Why lawyers defend monsters

>>> welcome back. it's going to get real here for a minute. a little personal. it is no secret that my people have been heavily persecuted for years. we have suffered by the hands of public ridicule, oppression, and sometimes made to feel that we are not acceptable just as ourselves. there are jokes. there are personal digs. there are stereotypes. what i'm saying is it's not easy to be a lawyer. see what happened there? you thought maybe i was going one way, then it didn't. so lawyers, as you all know, specifically criminal defense attorneys, are constantly asked a variation of the same question. how can you defend these people? well, our next guests have a pretty thoughtful response and many thoughtful responses that explore the personal and often even emotional reasons defense lawyers take on really tough cases. they are quick to point out they know criminal defenders are often defending people who have done something wrong, and it's not necessarily exactly what's alleged. it's all right here inside "how can you represent those people?" it's a collection of essays edited by abby smith, a professor at georgetown law school . with her, angela davis , a professor of american law .

>> hi.

>> thanks for having us.

>> absolutely. speaking about the sometimes real prejudice against defense attorneys and some of their clients, what was interesting, abby, right away is that you don't just talk about, well, this is how the system has to work, we need people on both sides, it will work out in the end. some of the conventional, institutional defenses we hear. what you write about, to some degree s the emotional draw that some attorneys feel, even for a very maligned client.

>> i do. i try to at least. there are many reasons for doing this work, as there are lawyers doing it. but i try to get behind the conventional answers and talk about some of the personal motivations as well as the political motivations for doing the work. for me, it's a very good fit to represent another human being in need and in trouble, and i don't have any problems with people who are not perfect, who are flawed in some ways. i think that makes them more interesting, not hard for me to relate to them. the politics include the number of people we incarcerate in this country, the length of time we incarcerate them. i think that's a pretty prevalent motivation for lots of defenders these days.

>> angela , abbe talks about the sort of personal aspect of this and relating to her clients. do you think -- i feel like a lot of us sort of look at criminals and look at these cases in the news and say, those people are nothing like us. we can't relate to them at all. we sort of strip them of humanity. if you're taking on these cases, if you're actually with these individuals who are criminals, who we label as criminals, does that change your relationship to them? do you see more of yourself in the folks that you're seeing on the news?

>> absolutely. in fact, the essay that i contribute to the book is called "there but for the grace of god go i." it sort of summarizes how i felt about the work i did for 12 years at the d.c. public defenders service representing clients charged with everything from simple assault all the way to first-degree murder. almost all of my clients were poor, and they came from backgrounds that involved very little education. they didn't have good housing. they didn't have job opportunities. sometimes not even food to eat. i always said, and i still say, that if i'd grown up like that and under those circumstances, i may have found myself in those same circumstances. so i never judged my clients. i was always very, very proud to stand next to them and try to provide the best representation possible at all times.

>> and abbe, you said that you are inspired by "to kill a mocking bird 's" atticus finch , who represented the wrongly accused black man. but sometimes you aren't defending the innocent. there are times where -- you know, ariel castro has to be represented, dzhokhar tsarnaev. looking back, what case was the hardest for you to defend in terms of feeling guilty or emotionally conflicted?

>> so here's the thing. i think by the time you actually represent a person who's accused of a crime, by the time you go to trial with such a case, you feel a connection. you need to feel a connection to your client. if you're about to try a case, you also need to believe in your case, at least. so i think by the time the rubber meets the road, you're there. there may be some challenges along the way. there are some cases -- criminal defense lawyers are human beings . we have the same feelings anybody else might have. there are some crimes that are more difficult than others. there's some conduct that, you know, frankly you want to turn away from. but i think there's a special sensibility criminal defense lawyers have to have. that's to put those feelings aside. not to suppress them entirely, but to put them aside and to focus on the client and the client's case.

>> is there a case that sticks out to the you, though, specifically?

>> i say in my essay, and you know, i guess i'm willing to admit that -- to put it in its most pif if i form, probably rapists and racists are are the hardest kind of cases for me, especially the sort of case that's kind of, you know, part of the ariel castro kind of category of cases. rape, captivity, abduction cases, you know, i think are horrific. representing people accused of hate crimes , not so easy for me. that's not why i went into this work. but when you peel away the charges and you sit with another human being , you often find that it's much more complicated than initially things appear to be.

>> angela , a little while after the o.j. verdict, i had breakfast here in new york with johnny cochran , famously on his defense team. we talked about the unspoken ethics rule that you don't throw your client under the bus. so i wonder if you've ever had personal experience with someone who has broken that unspoken rule . you're both defending the same person, but that person has said something to the press or did something in court that made it clear they were throwing the client under the bus.

>> well, fortunately, i've never had to -- i was at the d.c. public defender service, where we were taught to zealously advocate for our clients at all times. no one i know who worked there would ever do anything like that. i mean, our job is to go in there and represent our client zealously. i was always very, very proud to do that. with regard to the issue of guilty or innocence, i mean, i never had a case that i felt bad about handling it. i think that, you know, our clients, some of them certainly were guilty, maybe most of them, but i guarantee you that with all of them, the prosecutors usually overcharge. so they're never guilty of everything they're charged with. i didn't focus on that issue. i focus on the client. we have an adversarial system where we got a prosecutor, a defense attorney , a judge, and a jury, if it's a jury case. i wasn't there to judge my clients. i never wanted to judge them. that was never my role, and i was always proud to stand between them and the government because i think unless and until you're charged with a crime or you have a family member charged with a crime, you really don't understand the importance of having a strong and zealous defense attorney . i was very proud to play that role.

>> yeah, angela --

>> if i can say --

>> go ahead, please.

>> certainly there are court appointed lawyers who throw their clients under the bus. i, too, am a proud product of a very good public defender office, the philadelphia defender association. i practiced in a number of jurisdictio jurisdictions. i've seen, unfortunately -- it's not just a problem in the deep south , that court appointed lawyers, either because of lack of resources or a lack of commitment, will sometimes cozy up too much to the judge or the prosecutor and not keep their client at the center where the client should be. that is a problem. it's a problem even as we just celebrated the 50th anniversary of gideon against wainwright. you still see a different quality of justice for the poor.

>> angela , how much of it has to do with that overcharging you mentioned? this is not theory about what criminals should get. this is reality where we live in a country with a very harsh and unequal justice system .

>> that's the very point, is that there's so much evidence that the poor and the -- poor people and people of color , i should say, are not treated as fairly as their similarly situated white or wealthy counterparts. prosecutors hold all the cards. many of them, unfortunately, abuse the power they have and overcharge. that's why it's so very important we have a very strong defense. i was proud to play that role.

>> excellent. abbe and angela , thank you for spending time with us. good luck with this the book.

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