Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 30

I have never, and I mean this, never

met an honest man.

PERSONAL INJURY TRIAL LAWYER.

Jamie Wolfe.

I came to this job in an interesting way. Growing up, my father wanted me to be a lawyer, but I couldn't have cared less. I had no interest at all. But then, when I was around ten, in maybe 1954, he took me to a play on Broadway-Inherit the Wind with Paul Muni, one of the great actors. He played the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow in what they call the Scopes Monkey Trial. I saw it and I immediately fell in love with lawyering. Paul Muni had this thing where he would stretch out his suspenders with his thumbs. And for me that did it. I can't tell you why. [Laughs] I just took an interest.

I wasn't an exceptional student, but I got into law school. It was a night program, actually. I worked full-time during the day and went to law school at night for five years. When I finished, I met a judge who liked me, and even though I didn't have the same qualifications as a lot of others, he hired me. He was a federal judge, and from there I eventually got into the Manhattan District Attorney's office, where I worked for about five years and tried many cases, including many, many homicide cases. And then, for the last fifteen years, I've been doing what I do now, which is I go to court and represent people who are aggrieved or injured, and representing those whom insurance companies refuse to pay money. I'm the one that actually handles the trials for these people.

I'll bet you don't know this, but most lawyers don't ever go into a courtroom. Most lawyers sit behind their desk and administer an office. Their skill, their art, is in getting clients. In New York City, there are thousands and thousands of personal injury lawyers, but I think there may only be two or three hundred of us who actually go to court-who are what we call trial lawyers. One of the reasons for this is that ninety-nine percent of personal injury cases are settled well before they ever get to a trial. And they're settled because it's in the interests of both sides to dispose of it out of court. You see, when a case goes to trial, you never know what a jury is going to do. It's a c.r.a.pshoot. To get a jury to agree about the difficult questions of who may be at fault and who's negligent when, indeed, you can't usually get them to agree on what they want to have for lunch-well, you're just rolling the dice.

But despite this, some cases come up that can't be settled. The plaintiff feels his injuries are so serious that he wants to take a chance with a jury, or the defendant may take a firm position because he doesn't want to settle and set a precedent that would encourage more lawsuits. So then they go to trial.

These days, everyone sees court cases on television and they think they are very dramatic-which they are, sometimes. But what they don't see is how much hard work and sweat goes into a trial. For every hour that a witness spends on the witness stand, a good trial lawyer will spend fifteen or twenty hours of preparation with that witness. Because the witness and the lawyer have to be simpatico, to be one together, to be able to convey a coherent, clear story to the jury.

A trial lawyer tries to get the witness to look at the jury and talk to them and be honest and forthright, and most significantly-to be likeable. And when I say likeable I don't mean to be obsequious or to be pandering, I mean to be likeable in the sense that you're really genuine, you're sincere.

But no matter how much effort the client and lawyer put into it, there's only a limited range within which a person may be able to express themselves in front of a jury. I mean, most courtrooms are tiny-the jury is physically only a few feet away from the witness. And they're like cameras. The jurors are cameras, and they're studying you, and they're observing every nuance of your body language and your facial expressions. Who are you? Are you credible? Are you really injured? It's objectively very scary. It really is. Even an honest witness can look dishonest because what happens is very nerve-wracking.

And by the way, I have never, and I mean this, never met an honest man. I have had rabbis lie. I have had priests lie. I have had witnesses of every color and denomination and persuasion lie. Clients come to me and tell me that they were caused to have an accident and they were injured in a certain way. But the truth is that it usually didn't happen exactly the way they say it happened. The client may be fundamentally and inherently a good and honest person, but when it comes to their case their theory is, well, it's a G.o.dd.a.m.n insurance company, and they've got more money than G.o.d, and it isn't right, and it isn't fair. And so it's okay if, on the margins, on the fringes, they improve or enhance their story a little bit.

So we have to begin with a premise that it's not a question of whether someone's honest, it's a question of the degree. And lawyers are the most dishonest people of all. A lawyer will prepare his witness in such a way that he, the lawyer, thinks he's being honest, but in truth and in all candor, he's really not. Because he's kind of steering or directing the witness in a certain direction-the direction that says the other party is at fault. And that's part of our business. A good lawyer has to approach every accident, every case, with the mindset that his client is not at fault. The other party is at fault. And so a good lawyer is often dishonest and so is everyone else. And the truth is that if everyone were honest, I would have a tough job impeaching them. And here's a curiosity: even an honest man can appear dishonest, because in fact most everybody else is fudging with the truth, so the honest man really is the easiest one to catch because he's the one that's not used to lying.

