I thought it had all blown over and that everyone had come to their senses and focused on things that actually matter…until I read about the unbelievable obscenity trial starting in LA. The DOJ started out by threatening to bring the wrath on pin-up girls in collars and ended up with a single case involving fetish pictures so extreme as to make potential jurors nauseous.

I have a confession to make - I admittedly was not schooled thoroughly on the First Amendment and I did not even realize that the standard of “it’s not obscene if it has literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” was still in effect. I have heard tales of Supreme Court justices gathered with their clerks in a viewing room to screen porn in order to determine if it was obscene, but that was decades ago. In this age of the internet, mainstream porn stars, and pervasive sexuality, the concept of legal obscenity seems…quaint.

I actually laughed when I read about this trial, not only because it is actually happening, but because the defense is “performance art.” This brought to my mind images of shady men ducking into dark back rooms in order to ogle interpretive dance. I realize that “it’s art” has to be the defense with the legal standard being what it is, but no one is fooled by Ira Isaacs posturing himself as an artist on par with Marcel Duchamp. The guy was selling 1000 videos per month at $30 a pop - he’s a businessman who found a niche in the market and filled it quite handily. But it’s also ridiculous to counter that with the argument that child porn is a lucrative niche, but still indefensible as “art” - in the case of legit child porn, there is a victim, there is an actual person harmed by its production. No one here is arguing (as far as I am aware) that the people in these outlandish movies were participating against their will or that any actual, unconsented-to acts were committed. It’s porn. PORN. No one is sending it direct mail to schools or featuring it on the Yahoo homepage. It exists, but it’s easy to ignore. For all those reasons, I am laughing out of disgust that this is ACTUALLY an issue. There is actually a trial going on. There is actually a trial going on with its own scandal because the judge had some sexual images up on the internet.

Legal experts who had called on Kozinski to recuse himself from the Isaacs case said it wasn’t necessarily a problem that the judge had collected sexually explicit material but that he was reckless in allowing it to be discovered.

This may be my favorite part - it wasn’t that the judge was utilizing his freedom of speech or that he had questionable taste in humor (”One such item is a photo of two women seated in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair. Behind them is a sign reading ‘Bush for President.’” - Really?), it’s that he was too technologically-challenged to hide it. Somehow, I think it has more to do with the fact that Judge Kozinski has been a supporter of free speech issues:

“When he learned that there were filters banning pornography and other materials from computers in the appeals court’s Pasadena offices, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

“I did some rabble-rousing about it,” Kozinski said in a brief interview last week. He said he was made aware of the issue when a law clerk researching a case was banned from accessing a gay bookstore’s website.

“I didn’t think the bureaucrats in Washington should decide what the federal judiciary should have access to,” the judge said. “I thought that was incredibly arrogant for them to decide on their own.”

Here’s a summary of what is going on in my public defender life lately -

 - I have a big, big case on for trial a week from today.  The stakes are high, as is my confidence (tentatively). That is perhaps what worries me most.

 - I have, by far, the biggest caseload in my office.  I’m the first one in, the last one to leave, and the one here alone on the weekends.  It’s always been my nature to work (overly) hard and I get anxious when I have too much free time.  But it may be getting to me and it may be time to reassess the situation at hand.

 - With that all said, I have to get back to work.  But I’m thinking of you, blog.

Once I get set up over there again, I will let you know.

I get paid less than $40,000 per year by the state of Massachusetts to defend the indigent full-time.  There is something seriously, seriously wrong here.

“So what you’re saying is, if you were a lawyer, you wouldn’t put a public defender on him!”

Ouch.

“As a facility for the pretrial detention of presumptively innocent citizens, Charles Street Jail unnecessarily and unreasonably infringes upon their most basic liberties, among them the rights to reasonable freedom of motion, personal cleanliness, and personal privacy. The court finds and rules that the quality of incarceration at Charles Street is ‘punishment’ of such a nature and degree that it cannot be justified by the state’s interest in holding defendants for trial, and therefore it violates the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The court ordered that a new jail be built by 1976, but (after a lot more litigation), the Charles St Jail didn’t actually close until 1990, after seventeen more years worth of suffering for its inmates. And now, perversely, it’s the city’s hottest night spot and most luxurious hotel.

