care about the off-topic stuff, plus another blogspot blog was free.

THE PD STUFF FIVE QUESTIONS

What other job would you like to try and why?

Since I’m unemployed at the moment, this question takes on greater import than usual! I may get my chance. Perhaps my response should be, “What have you got?” I might like to write professionally again. I left journalism because it’s so frustrating to break a story then watch as nothing happens and the powerful people you’ve exposed just roll on. In the blogging world journalism and activism have merged and some of that has changed, IMO, so it’d be fun to explore some of the new possibilities.

Otherwise, as a kid my family raised and trained horses and I miss being involved in that – it’s tough to make a living because those are dying professions, in a lot of ways, but I really enjoyed it.

Best moment on the job?

Turning a near-worst moment into a best moment. In 2001 in the wake of the “Tulia” scandal, Texas passed legislation requiring corroborating evidence for undercover drug stings. The original filed bill was drafted by a bunch of us sitting around the same desk I’m writing at now, and I negotiated the bill on behalf of ACLU. The original legislation required corroboration for both cops and informants, but the police unions bitterly fought it and I agreed to a compromise requiring corroboration for only informants. A couple of the parents of Tulia defendants were FURIOUS at me because the bill then wouldn’t have affected their kids’ cases. I felt awful about it, but also knew the only other option was no bill at all.

Then a few months later in September the bill took effect. One of the first consequences was in Dallas – home of the wrongful conviction – where the DA began to seek corroboration for mendacious informants on whose sole word they’d previously obtained hundreds of convictions. It turned out much of the drugs these informants had helped seize was fake – 86 cases were ultimately dropped because they’d set up mostly undocumented immigrants using pool chalk packaged to look like cocaine. It turned out ½ of the cocaine and ¼ of the meth seized by Dallas PD in 2001 was fake drugs used to set up innocent people. Statewide hundreds of pending cases were dropped where a CI’s testimony was the only evidence. The day the Dallas News attributed the discovery of the fake drug cases to the law we passed might have been my best day. Or else it was when I saw one of the ladies from Tulia who was mad at me the previous year talking about Dallas and taking credit for helping pass the law in a national magazine. Either way, it was a nice vindication and IMO also a substantive improvement in the law.

Worst moment on the job?

April 19, 2005 at about 2 p.m. – I won’t go into detail except to say that no enemy in politics can ever do as much damage as a trusted friend when they stab you in the back.

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

“I know it’s not Texas but I think you’ll learn to like it here, anyway.”

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

I.F. Stone – the father of modern investigative journalism. Reading his collected IF Stone’s Weekly from the ’40s to the early ’70s was a life changing experience for me, and I’ve mimicked many of his research approaches and methodologies, and developed new ones based on his concepts, from that day to this. As I wrote on Grits a couple of years ago:

In a way, Stone was a proto-blogger. His I.F. Stone’s Weekly was relatively short and punchy, and it only went to folks who particularly wanted it — he didn’t rely on mass distribution, but niche targeting. Using today’s Internet technologies, Stone would have easily found a mass audience and taken on guys like Josh Marshall, who’s pioneered investigative journalism in the “new media.”

Many of the possibilities of what blogging could be, IMO, were explored first by I.F. Stone covering Washington as an “alternative” journalist. With little access himself to the halls of power, he vetted public information, reports, and hearing transcripts to separate out truth from self interest and posturing in ways that presaged what bloggers, at their best moments, do today en masse. It’s hard to even imagine what my life would be like if I’d never heard of I.F. Stone.

Thank you very much, Scott, for taking the time to share your insights with the readers of PD Stuff.

Next week’s guest is Frolics and Detours. If you have any questions you’d like me to consider for her interview, please email them to me.

…

I must admit I wasn’t sure what to expect from Woman of the Law in her Monday Musings interview. After following her blog since first finding it more than a year ago, I feel that I’ve come to know her through her writing, which is some of the best you’ll find on any blog anywhere. But then there is the dark side. Throughout the history of the blog there are hints of throwing in the towel, punctuated with descriptions of profound writer’s block. Even her most recent post (most recent as of this publication) talks about abandoned posts she has started and not finished.

As you will find below, however, my concerns were completely unfounded. This really is WOTL at her best: insightful, fearless and a wizard with words.

With that having been said, I give you Woman of the Law…

Tomorrow’s guest on Monday Musings is Woman of the Law.