So everybody lies. And for the lawyer, a trial becomes a real challenge of the wits, of your presence of mind, of your ability to think clearly on your feet. If you make the mistake of being too a.s.sertive with a witness on cross examination, the jury may never forgive you. Then other times you may have to attack, because a jury may feel that the witness is not being credible. But you have to be very cautious about it.

I do things now that I would never have done fifteen years ago. I spend much less time attacking witnesses than I ever did before. I have a much greater sense of confidence that through the sheer dint of my ability to a.n.a.lyze what they say, I can reason with them in front of a jury and show the implausibility of their testimony. Instead of insinuating the witness is a liar-and remember, everybody is lying at least a little bit-I can often expose them simply by having them reenact the events in front of the jury. If you go through all of the details, all of the nuances of every single act and action that that person did, you may hit pay dirt. You may be able to show a jury that it's simply implausible that what he says happened happened. Either because there wasn't enough time, or the distance wasn't correct, or some such thing.

Of course, the danger of that kind of examination is that you may not have antic.i.p.ated every aspect of the event. And also, no matter how good you are, every trial lawyer always faces the terror, the fear that he'll meet a witness who is more glib, who is sharper, who is brighter, and ultimately just better than he is in a courtroom. I've lost cases that way.

But the longer I do this, the more familiar I am with all the aspects of an event. And if you've done hundreds and hundreds of automobile cases and hundreds and hundreds of cases involving incidents at an intersection, well, you have some specialized knowledge, and there may be one or two specific things that you can ask a witness that could impeach them. Of course, to be a good trial lawyer, you have to learn about everything, not just intersections. That's where the skill and the art comes in. If I try a case involving a sciatic nerve, I have to know more about the sciatic nerve than an orthopedic surgeon or a neurologist. I have to know more about the subject at hand than the experts who oppose me, so that I can form a series of questions to try to impeach that expert, to show that he's wrong in his expert opinion. I have to be a jack-of-all trades.

For instance, I once represented a client who was a roofer. In simple terms, the case concerned the fact that my client was caused to have his hand impaled-literally impaled-on the roof of a building by his power tool, a Stanley pneumatic stapler. My client had thought that the tool was disengaged from what's known as its power hose and was therefore safe to clean. But even though it was disengaged, the stapler still retained some power in it. And there was no warning in the directions for the tool saying that this might happen. We felt that made for a defective tool. And indeed, that tool-loosed from its power hose-still had the power to drive a nail through my client's hand into the roof.

So we sued this company, and they brought the country's leading expert on pneumatic tools from California to represent them. The lawyer that defended this case for the insurance company only handled power tool cases. That's all he ever did for his whole life.

Now, this was the only time I had ever tried this kind of a case. And I felt, understandably, that I was in over my head. When the expert witness took the stand and I examined him, he was making me look terrible. He was making all these technical points as to why my arguments were not feasible and why the tool was safe for use and why the instructions were sufficient and ample to warn the user. And then, without going into the details, I came upon a certain fact that I hadn't noticed before-the little tiny head that connects the power hose to the tool was confusing. It had two heads that looked the same, and if it was screwed on backwards then air could be retained in the tool even though you had otherwise followed the instructions. And I confronted this expert with this. And it was one of the high moments of my career, because after about a half hour of questions about this, finally this expert witness turned to me in front of the jury and said, "Look, Mr. Wolfe, you got me. I can't answer any more questions. You're right. It is confusing. It is defective. And I can't [laughs] explain to the jury why it was done that way." And for me that was a terribly exciting, uplifting moment. In an area that I knew almost nothing about, I was able to accomplish that.

So I am definitely a jack-of-all trades. I have tried cases involving swimming pools where a child drowned. I've tried cases involving explosions where a client died in the airport because they failed to properly warn of a bomb that had been planted by a terrorist organization-my client's arms and legs blew off and he died in the airport. I've had cases involving defective drugs and cases involving the Dram Law, which holds bartenders and restaurants responsible for serving too much alcohol if a man goes out and has an accident or injures someone. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Each of these cases have involved their own unique areas of specialized knowledge. I'm always learning.

