The Choice is Yours
“You can’t do that” the Prosecutor told me, but I expect her to say that. She gets paid to say that. Exasperated, but not obnoxious. She simply doesn’t need one more thing to do. The manila folder on her desk, three inches thick with paper slammed shut as her index finger ran along the edge of the table. “I don’t know what you want me to do, it can’t be done.”
I just need you to let me address the judge. I don’t care how, but I need to address the judge.
Yeah, you can’t do it Marcus.
Now this second voice I didn’t expect to hear. Another Defense Attorney had chimed in, to tell me I can’t do something? He doesn’t get paid for that.
It’s an interesting life being a Defense Attorney. It’s an interesting camaraderie. On one hand, we’re in precisely direct competition with each other: every dollar I make is a dollar he doesn’t; every time he drops his price, I lose money across the board. But on the other hand, no one else can relate to what we do. It’s very hard to be required to descend into the bowels of humanity for X hours everyday. Our goal is to find that small slice of innocence we can hold up as an example of redeemable good. But to find that slice, we wade through a lot of muck. It is impossible to do it and come back unchanged.
And so Defense Attorneys become some kind of a fraternity. There’s certain stories I don’t tell on my blog. There’s things we’re required, by law, to do that I don’t brag about in public society. There’s one case in particular I’ll probably never explain on this blog. Surrounded by Defense Attorneys it becomes almost my rank or insignia. If anyone questions my merits, another attorney who knows will mention the ten word synopsis, and the response will be, “What? You were able to do THAT?” And they’ll be no more questions.
You can’t do it, Marcus, you’re going to have to get it done another way…
I tuned out. Why was this guy even talking? On one hand he wasn’t kissing the Prosecutor’s butt in order to curry favor. That was an option, but I didn’t believe it.
See Marcus, you can’t do it. What you need to give us…
Give us? Give US? You’re a Defense attorney! And I tuned out to the rest of his speech as I tuned in to the problem. He wasn’t one of us. He hadn’t joined, in his own mind, the fraternity of the Defense Attorneys. Don’t get me wrong, he collected money to “defend” people. He stood next to them as he pled them guilty to crimes they may or may not have committed. He explained to them their right to plead guilty, the right to throw themselves on the mercy of the court. The right to pay him a flat fee that includes nothing but showing up.
“Give US.” See, he was an ex-prosecutor, but something worse. He still self-identifies as a Prosecutor. He still self-identifies as someone who wants MORE people in the system, rather than less. But people pay him for it, maybe I’m wrong.
And I turned to the real Prosecutor, “I just need to get before the judge”.
I stepped outside and made a phone call down to the Beretania Police Station to get my facts straight, then came back inside. I sat in the front row and waited. Long. I had to wait until the rest of the calendar was done. When the judge got to the end of his schedule he asked the Prosecutor if there was anything else they could take care of before the break.
As I jumped to my feet, the Prosecutor dismissively allowed me to address the judge. I would have yelled had she not. The judge heard my request and said, “Well, Mr. Landsberg, that sounds like a reasonable request to me. Granted”.
120 seconds. Done.
And as I looked around the court, the “Defense Attorney” was not there. Too bad, I wanted him to see me win. I collected my things, placed them in my bag, and on the way out the door I saw him in the hallway talking to his client with a familiar refrain:
I understand you think you can win this case, You can’t do it. It can’t be done. You can’t win here…
And I shook my head, And sung to myself:
You can get with this, or you can get with that.
You can get with this, or you can get with that.
You can get with this, or you can get with that.
I think you’ll get with this, for this is where it’s at.