The weirdest part about it is that it isn’t just a hotel with trendy bars. The restaurant is called “Clink” and the bar is “Alibi.” And remnants of the building’s past remain:

These are the ghosts, the half-perceived evidence of the old cells, which you can make out as puzzling patterns on the floor or the walls. There are teasing traces of old brick and metal, handsome exposed wood truss work that holds up the dome, a few remaining cell bars….Too often they yell at you that you’re, hey, in what used to be a jail. Restaurant tables cuddle up to bricks and bars. Interiors are blatant and often hideous. (Interior furnishings and finishes were designed by Champalimaud & Associates, of New York.) Knock-your-eye-out, boldly patterned murals, carpets, and furnishings leap at you from otherwise gloomy surfaces. Huge murals of silhouetted trees are supposed to make you think of freedom outdoors. A floor mosaic by artist Coral Bourgeois might seem delightful somewhere else, but because it consists entirely of cartoony icons of prison life, it strikes you as yet another in-your-face commercial for the jailness of the Liberty.

The drink menu is even filled with cocktails named after “people who tend to get you in trouble.”

I guarantee you that the Saturday night line to get in would not be over an hour at 11:30pm if this was just a new hotel. The intrigue lies in this “Ooh, I’m going to jail!” kitsch. And I find it both fascinating and somewhat repulsive, as I obviously spend a lot of time in real jails and know not only how unpleasant they are, but also that such a gimmick is rather disrespectful to all those people who were locked up there under horrible conditions and how many people continue to be so in facilities elsewhere.

Whether I will be able to appreciate the place in actuality remains to be seen - we refused to wait in line for so long on a cold night. So perhaps on an evening when it is not so in-demand, I will be able to report back on drinking in a luxury jail.

“We have never seen this happen before,” [U.S. Attorney Michael] Sullivan said. “The judge was persuaded to separate them from the people they influence.”

I must admit that I am flummoxed by this ruling.  Will they be charged with trespassing if they come back to Boston?  Based on my rudimentary understanding of the Tenth Amendment and Article 4, I suppose it is constitutional, as it does not restrict interstate travel, but I’m guessing this is not one of the things that the defendants were anticipating when going through a plea colloquy.

I am having a crisis of faith. I fear that I am losing my passion, that I am succumbing to the daily pressures, that I am reaching the dreaded burn-out. And I am intensely ashamed of that, because there was rarely a soul that drank the Kool-Aid as deeply as I did. It has barely been a year as a public defender - a mere year! - and I am finding that my patience is waning, that my long nights are getting shorter and shorter, with fewer and fewer things getting checked off that to-do list. And I hate to say it, but a great deal of it is the money issue.

Now, of course I came into this job knowing that I was going to be making crap for money. I was embracing my idealism and eschewing the ease with which my friends were putting down payments on downtown condos. I was doing it for the love, not the money. And all that would still be well and good, except that I am not only living below the means of my friends, I am actually not even able to make ends meet. I am sinking deeper into credit card debt, because my rent constitutes 50% of my pay and the rest simply does not cover food, gas, utilities, and the occasional need for a new suit or a cocktail (nevermind my loan payments). Just last week, I had to replace all four tires on my car because I had worn them to dangerous levels and I have absolutely no idea where that $500 is going to come from. It went on the plastic and that is going to overwhelm me. The theory of living like a righteous warrior fighting the good fight is a lot easier than facing the reality of ever-mounting debt of all kinds. It honestly keeps me up at night.

So I figure that I have three choices - a) keep at it, hoping for a raise or a bonus at the whim of the legislature, while still racking up more and more debt; b) pick up a second job slinging coffee or scanning book purchases and sacrifice the precious few hours I have with my family, boyfriend, or slumber as it is; or c) quit and find something that pays better. Several of you may suggest d) moving closer to work to cut down on expenses, but that would mean having to sacrifice my entire relationship with the man I am going to marry, so I cannot go there. Other than that being thrown out, I honestly do not know what to do. I really, really do not.

The daily grind of difficult clients, overwhelming case loads, frustrating prosecutors, and the rest would be eased enormously by the money issue. In the end, my crisis of faith is not so much about the job, but about the living. I just don’t know if I can do it.