| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | Ignoring the Warning Signs | >
> | Some days I swear off criminal prosecution. Other days it comes back with a powerful nostalgia, connected to a time when I was paraded around by family as an up and coming “community leader.” I spent the last draft trying to keep prosecution alive as a career path; I will spend this draft trying to bury it. | | | | |
>
> | Can I Live with The Downsides? | | | | |
<
< | Bright-Line | >
> | In my last draft, I told the story of how my sister made an effort to duck cases involving undeserving defendants at her district attorney externship. I was proud of her for taking a stand, and I thought that I could hold onto her story as reassurance, drawing on it every time the usual attacks were laid on the criminal justice system and the district attorneys responsible for its execution. | | | | |
>
> | However, the previous draft showed how little I could squeeze out of that story. Putting it in writing made it feel less like a plan for change, and more like a final gasp of rationalization from someone who desperately wanted to maintain his sense of having a plan. I am not sure what fantasy DA’s office I had in mind in that draft. How would things go when I, a 26-year-old ADA with no experience, try to push back on cases handed to me by a veteran DA who has no patience for my vague attempts at prosecutorial reform? How does “I can’t do this one” sound to the old Irish-Catholic San Franciscans that run the offices I would work for? To them, it sounds like some liberal, ivy-league elitist mistakenly thought criminal prosecution was a space for moral self-expression. I know these guys personally, they do not question nor do they take well to questioning, and I erroneously believed I would successfully operate as a disruptive force when thrown into their world. Besides, I have spent my entire life following the rules, there is no reason I would suddenly get good at saying “no” when the stakes are higher. | | | | |
<
< | My mother is from an authoritarian state. If one breaks the law, he or she goes to jail; that’s the message she grew up on in Iran. The bright-line between law-abiding and law-breaking was prevalent in my mother’s rhetoric during my childhood. | >
> | Truthfully, I know myself well enough to know that I would feel forced to take most of the cases I said I would deny. When I did help land some dumb kid in prison, I know I would not rest easy by simply telling myself that I would make up for it later in my career. I want to avoid viewing my work as a series of social-good pluses and minuses, hoping to land on the net-positive side when things are said and done. I am not that economic with my conscience. | | | | |
<
< | My father is a Republican, Irish-Catholic raised by a devoutly religious mother of six in San Francisco, California. Don’t let the geography fool you; this family of eight had very little interest in the anti-establishment counterculture that pervaded San Francisco and Berkeley in the 1960s. | >
> | I understand that a job having downsides is no reason not to do it, but I do not take that to mean that a person should knowingly accept those downsides without examining whether he could live with them first. I am currently working in a prosecutor’s office, and I have already begun working on a case that is not exactly inspiring the pride I expected to feel when I used to imagine prosecutorial work. It is unsettling to sit at my desk writing a brief that has an enormously negative impact on the life of a man I will never know. I believe he is not evil, but dangerous, and he very well might offend again if released. If prison is all we have to keep a continuous threat away from innocent people, then he should be there, right? I keep telling myself that, but it still feels wrong to have this degree of control over another man’s existence. Maybe it is because I know his life is marked with poverty and personal tragedy. Maybe it is because I spent 24 hours in jail when I was younger, and, although career criminals would laugh at the notion that I know what life in prison is like (and I would agree), I know a fraction more than nothing about what the inside of a cell feels like, just enough to give me pause when I make the argument that someone should spend years living in that world. | | | | |
<
< | His brother, my Uncle, was the former Chief of Police of San Francisco, and I grew up on his stories. They were simple: cops caught “bad men,” the DA tried “bad men,” and the “bad men” went to jail to answer for their sins. He once told a story of him leaving his bed at four in the morning to answer a distress call from a woman trapped in her house while her armed ex-boyfriend stood outside, yelling at her to come out. He handled it, everyone went home safe, and the neighborhood was better for it. I wanted to stand between predator and prey, just like my Uncle. | >
> | “District Attorney” is beginning to feel like a passionless stock answer to “what do you want to do with your law degree.” It was the answer I had rehearsed about a thousand times, it rolled off the tongue, it was safe, and it made people proud. I kept saying it, all the while growing increasingly wary of the warning signs. Maybe it’s time I let this dream die, and understand that it seemed like a dream job only because I never truly understood what it was when I was a kid. | | | | |
<
