Ruminations
True story.
The trial's winding down. Comes my turn, I get up and give my customary spell-binding close. You've probably seen clips of it on the news. I finish, go over to the table, and sit down. My client turns to me and asks, "Am I going to be sentenced today?"
There's a confidence-builder.
The answer was no; some four hours later, after listening to the judge intone the word "guilty" fifteen times - plus "yes" to a couple of specifications on each of them -- the attorneys picked a mutually agreeable time for sentencing in two weeks.
It was a child rape case, and so a few observations.
If you're going to hope to win one of these, you've got to answer two questions: How would the kid know all this stuff if it didn't happen? And why would the kid lie about this?
The first one is answered by the joke about the father saying, "I sat my 10-year-old down to talk about the birds and the bees, and boy, did I learn a lot!" It might not be a bad idea to get an expert to come in and testify how easy it is for children to access sexual materials on the Internet. I'll bet there's data on that, and that's certainly not going to be a hard sell to the jury.
The second one is tougher. It gets easier if you've got indications of coaching, or there's a custody battle over the child going on, or the child has some particular reason to dislike the perpetrator. (In this case, and in about 90% of them, the perpetrator was a family member, the father.) This is where expert testimony might come in handy, too, especially if you've got extensive interviews with the kid by detectives, social workers, etc. The next time a false accusation of child molestation is lodged because of improper interview techniques won't be the first, and it won't be the last.
But if you don't have that, you're in serious trouble. The kid in my case was so adorable I thought several women on the jury were going to file papers to adopt him.
One other thing, if you're a potential defendant: listen to your lawyer. I got him a plea offer of one count of straight rape and a few GSI's, with all the specs deleted. Probably would have gotten 8 to 10 years. Not a day at the beach, but beats life without parole.
The cases with children -- pornography and molestation -- are what test us. Jack, a public defender, and I were talking the other day about how inured our job has made us to physical and moral pain. I've heard defense lawyers refer to "kiddy rape" cases, like it's a ride at Cedar Point. Jack talked about how he was telling a story about one of his cases to his brothers, and realizing that the brothers were horrified about what he was talking about. Jack said he'd also gotten what he called the "Wedding Reception Question": "How can you represent people like that?"
Here's my take on that. People ask us this question because of the kind of people we represent: poor blacks.
The Great Recession of 2008 was an epic catastrophe. Millions of people lost their jobs and their homes. Despair does bad things to people, and it comes as no surprise to learn that suicide rates jumped after the recession hit. And you can make arguments about how responsible the government was, but every objective analysis concludes that it was the greed, fraud, and duplicity of the banks that drove the economy off the cliff.
So how many bankers went to prison for their role in causing the greatest global recession in 80 years?
One. You've never heard of him; he was somewhere on the lower end of the totem pole. He did 30 months.
There are a number of lawyers on Wall Street who got paid more in a year than I'll make in a lifetime to ensure that no other bankers went to prison. And you can pretty much bet that not a single one of those lawyers ever had anybody walk up to them at a reception, and ask, "How can you represent people like that?"
Here's how I answer the Wedding Reception Question, and I encourage my brothers in arms to do the same: I look the person who posed it straight in the eye, and say, "It's part of my lifetime plan to destroy the moral fabric of America." You've got to give a pause before "of America," and nod your head while you're saying it, giving it special emphasis.
That either ends the conversation, or things take a very dark turn.
A consultant told me I need to add more graphics to the posts, so here you go. There were three U.S. Supreme Court decisions on search and seizure last term. All of them went for the defendants. We'll analyze each of them next week, and conclude with an open-mike discussion of whether this is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.
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