In earlier installments (Part I and Part II), I discussed the recent ABA Ethics Opinion that gives public defenders the power and duty to refuse excessive caseloads, and why "caseload standards" numbers are arbitrary but useful as an absolute maximum and a starting point for more in-depth caseload analysis.
Why care about ABA opinions and policy standards that are repetitive and tedious, when they have thus far failed to reform public defense? Because I am suggesting to you--my brother and sister public defenders--that one day many of you will reach a breaking point. That you will realize that you have too much to do, and no matter how you learn to play the system and fight for the clients, that you can't do it all, and then you'll realize that some of your clients may be suffering and you are as well. You may end up standing in your bedroom one weekend, trying to run through the list of upcoming trials (burglary next week, then assault 2, then back to burglary and then that bullshit stolen vehicle one and then the vehicular homicide and you know there's another one and you can't remember it) twitching. Oh wait, that was me.
When you reach this point, your options have been traditionally pretty limited: 1) leave the job; 2) have a mental breakdown; 3) stay in the job a broken, lesser version of yourself.
I just want the record to be clear: I thought of the Public Defender Calendar first. But my follow-through sucks sometimes.
The seed for a PD Calendar (and a PD public relations campaign) came to me, strangely, from the Archer Daniels Midland company. About 10 years ago, I heard a story called The Fix Is In on This American Life, an outrageous tale of price fixing and criminal corporate behavior. I didn’t think much about it again until I saw ads on public television featuring wholesome American images with a feel-good slogan, and then the “ADM” logo superimposed over all of it. I thought, Holy Shit, those are the guys that lied and cheated, etc.—Don’t NPR and public television talk to each other? But that ad series made me think about the power of public relations advertising: that the image can be more important than the facts.
After years of living with the misconceptions and bad press that public defenders have, I realized that if Public Defense were a corporation, the first thing it would do is launch a PR campaign. Which led to many, many ideas, but one of those ideas was The Men and Women of the County Defenders' Office Calendar.
Last year, a friend and I signed our attorneys up for the PDs calendar, and the plan was to have the calendars ready by this year for Holiday presents (imagine the prosecutors, judges and cops as they opened their gifts!)--but then a budget crises tore our office apart, dividing us against each other for the first time I can remember, and no one was making a calendar.
But Mr. Adachi—be still our public-defender hearts—produced a public defender calendar this year! We can’t decide if we are mad at him for preempting our idea (as if!), or if it makes us smarter that we sort of had the same idea that he had.
Mr. Adachi, the head of the San Francisco Public Defenders' Office, has been in a long battle with the city's commissioners (at least he is fighting, eh?), and this year produced his budget report in the form of a PD Calendar that not only contained the budget numbers, but showcased his lawyers as valiant fighters for the poor. Nice!
Even nicer than the calendars, is the image of Mr. Adachi as the leader of his public-defender troops. We would like to be considered for adoption, please.
Mr. Adachi has inspired us to finally format our own Public Defender Calendar for This Here County 2010. Order your copy now, before they're all gone:
Coming tomorrow: How to Be a Public Defender Revolutionary, Part III (Crunch the Numbers!) (We here at PDR apologize for the delay in this important post--sometimes we have a lot of silliness we have to get out before we can get down to real work.)
On any given Friday afternoon in the public defenders' office, Jorgé (not his real name) will hold "court" for newbies and veterans alike. In Jorgé's office, one can seek advice on how to deal with that unreasonable prosecutor, difficult client, or troubling ruling from the judge ... he is a true war-time consiliari, with advice that is consistently right-on. I have always wanted to make a sign that says "Advice: $Free" for his door. Jorgé is a ninja pd--he achieves great results, but with a modesty that declines the ego recognition many of us need--the same modesty that will make him super mad that he is included in this post. (But we don't care--we are rebels!) I would have quit thirteen years ago (before I graduated from law school) without his guidance and example. Jorgé is a true believer and an inspiration to all of us. If what we do in life really echos in eternity, Jorgé's compassion and mad skills will live on.
