There was an article in one of the papers today about the death of one of my former clients. She was the first of my clients to pass away (that I know of at least). She was young and she was a severe addict. I once got her out of jail and straight into a detox. The last time I saw her, she remembered me as the lawyer who got her help. She looked healthy. She had a tough life, but she was a genuinely nice person and I’m very sad to hear that she died. I don’t think there were a lot of people who helped her out in her life, so I like to think that I did help her, even a little, even if it didn’t ultimately make a difference.
I have been thinking about this post for about a month and a half now and I’m still not sure exactly how to say it. Basically - I sold out. Sort of. I left the public defender’s office for private practice. BUT it is still criminal defense and my heart is still in the same place. I was not looking to leave the public defender’s office at all. But a judge, of his own accord, passed my name onto a well-known private attorney in solo practice who was looking for an associate. He offered me a job and my world was thrown into turmoil for a few weeks while I wrestled with whether I should leave my beloved job as a PD for an opportunity to do the same kind of work for a different kind of paycheck and a different kind of client. Ultimately, I decided that it was an opportunity that I should not pass up, for many reasons.
I went back yesterday and read the interview I did on Monday Musings last year. I said that I had found the job I was supposed to do, that I couldn’t shake the part of me that gravitates towards the poor. And my heart still aches to think about that. I wanted to use my skill and my soul and my position as someone lucky enough to have a phenomenal education to serve those that were not as privileged as I was. But in the last month, I have worked on cases that I was not getting the opportunity to tackle when I was a public defender, after being passed over for a position to handle superior court cases. I have already written and filed a brief with the Supreme Judicial Court. I’m getting to delve into the law more than I was before, when so much of my time was occupied with triage as a result of too many cases. I’m working longer hours, but my commute has shortened considerably and my paycheck has grown comfortably.
I do mourn the loss of the public defender camaraderie. It is not the same to be a private criminal defense attorney and I know this. There is something special about people who choose to pursue the life of a PD and I thought that I was going to be a part of that for as long as I could. But it’s been a period of a lot of changes and a lot of transitions in my life and I am embracing this particular one. I still feel like I am fighting the good fight.
I still have the urge in me to write, so stay tuned for the future of the blog. I don’t know where it is headed, but I like it being here.
A couple of years ago, there was a big brouhaha over at Suicidegirls due to the DOJ’s supposed new battle against obscenity - the SG admins took down a whole bunch of photosets in order to either protect themselves against the “wrath” of Alberto Gonzales, or to rile up some diehards to fight the good fight. After all, SG features female-only pictures, with no penetration or anything really explicit at all. At worst (or best, depending on how you look at it), I would characterize the photos as “racy,” with some relatively graphic female-parts shots and some suggestions of bondage and girl-on-girl sex. Then again, SG was at the peak of its popularity and no one really knew the extent to which the Bush administration would show its insanity. But eventually - or so I thought - the outcry died down, the pictures came back, the guidelines were once again relaxed. I had expected from the outset that this “war on porn” was an empty cry - after all, in this day and age, how could such a witch hunt possibly stand up to the First Amendment?
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.”
I just got an email telling me my blog is now part of the ABA directory, so I figured that perhaps I should pay some attention to it. It’s not that I have purposely ignored it - it’s just the same old, same old. No time. Never any time. (I’m so excited….anyone?) I don’t get to comb news stories and other websites much anymore, thus I didn’t have as much material or inspiration to draw on, nor do I have time to actually sit down at the damn computer and write. But I am in need of some distractions lately, and potentially will need more in the near future. So why not (once again, I know) resurrect my dear misstyrios.com.
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.
If you remember, my first trial was a contested bench trial last July, which I won. My first jury trial was last September, which I won on four out of seven counts by way of required findings of not guilty, but the jury convicted on all three counts that went to them and my client was taken into custody as a result. Well, today I had another jury trial and I got to hear the jury say “NOT GUILTY” for the first time. And it was glorious. One charge, not guilty, you are free to go, ma’am. Best feeling ever. Until I started thinking about all the things I did wrong, but that’s to be expected, I suppose. I wish I could go into more detail about the shenanigans that manifested during jury selection and the prosecution’s case, but I am not totally anonymous anymore, so I am not going to.
I’m back to being a writer/editor for the suicidegirls website (if you don’t know, it’s a site focused primarily on naked girls, so don’t be shocked). I began my internet writing career as a Politics writer/editor over there from 2005-06. When they went in a different direction, I was no longer needed and eventually came here on my own. They are going in yet another different direction and have given me the Politics post again. I am thrilled about this and I will tell you why - I have been in a rut and this was a gig that I just adored. It is no secret that I never really got this site off the ground - I didn’t give it the attention that a real blog needs and I figured that no one was reading, so why keep writing? It was a terrible trap to fall into, of course, because the less I write, the less there is for anyone at all to read. But now that I am back writing for a built-in audience and responsibility to answer to, I anticipate a rebirth of this site. I will cross-post at times (not everyone wants to go to a naked girl site, even though you will be able to read my stories without paying for membership or looking at any actual nakedness. And certainly not my nakedness, let’s make that clear). I will make this my public defender focus, though - SG is not the place for most of the stories I like to write here, which are more personal and somewhat more raw. I will have a broader focus there, though my job and my passions will still shine through no matter what.
Once I get set up over there again, I will let you know.
Merry Christmas to all my clients, past and present, who are in jail for this Christmas. I tried my hardest for all of you and I am thinking about you. I wish I could do more.
The special prosecutors hired to investigate the Big Dig celing collapse death are being paid$30,000 per week by the state of Massachusetts. To date, only one company has been charged with manslaughter in the death and that carries a maximum penalty of a $1000 fine.
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.
During a commercial break in last night’s Patriots game, my friend clicked over to the NC State/Villanova basketball game on ESPN. And the announcer said at that very moment:
“So what you’re saying is, if you were a lawyer, you wouldn’t put a public defender on him!”
Last Saturday night, my friends convinced me to actually go out, notwithstanding my money woes (they have a great way of offering to buy rounds and then never giving me a chance to buy the next one). And our destination was the hottest new spot in Boston, where all the pro athletes and townie celebrities hang out - jail. Well, sort of. In reality, it is the “Liberty Hotel,” a luxury four-star hotel on Charles St. But it is the renovated site of the infamous Charles Street Jail. The jail was built in the mid-nineteenth century and served as the one-time “home” for the likes of Sacco and Venzetti and John Michael Curley. Perhaps most famously, in 1973, inmates sued the sheriff and others, claiming that pretrial detainees were being held in unconstitutional conditions. And the federal court agreed, holding:
“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.
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.
