A Window to my Choices: The Evolution of a Law Student

The Search for Justice

Justice Meet Inequality

Learning the language was the easiest obstacle to overcome. The others, however, I felt were unchangeable. I graduated from high school, the first in my family. I graduated from Rhode Island College, a nationally unknown and unranked university.

I was the first of my family to do that too.

I was accepted at a top law school making me not only the first in my family to pursue a higher education, but also the first from Rhode Island College to be accepted to a law school of such prestige. Throughout, I told myself that I wanted to be a prosecutor. I wanted to help people get the closure of which I was deprived. I was unmoved in my desire to pursue justice.

But the ground below me started to shake.

Despite my education, despite my now accent-less English (which those around me loved to point out), I was still poor. I was still an immigrant. I was still a woman. I was still black.

The Divide Between Public Interest and Private Sector

I accepted the loans.

I took on the debt because my mother didn’t start a college fund for me and couldn’t contribute a dime to my education. Not with her job at a factory. Not with the breast cancer she was fighting. Not with her loss of work. Not with her income.

So, I came to law school.

Almost immediately, I sensed a divide in the community. There were students dedicated to public interest work, called “the good ones,” and students that were set on pursuing work in private sector, labeled “money hungry.”

All I wanted to do was thread the needle.

I knew I wanted to seek justice, but I soon realized that I didn’t have the privilege to forego the money.

It wasn’t just me.

It was my mother’s desire to own a home one day. One day where she didn’t have to live paycheck to paycheck. It was my desire to one day help others that come after me pay for their college applications, LSAT prep classes, textbooks and all the things that I found myself having trouble acquiring.

I still want to help but have realized that I can do it in different ways.

It’s not that I won’t become a prosecutor one day, it’s that this is not the plan for now. I know people criticize the conversion from public interest to private sector that happens at law school but it’s not necessarily that we don’t care about others.

We just have more to think about.

Money is the “great equalizer.” If you keep us poor, then you keep us down and to raise my community I need a seat at the table—the big table where all the white, middle-class, men are sitting.

Building a Bridge instead of a Wall

So yes, I’ve evolved. I’ve changed my mind because I found that it’s not as clear a divide as it seems. I learned that big law firms help fund public interest organizations. I learned that big law firms do a lot of pro bono work and directly impact communities.

I learned this firsthand when I met a Pro Bono client applying for asylum at the lobby and showed him to the conference room on the 40th floor. The look on his face when he saw the view from up there was enough to show me that there doesn’t have to be a wall between public and private. There can be a bridge.

A bridge I’m determined to walk.

The most important route to improvement is a strong language edit, both to remove words that are taking up space without doing work and to straighten out occasional grammar tangles.

On substance, it's not clear why you use an essentially "internal" legal analysis to show what happens in DUI cases and an essentially "external" social stratification explanation (it's about blackness, or not being white median-incomeness) to describe what happens in drugs in the car cases. Both forms of explanation may be valid, but that only makes it more important to understand in which context to use them. Other external or sociological forces seem to me to shape both kinds of cases in may respects, while I agree with you that the most important issue is evidentiary: drugs in defendants' possession can be weighed and tested, while without a breathalyzer test result in a DUI case, there's nothing on which to base a significant charge.

How To Get Away With Driving While Intoxicated?

Some Crimes Are Black And White

-- By GenesisSanchez - 01 Mar 2018

How To Get Away With Driving While Under The Intoxicated?

I’ve always been amazed by the number of individuals who are charged with drug possession with either and intent to sell or buy but how few individuals get charged with Driving Under the Influence. Working at a law firm in undergrad showed me just how easy it is for an individual to get away with driving under the influence and not have it go on their record or be sent to jail. Currently, with the technology available, i.e. breathalyzers, it is much easier to detect the blood alcohol content in a person’s blood than it is to determine exactly when and how much drugs were consumed by an individual. Yet still, despite the technology, if you are caught with drugs you will more than likely go to jail Easier to test for alcohol levels than it is for drug levels yet one offense is more likely to end up on your record, and sending you to jail, than the other.

Despite the level of emphasis given to driving under the influence, the law is full of loopholes that drives take advantage of. Loopholes that are enabled by prosecutorial discretion. In my experience working at a law firm as a legal assistant, I remember numerous times individuals came to us asking to be defended in driving under the influence cases. Through my experience, I discovered that whenever individuals get stopped for driving under the influence, in the State of Rhode Island, they should refuse the breathalyzer. Refusal of the breathalyzer is the key that is necessary to prevent the perpetrator from getting locked up. In refusing the breathalyzer test as well as other tests conducted by the police, the prosecution would charge them with refusing a breathalyzer and driving under the influence. The consequence that follows is that the prosecution will offer them a deal the majority of the time where if the individual pleads guilty to refusing the breathalyzer, the prosecutor will drop the DUI offense. The reason, when charged with refusal of breathalyzer and driving under the influence, the offenses are charged in two different courts, traffic tribunal and district court. In order to not have to deal with the hassle of attending a district court on a criminal charge and the traffic tribunal for the breathalyzer charge, prosecutors drop one and the individual driving under the influence gets away with it. They get a slap on the wrist, and a breathalyzer machine installed on their vehicles for a couple of months but nothing else follows. The record is wiped of the alcohol offense. All because it would be easier to close the case by getting the perpetrator to plead guilty to the lesser offense despite what it means for that individual’s future conduct.

Driving Under The Influence Of Alcohol Affects The Public More Than Drugs.

Alcohol kills people every day, and statistically many, if not most, fatal motor vehicle accidents are the result or caused by individuals driving under the influence of alcohol. Drug related motor vehicle accidents, are far and few between. Yet, driving while with drugs in the car will always be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It would appear to me that crimes that are more likely to affect a larger population should be punished more severely. While drug usage does impose costs on society, generally speaking, some drugs that receive harsh penalties will not result in the same mass outcome that driving under the influence does. The impairment of the driver is lesser when under the influence of drugs like Marijuana. On the other hand, the simple action of driving a car in a public road while intoxicated affects not just the driver but also passengers, pedestrians, and others driving on the road.

The only explanation I can think of for the discrepancy in punishment is the difference in the pigment of the offender’s skin. My theory is that the majority of drivers that get caught driving under the influence are white males with median incomes. While individuals who are prosecuted, and charged with drug offenses tend to be minorities, men of color. Looking at crimes like driving under the influence and petit drug offenses through a black and white lens helps explain the discrepancy in punishment.

To combat this unfair treatment of crimes that affect the general public, I would propose that whenever an individual is stopped for driving under the influence the prosecution is forced to pursue at least add a minimum mandatory sentence as provided for in a statute. The sentence could be forcing the driver to take AA classes, revoking the driver’s license, adding mandatory community service and reeducation classes, and monetary damages. There should also be a two-strike law where if you are caught driving under the influence twice, there are harsher punishments for it like a revocation of licenses and driving privileges for a set number amount of years along with some potential jail time. Driving under the influence is a serious offense and should be treated as such. Crimes against the public should be treated more seriously than crimes against oneself.

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