As much as I feel (a probably undeserved) solidarity with graffiti artists, and as much as I like graffiti, PDR's graffiti-header didn't feel right to me. Maybe because I felt like a poseur, having never actually sprayed paint from a can on a brick wall. But I think my hesitation came from the fact that although I adore graffiti's fuck-you charm, it doesn't necessarily elicit public-defender-ness. I needed something--not necessarily a straight representation of the public defender--but something more evocative of our work.
Hmmm ... court house? six-pack of beer? a jail cell? Nothing felt right. And then I looked down at my brain-storming list. What do we all use? Ratty, yellow pads. In tight budget times, our managers have been known to search our offices and round up all of the pads with remaining pages, which causes people to hoard them, which means there are none left when I open the door to the supply cabinet on my way out the door to trial.
Even with computers, I still use yellow pads all the time (when I can find one). And I'm really not sure why they're yellow--I heard that yellow causes less eye strain--or if I believe this, but if given a choice between yellow and white, I'll choose yellow. It's like white was for high school and college, and yellow is for court. I doodle and scribble all over them, which is the only thing that keeps me from running screaming from the courtroom some days.
So, goodbye, Graffiti Theme, hello, Ratty Yellow Pad. In an homage to the short-lived graffiti header, some eye candy from a New York company that is putting its own spin on graffiti:
A set of china I would buy for most of my public defender friends--you know, the ones who consider their decorative water bottle an ample nod to tableware. New York Delft by lovegroverepucci combines the "classic tradition of Dutch Delft craftsmanship" and the street art and imagery of New York City in a porcelain dinnerware collection.
I haven't had much use for fine porecelain, until now. Public defender friends, here is your wedding gift from me from now on:
Each place setting is made of fine porcelain and has five pieces; a dinner plate, side plate, soup bowl, cup and saucer. I am sorry if it is redundant to post these additional images, but I do love the police-car plate, garbage-truck soup bowl, and hot-dog-stand cup so much--
My favorite piece of all, though, is the street-light napkin:
You can also watch lovegrove's promotional YouTube video:
The innovation shown in the combination of modern street art and centuries-old china parallels the work that we do as lawyers: we find inspiration in the artistry of our colleagues and heores, and then transform their work into something relevant to our client. If we're lucky, we stumble on new methods to make our clients' stories resonate with an audience that understands as little about them as my grandmother does about graffiti, or as little as a street kid connects with centuries-old Dutch craftsmanship. As public defenders, we derive our skills from our heroes and role models--and not only is our well of inspiration deeper than our opponents, but our creative power is enhanced because we understand that there is beauty in the street.
"Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism,
or the darkness of destructive selfishness.
This is the judgment.
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is,
What are you doing for others?”
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
About a year ago, a lawyer posted a question on a criminal-law list-serve that I belong to, seeking names of "public defender heroes." While I don't remember who posted the question, or many of the names submitted (except that I learned that Joe Biden had been a pd for a brief time), I do remember being struck by the lack of generally accepted or even proposed PD heroes. How is it that many public defenders are the bravest, smartest, and most altruistic people I know, and yet their legacy of inspiration for those of us in the trenches goes unheralded.
W hile the disaster in Haiti makes me feel powerless and small like everyone else, it is a powerlessness I recognize--powerlessness not from inability to halt the destructive force of nature, but because I sometimes fear that I cannot, or rather, that we cannot, stop the devastation of the poor by the powerful.
Having some familiarity with the treatment of the poor in a wealthy country, I wondered (with admittedly low expectations) what I would find in the Haitian Criminal Justice system. At United States Institute for Peace, a nonpartisan institute funded by Congress, a report by Vivienne O'Connor of USIP Dispatch from Port-au-Prince, Haiti (June 2009) provides an overview of the country's legal system and its sadly predictable problems:
"Persons awaiting trial in Haiti can languish in pretrial detention for years, forced to remain in prisons where conditions could be described as inhumane. There are numerous reports of mistreatment and torture committed by the police which go unaddressed.