< | I was supposed to be a cop. I even filed the application and had an aptitude-test date. However, my parents begged me to “put [my] GPA to use.” Even my uncle told me I was “too smart for this shit.” I caved, either because of my ego or because there was something to their “higher purpose” spiel. Instead, I decided I would be a District Attorney; that way I could fight the same kind of devil I always wanted to fight. | | | | |
>
> | What’s Left? | | | | |
<
< | Standard | | | | |
>
> | If being a DA is not my first stop, then at the very least it was a good way for me to express some things that are important to me in a career. First, it helped me figure out the type of person I wanted to work with. Prosecutors swear at work, which I appreciate. I liked how these offices didn’t roll out the red carpet when they heard a Columbia student was shadowing for the day – in fact, some of them treated me like crap, and it was refreshing to meet people willing to say (with their body language) that I had yet to earn their respect. These are real people, too busy with real work to fake excitement. Next, I liked the whole show of it: the litigation; preaching from the podium to twelve very confused, but awestruck jurors; arguing with the PD in the hallway, no longer even feigning the usual workplace niceties; and complimenting the judge’s tie. Most importantly, what attracted me to prosecution was the prospect of making it harder for bad people to do bad things. While that goal may have been tarnished for me in regards to prosecutorial work, it does not mean the underlying passion is itself ruined. It is still my career goal, I preferred being able to label it (“prosecution”), but now I have to find a more suitable home for it, one with sufferable downsides. | | | | |
<
< | Then I saw the dirty work.
Cop, criminal, or DA, in the realm of criminal law, nothing is as simple as my Uncle’s stories. His law enforcement career ended by way of public outcry right before I started law school. It happened when his 4 A.M. distress calls were replaced by press conferences, and his “do-no-wrong” choices to march up to the armed ex-boyfriends of the world were replaced by choices between degrees of disciplinary measures to be taken against his alleged “good-ol’-boys” police force. In other words, it happened when justice turned into politics.
Criminal law gives its participants ample opportunity to drown. Joseph Lawrence articulated what I had been ignoring in order not to disturb my childhood dreams. I wanted to remain Robinson’s ordinary man who revered the criminal justice system for its mystifying concepts of “mens rea” and “reasonable doubt,” but I now stand face to face with the reality that something beyond good and evil governs this area. I shadowed an Assistant District Attorney in Oakland during a misdemeanor trial and asked myself what the hell was accomplished by the guilty verdict: just a dumb kid once again not getting a break. I put myself in the place of the DA tasked with prosecuting Robinson’s client and knew it would only be a matter of time before I was asked to do a favor in this line of work. How could I stand between predator and prey if this was the nature of the work?
A new rule?
Perhaps I am so arrogant that I think I can walk a different path, but I am holding out hope that I can figure out a way to make this job work better for its community instead of crushing its citizens. Robinson’s client’s dilemma is a product of human decision; the outcome is not something inherent in the criminal justice system. There’s no rule in criminal law that says a DA is prohibited from contemplating the implications of his or her decisions on the defendant and then using that information in deciding on how to proceed. Joseph Lawrence’s DA was not searching for justice; she was searching for powerful friends. That rule exists as a product of politics. The question becomes whether a DA can avoid getting fired while ignoring the rules of politics. Will I be able to excuse defendants where justice requires and still keep my job? It is a question I am unable to answer.
My sister, a 2L at Stanford and former aspiring public defender (disenchanted after a summer of PD work), works full time at an externship with a District Attorney. She jokes that she spends most of her working hours writing memos to her boss regarding why she feels uncomfortable taking cases assigned to her. Her most recent successful effort to duck a case came when a homeless man had been booked on a weapons charge after he was found sleeping in his car by a police officer. He kept the gun for protection because it is dangerous business, sleeping in parking lots. She is figuring out how to stand between the awesome power of the state and its citizens in a role not typically known for that sort of endeavor.
I admit ducking cases is a thin vision of positive social change, and yet, I still want to be a DA. Perhaps it is just the cumulative effect of my parent’s discourse when I was young, but I remind myself about the assailant threatening to attack his ex-girlfriend. I remind myself that sometimes the choices are clear and the cause worthy. The challenge will be to remember that when I hear clamoring for a district attorney more “tough on crime.” I will need to be willing to find out the hard way whether I can be a keep my job while ignoring statistics and “favors” in a profession mired in politics. | | |
|
|