The Soul of my Practice
"People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annhilated: vaporized was the usual word." - George Orwell, 1984
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” - Thomas Jefferson
For the most part, I consider myself to be a pretty placid and pleasant individual. Despite this easy disposition, there are certain ways to get me from zero to irritated in about five seconds.
One of the quickest?
“I can't believe that guy got off on a technicality!”
I'll state this as simply and plainly as I can. In fact, I will give you the exact response I give to any individual unfortunate enough to use this phrase around me.
“THE FOURTH, FIFTH, AND SIXTH AMENDMENTS TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION ARE NOT A TECHNICALITY!”
Imagine a world (and unfortunately, these days, it is easy if you try), where the government listens in on all your communications. Imagine a world where government officers invade the sanctity of your home and do whatever they want to, simply because they have position, power, and the will to do so. Imagine a world where your possessions and your very freedom get robbed from you without any opportunity to say your piece. Imagine, if you will, a place where law enforcement can violate the very sanctity of your person, simply because they are bored.
It sounds like I'm describing a scene from George Orwell's 1984, doesn't it? Perhaps it sounds more like Nazi German in 1939. In fact, what I am describing is a United States where the Bill of Rights didn't exist.
I suppose the issue with most people I take boils down to this: If you ask them if they support the Bill of Rights, they will vehemently say, “Yes!”
However, if you ask them their opinion about a criminal case getting thrown out on the basis of Fourth Amendment right violations, they got “got off on a technicality” because of “some lawyer bullshit in the system”. Search your own experience, and see if you can't imagine at least one or two people who wouldn't give voice to these patently contradictory responses.
I am often painted as a villain because I am a criminal defense attorney. People ask me, “How can you live with yourself, helping all those criminals get away with their crimes?”
Suffice to say, this is another way of quickly rousing my ire, but I digress...
Questions such as this deeply upset me, because the demonstrate the extent to which people neither understand, appreciate, or care about what I do.
The Bill of Rights is worthless. There... I said it. Let that sink in for a second. It is a worthless and meaningless thing. In fact, it is worth less than the paper it was originally printed on. These sacred tenets, which we have agreed (kind of) are the bedrock of our country's spirit, have absolutely no substance or meaning unless men and women act on them.
To bastardize an old Japanese proverb, laws without people acting to give them force are just so many noises carried away by the wind.
For those principles to remain alive, it takes flesh and blood men and women, taking action to uphold them. I consider this to be my most sacred and utmost responsibility as a public defender. I consider it to be one of the most patriotic things I can do for my country.
Admittedly, when the exclusionary rule is applied, wrong-doers often gain windfall in the form of dropped charges. But... how else is there to effectively keep the power of the executive branch in check? The badges, the guns, the uniforms... they all constitute an awesome form of power and dominion. Nearly any man or woman would, at times, be drawn into temptation and immoral behavior by such things.
The threat that all that work will be undone, and great injustice potentially wrought, if they forget the limitations placed upon them is perhaps the least we could do in terms of insuring some sort of personal sanctity in our country.
People focus on the times the criminals “get off”, but educated, suburban whites rarely appreciate the other half of it. I have represented children who were stopped, brutally seized, and physically violated by the police simply because they were black children in a white neighborhood. I've seen officers who pulled people over simply because they were Mexican-Americans in a van. Once, I represented a woman who nearly got tazered along with her children, simply because she wanted to know why she was being arrested.
That behavior is wrong. This kind of abuse by the powerful amounts to the worst form of tyranny; state and society-sanctioned violation of the individual. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's famous quote concerning slavery. “I should like to see any that support slavery have it tried out on him personally.” I believe the same should apply for these head-knocking tactics.
A sad truth of this world is that many who are attracted to law enforcement are psychologically woefully unfit for it. Empowering those with serious power issues, without a seriously structured and controlled environment, begs for tragedy to ensue.
That is where I come in. The “bad guy”, who helps people “get off on technicalities”. Often, I am the only form of policing that these law enforcement officers have to endure... and I cannot jail them or take their power or money. I am armed only with ideas and sincere beliefs about the rights of men.
Woefully unequipped, I stand up for these rights because I know that the genius, beautiful documents that constitute the soul of our nation are meaningless without such action to support them.
My reward for this action is often derision from the very people whom would squawk in outrage if they were forced to suffer the abuses some of my clients endure on a daily basis. I can only wish this invective came from the uneducated and ill-sighted. Often, I hear legislators and government leaders scoff at our jobs. People keep pushing for us to slash more and more of our budget as public defenders. “I mean, why do they need it, right? They represent the dirt bags.”
I am continually amazed how many people, even trained lawyers, hold this opinion.
When I see this lack of understanding; this callow presumption of rights coupled with the abuse of those who would stand for them... I sometimes wonder whether it is worth standing at all.
Or whether it would be more just to let these people reap the rewards of their own ignorance. Certainly, as our country develops, those dire rewards seem more and more apparent. In those dark times, where I want to walk away from this fight, I read the same words and I am restored.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
I had this moment during my second year of law school. I was studying deeply the liberationist philisophy of Cha'an Buddhism that greatly colors and influences the Jiyushin-ryu, which is truly the core of my life. Those words in the Declaration of Independence echo the Jiyushin-ryu philosophy perfectly.
In that moment, I became a patriot. And I resolved that I would always work to uphold those principles, both on a personal level and for society as a whole. That oath holds true, no matter what people accuse me of evil, and what people consider my job to be nothing more than a glorified practice of dodging hangmen. I sometimes smile when people speak of technicalities, because those "technicalities" which these alleged "patriots" scorn are truly the center of my life.