For a taste of WOTL’s interview, please enjoy this excerpt:

She knew my background in child protection and asked me why I thought I wanted to be a DA. I told her that I watched as my kids got hurt all the time, and no one cared, and no one was held accountable, and I wanted to prosecute those people because they are the ones who hurt my kids. I’ll never forget that she looked at me straight in the eye, and not unkindly said to me, “These clients that we defend – they were your kids once. And this is where they ended up. This is what the system did for them.”

I almost fell out of my chair. I had never really thought of it like that.

Please join us here at PD Stuff tomorrow for WOTL’s very insightful (and entertaining) interview.

…

Tomorrow, April 3, Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office goes on sale. It is with great pride I get to introduce the book’s author as today’s Monday Musings guest.

The book has its own category on Public Defender Stuff so you can see what has been published about it here on the blog, including links to articles and the PD Stuff review. Kevin Davis’ website is here.

I really can’t say enough about what an incredible accomplishment this book is. I planned to write more in this introduction, but I’ll let Kevin tell you about it himself…

INTRODUCTION

Hi, and thanks so much for having me as a guest on Monday Musings. I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk about my book and the story behind it. Working on Defending the Damned has been among the most fascinating, illuminating and rewarding experiences of my journalistic career.

A little about myself: I live and work in my hometown of Chicago, and come from a family of journalists. Ink, as they say, runs in our veins. My grandfather was a newspaper photographer (he shot pictures of the notorious bank robber, John Dillinger) and my Dad worked as a reporter and later became a novelist. I think we all were born to be storytellers.

My first job in journalism took me to Florida, where I worked for ten years as a reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, mostly on the crime beat. While down there, I got my hooks into a story of appalling injustice, which became the subject of my first book, The Wrong Man. The book examines the story behind the wrongful murder conviction of a mentally ill man who was coerced into confessing to a double murder.

Since moving back to Chicago, I’ve written for a variety of local and national publications while squeezing in time to work on my book. I live on the far North Side of the city with my wife, Martie Sanders, who’s an actress and performer. Despite of the serious look I have on my book jacket photo, I don’t carry such a grim expression all the time.

Defending the Damned has a double meaning: in a way the book defends the people who work in the Murder Task Force, who themselves are often damned by society. How on earth did you get involved with this, and how did you get a publisher to publish a book about these people?

I got involved in this book project because I wanted to see another side of the criminal justice system after having spent so much time covering it from the police and prosecutor’s point of view. As crime reporter, I worked very closely with police officers and detectives on my daily beat. I hung around police stations, spent time at crime scenes and inside the homes of the families of murder victims, talking with parents, spouses and children who lost someone to violent crime. I felt their rage and grief as I sat in their living rooms paging through photo albums. I understood how they came to demonize the defendants charged with killing their loved ones.

My dealings with criminal defense lawyers—public and private—were usually brief, largely limited to perfunctory calls that I’d make right before deadline. I’d get a suspect’s lawyer on the phone and ask for the other side of the story. My calls were most often answered with a no comment or obligatory declarations of a client’s innocence. Such trite responses weren’t necessarily the lawyers’ fault. They usually hadn’t seen the case files or even met their clients yet. Media coverage of crime is largely weighted on information supplied by law enforcement. Cops and prosecutors put out news releases and hold the press conferences. Public defenders generally do not.

As I moved from being a rookie reporter to a more experienced journalist, I began to report and write about cases of dishonest and corrupt cops, about wrongful convictions and I saw how the criminal justice system can fail. My first book, the Wrong Man, inspired me to dig deeper because it showed me that police and prosecutors make mistakes, that they can coerce suspects into confessing to crimes they did not commit, and that the legal system can be terribly flawed. I wanted to know more about defense lawyers. I wanted to see and understand how the other side works, especially public defenders who seemed to have the toughest cases of all. I was struck by how difficult and thankless their work was, how they are assigned to handle the most difficult and seemingly impossible cases. I wanted to know how and why they do it.

Persuading a publisher to take on such a book did not come easy. My agent circulated my book proposal for nearly a year, and I received plenty of rejection letters before landing a contract with Atria/Simon & Schuster. I was fortunate to have a persistent agent who believed in the book and kept pitching it. I was also fortunate that an editor named Wendy Walker saw potential in this book. Wendy felt that Defending the Damned had strong characters, felt authentic and told an important story. I think because it’s structured as a narrative with suspense and scenes that play out like a novel, that the publisher felt it had a chance at some broader appeal and commercial success. Who knows? I certainly didn’t do this thinking I would get rich.

How difficult was it to get such incredible access to the Murder Task Force, and why do you think they agreed to let you in?

