Personal Introduction

-- By JocelynCazares - 29 Jan 2015

From law school I gain the tools, and knowledge I need to pursue my dream. Through the knowledge, practice, and skills I develop in law school I will be able to finally enter the realm of law and criminal justice. Specifically, I seek to become a public defender and to provide a legal voice to those in my life who have been taken advantage of by those with greater access to the law due to money. Furthermore, law school will provide me the necessary social capital to then assist in the attack of many systematically unjust legal frameworks.

I hope you will enjoy making Robinson's acquaintance and that we will be talking about him, and your professional aspirations, in class on Friday. The overwhelming majority of a public defender's clients are guilty, and you job will be the negotiation of their guilty pleas whether they are or not. Will that bother you?

That is an issue I grapple with regularly, I don't want to be yet another public defender that is simply spending all his/her time making plea deals. In an idealistic world, there would be more resources so that the client load a public defender is given allows for more than this, that it allows for them to actually lawyer on behalf of their client from the get-go. However, I realize given the structure as it is now, there is that strong probability I will be among that majority in negotiations of guilty pleas and that definitely weighs on me. The fact that a client who was innocent, or even guilty for that matter, will not be granted their rights as citizens to a trial and the presumption innocence before proven guilty is not something I am comfortable with. As such, I know it will definitely bother me, especially when I am first developing in the career because my access to any sort power to push against this standard of practice will be limited. However, as much as I know it will bother to have work in that way at times, it would bother me even more if I were to pursue some other field and there be other public defender with clients that lack my passion for criminal justice, and thus, who won't even be bother to be bothered about this structural issue.