A Lawyer's Psalm

I'm not just a lawyer.  I'm a criminal defense lawyer.  To make matters worse, I'm a public defender.  Sometimes our clients call us pretenders, dump trucks, fake lawyers (as opposed to real lawyers or street lawyers). After 14 years in this line of work, I've learned to stop being offended.  I've learned to see the big picture and appreciate the privilege of it all.   Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be somebody's hero.  I often imagined myself standing in front of a vulnerable person holding a shield aloft to protect them from some overwhelming force.  Before I lost interest in Barbie dolls and Menudo, I knew that I wanted to spend my life defending people's rights.  That's what I prayed for.  That's what I worked for.  That's what I sacrificed for. As I child I was never great with making specific requests to God, and I guess that's how I ended up with my mixed bag of blessings.  Let's be clear.  How m...

That is the question I hear most often about the work that I do? Those people . As if you didn't know that the line between us and those people wasn't razor-thin. Being accused of doing something wrong is by far the most isolating thing you will ever experience. When I say "wrong" I mean anything that is frowned upon by the rule-makers (i.e. breaking the law.) You may not break the law, but you break wind. By a mechanism that I still don't understand, the digestive process, not only creates urine and poo, but an ethereal noisome phenomenon known colloquially as a fart. Farts can be loud or quiet, concussive or delicate, wet or dry...you get it. The problem is we pass gas, but no one likes to talk about it. What's even more upsetting is that IF you have the misfortune of passing detectable gas (noisy or really funky) in a room and you look like you did it, people will walk away from you. As they escape your stink, they tell someone else in the roo...

In 1961 a man was accused of stealing $5 and beer from a pool hall. Unable to afford an attorney, Clarence Earl Gideon was forced to represent himself. He was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison. He filed a habeas petition with the Florida Supreme Court attacking the conviction on the grounds that the court should have appointed him counsel. Florida, of course, denied the petition. Gideon filed suit against Louie L Wainwright, the Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections asserting that he had been denied his Sixth Amendment right to counsel (as applied to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment). The Supreme Court granted certiorari. The rest is history. Thousands were released from prisons in Florida as a result of the 1963 Gideon decision. Earl got another trial. This time he had the benefit of appointed counsel and he was acquitted. Gideon v. Wainwright spawned the creation of public defender systems countrywide. These systems represent our country...