Showing interest in what people do, and listening to what they have to say, is the key to opening those kinds of doors. As a journalist, my craft depends on my curiosity and ability to make people feel comfortable enough to talk with me. I talk to people as if we’re having regular conversations. I don’t act like I’m above them or judging them. I don’t demand they tell me things. I think I’m a good listener, and can put people at ease. Of course, not everyone I try to talk to feels that way. I’ve had plenty of “no comments” and doors slammed on me throughout my career.

Because I arrived as an outsider, I had to start knocking on doors. One day I telephoned a public defender named Shelton Green, who was supervisor of the Cook County Public Defender’s Murder Task Force. I introduced myself, told him I was interested in writing a book about public defenders and asked if he’d talk with me. I was surprised at how forthcoming and flattered he was that anyone was interested enough in their work to write a book. I met with him in person a few days later and we hit it off. I explained to Shelton that I was interested in observing the day-to-day workings of his office. Because Shelton and his colleagues knew their reputation was often unfavorable, he explained to me that they usually avoided the media and kept their stories to themselves. But he agreed to take a chance and talk with me. “People may not like us,” he told me. “But I hope they understand us.”

Green really wanted to help foster that understanding, so he allowed me full access to the Murder Task Force office. He said I could speak to whoever wanted to. I visited that office on and off for the next five years, watching, listening and asking questions. Some attorneys were busy, or didn’t care to talk, and others opened their doors and their souls in ways I had never expected. What I didn’t want was stock answers to my questions or vague general comments that were self-serving. This was going to take time. By showing up to the office, sitting in court and hanging around I developed relationships with many of these lawyers. We had lunch together, we had drinks together and all along they knew whatever they talked about was potential fodder for my book. I never betrayed any confidences or gratuitously used anything in the book that I thought would be damaging or embarrassing to anyone. I wrote about their actions, words and deeds that I felt were relevant to telling their stories.

There were a lot of public defenders, and plenty of cases, you could have chosen as the framework for the book. How did you decide to focus the story on Marijane Placek and the Aloysius Oliver case?

Early on Shelton Green recommended — actually insisted — that I meet with Marijane. He said she was one of the longest-serving members of the task force, one of the most outspoken and one of the most colorful. He certainly was correct. I remember the first time I walked into Marijane’s office, I immediately noticed a wire shoe rack in the corner. It was jammed with flats and pumps, various styles of boots and a pair of red, white and blue tennis shoes speckled with glitter. There was also a pair of snakeskin boots, and she told me that some people called her the gunslinger. I knew I was going to like her. Everyone around the courthouse knows Marijane. She has a reputation as a flamboyant, larger than life figure, as well as a sharp and skillful lawyer.

When I asked Marijane whether she’d be interested in participating in the book project, she immediately agreed. She said she’d tell me anything I wanted to know. “I have no secrets, and everything is on the record.” I rarely heard that kind of candor, and took advantage of her willingness to participate in my research. Marijane became my guide through the system, introducing me to judges, lawyers and investigators and answering my many questions. But interviews were not enough. I wanted more, and asked Marijane for permission to follow her through a single case from beginning to end. I told her that I wanted to observe the process from behind the scenes. Marijane told me that she and Assistant Pubic Defender Ruth McBeth were representing a client named Aloysius Oliver, who was accused of killing Chicago Police Officer Eric Lee on August 21, 2001.

I chose to follow that case because I believed the crime symbolized a classic battle between good and evil—a police officer who was a shining light in his community, allegedly killed by a street thug who showed no respect for the law. This would be a powerful example to show how difficult some of these public defender cases can be. More than that, the case exposed the legal and emotional complexities of representing a client who faced the death penalty. I wanted to understand how these lawyers prepared for such a possibility, what it really means to work a capital case. Marijane and Ruth graciously agreed to let me watch them work this case. And my book began to take shape.

There are some scenes in the book that will make public defenders cringe as they imagine the general public’s reaction to some of the attitudes expressed by the public defenders. How do you think public defenders will react to the behind-the-scenes nature of the book? And how have the people in the book reacted?

Some of those things made me cringe, too. But I chose to include their raw language, humor and occasional callousness and cynicism because it was so very real. All journalists make judgment calls about what they include and exclude from articles, books, documentaries, whatever their medium. Sometimes it’s a matter of taste, sometimes it’s a courtesy to a source, sometimes it’s to make a point. I wanted this book to be as real as what I was witnessing in and out of court. Otherwise, I feared I would fail. That public defenders joked about a baby killing case told me something very important about their characters and how they deal with such ugliness. If I started censoring them or let them tell me what to censor, I would feel that I’ve lost my mission. And here’s the other thing: These lawyers are not the kind of people who are afraid. They’re not concerned what other people might think. That is one of the qualities I most admired about them. They are willing to do an unpopular job and live with the consequences.

I believe they made no effort to hide their ghastly humor or profanity because they felt comfortable around me and trusted me to put it in context. You’re absolutely right that outsiders may be turned off. And outsiders may never fully understand or appreciate the value of public defenders, whether they read this book or not. I have a great respect and affection for those I wrote about, I think they felt the same. In fact, I’ve been getting notes and calls from them thanking me for telling their stories. I just talked to Woody Jordan, one of the lawyers in the book. He told me they’re having readings of my book in the Murder Task Force Office, selecting certain passages about each other and reading aloud. I asked Woody if it was safe for me to walk back into the office and he had a hearty laugh and said, “Of course!” Bob Strunck, another task force member, sent me a note telling me he thought the book was “fantastic and so damned real.” Marijane, the main character, is extremely happy. (she is the star, after all) So I feel relieved and humbled that I did them justice.

It is clear you have a deep respect for the attorneys who take on these thankless jobs. But, ultimately, you also saw the cost to many of them. How do you deal with leaving that connection behind now that the book is done, and what do you take with you from the experience?

I haven’t really left that connection behind. Many of these public defenders have become friends. I still go to the courthouse from time to time to say hello. Because I volunteer as a writing instructor at the jail, I’m at the criminal courts complex twice a month so I can see many of the people who are part of the book. I have lunch with Marijane Placek, Ruth McBeth and Julie Norman regularly.

I know this may sound corny, but it’s absolutely true: My experience during those years I spent researching my book opened my eyes to public defenders in a whole new way. Like other outsiders, before I knew any better, I bought into some of the stereotypes, had misconceptions about who they were and what role they served. I came away understanding that every time a public defender steps into a courtroom they are, in a sense, fighting on behalf of all of us – whether they win or lose. I came away admiring these people who have the guts to stand up and challenge authority every day, knowing that their profession and their efforts are often never celebrated beyond themselves. I hope that my book celebrates them as they deserve to be.

THE PD STUFF FIVE QUESTIONS

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

I don’t look at being a journalist as a job, but more of a part of who I am and a reflection of my interest in the world around me. I’d like to try filmmaking as another profession. I love the visual medium and beauty of great films – both feature films and documentaries. There is so much I’d like to learn about new advances in digital technology, sound and animation. It’s really another form of story telling. I have a passion for the visual arts. I’d also like to be a chef. I’m fascinated with food – preparing it, smelling it, eating it and describing it.

Best moment on the job?

The day John Purvis walked into the arms of his family a free man after serving ten years for a wrongful murder conviction. Purvis was the mentally ill man who was the subject of my first book, The Wrong Man. I had covered the story as a reporter, got to know his family well, and was with them during this powerful moment at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Worst moment on the job?

Covering my first accidental shooting of a child. I was a rookie reporter in Florida and was dispatched to a house where a boy accidentally shot his friend with a .357 magnum. I arrived to see the victim being taken out on a stretcher with half his head gone and heard the chilling cries and inconsolable wails of his mother as she stood in their front yard. Five minutes later, the father pulled up after being called at work. It was among the most tragic scenes I have ever witnessed. I was haunted for a long time.

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

“Kev, you whip up a really tasty Panang Curry, but your Pad Thai needs a little work.”

If I’m lucky, he’ll say “Kev, thank you for giving voice to many of the voiceless on earth whose stories needed to be told. ”

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

My Mom is my heroine. From her I learned to be a good listener, to understand people for who they are, to reserve judgment, to show compassion for my fellow human beings and to drink in life and enjoy it while we’re here.

Thank you very much, Kevin, for sharing this deeper look into the book. I really wish you all the luck in the world with it.

Next week’s guest on Monday Musings is Woman of the Law. If you have some questions you’d like me to consider for her interview, please email me.

And don’t forget: you can schedule your own Monday Musings interview by sending me an email and letting me know what date you’d like.

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With all quiet on the PD news front, this is the perfect opportunity to check out the interviews on Monday Musings.

Gideon of a public defender is, of course, this week’s guest.

And don’t forget the previous guests:

Skelly of Arbitrary and Capricious

Blonde Justice

David Feige of Indefensible

Injustice Anywhere

Sanchovilla of Tales of a Public Defender Investigator

The Wretched of the Earth