Now, of course, the public is very cynical about these cases. They feel that most if not all of them are frivolous and without a merit. They read in the newspaper about multimillion-dollar verdicts, and they think, oh, my G.o.d. But for every one you read about where there's a million-dollar verdict, there are a hundred where the results are bad for the injured person. And, indeed, more than two-thirds of these cases are lost. The plaintiff gets nothing. Zero. Juries are very unsympathetic to these lawsuits.

In fact, in a larger sense, people are generally unsympathetic to plaintiff's lawyers and this is kind of unfair. I mean, in every courthouse there are two different kinds of animals-plaintiff's lawyers and defendant's lawyers. In the waiting rooms and the lunchrooms or wherever the lawyers congregate, the plaintiff's lawyers always sit with the plaintiff's lawyers, and the defendant's lawyers always sit with the defendant's lawyers. There's no mixing. And the plaintiff's lawyers always say how terrible the defendants are and how awful the insurance companies are and how unfair, and the defendant's lawyers always say what terrible boors the plaintiff's lawyers are and how all they want is money and they realize that there's no basis to their client's cases. And this is the same conversation in every court in every county in every state every day for the history of mankind.

I see it through my perspective, obviously, because I'm a plaintiff's lawyer. But my view is that the usual plaintiff's lawyer is someone who is more liberal politically, who is more caring of individual rights, than a defendant's lawyer. A plaintiff's lawyer tends to be not only politically, but in all respects generally more caring about the welfare of people. At least that's how we see ourselves. By the way, parenthetically, the defendant's lawyers see us as mercenary people who are only concerned with the dollar and not at all concerned with our clients, which of course we deny.

The truth of the matter is that maybe a number of lawyers who practice plaintiff's law do look to the bottom line because we get paid on what is called contingency basis. In other words, we don't get paid by our client on an hourly basis. And this is true in every personal injury case. The person who's injured comes to a lawyer and signs a retainer agreement whereby he agrees to pay in effect one-third to his lawyer if and when the lawyer settles the case. So a plaintiff's lawyer can realize a very substantial result for his client. Whereas, on the defendant's side, even the very best trial lawyers-and there are some excellent defendant's lawyers hired by insurance companies, senior guys that are really excellent-they're paid by the hour. So although their hourly rate is considerable, they only get paid for the time they put in that case. And the insurance company watches over them to make sure that they don't overbill.

So, overall, the big money is on the plaintiff's side. And let me make it clear about lawyers and money: if I hit a big case, I can get a very big result. But any plaintiff's lawyer will tell you that's not why we're in it. We're in it because we care about our clients. Because for every guy you read about that gets a big verdict, there are a hundred little fellows that are trying little cases for injured people that you never read about. And they never recover substantial money, but they represent their clients with great vigor and devotion.

I've had several very, very substantial multimillion-dollar results. I represented a little three-year-old girl who was seriously burned as the result of a radiator that exploded. She suffered very serious facial burns, and obviously you can appreciate that a jury would be very sympathetic to her and have no patience with the landlord who simply didn't pay attention to see that the radiator was well maintained. And that resulted in very, very substantial results. Although I can a.s.sure you that the child and the mother would gladly give up those results to avoid the kind of scarring and pain, emotional and physical and otherwise, that the child had.

But what the public doesn't understand is that these cases are often appealed. In other words, if I win a seven-figure result in a trial, the insurance company is going to bring that case to a higher court and can hang that case up for years and years. And ultimately, these cases never, never result in the kind of recovery that you read about in the paper, okay? You read about this McDonald's case where a man recovered an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar award after some McDonald's coffee spilled in his lap and scalded him. What people don't know is that the trial judge reduced that jury verdict. This is a power that a judge has. And even if a judge doesn't do that, the insurance company can appeal it and keep it hanging for years. And then three years later there's a tiny little article that the case ultimately settled for ten cents on the dollar. So there are very few lawyers that are walking away with huge fees. It's just not happening. It hasn't happened for me, and it doesn't happen for my friends. It's just not there. And plaintiff's lawyers will say that's not why we're in it. We're in it because we care about our clients. And, by the way, that's the way I feel about it. [Laughs]

For me the greatest appeal of a trial, and this is really a very embarra.s.sing thing to say, but I'll be truthful about it, is that a trial is a matter of control. You have an adversary who has as many years' experience as you do, who's a partner in a very substantial law firm, who has had many good results-who has great stature. And you and he understand one significant thing: that the lawyer who seizes the control, who imposes his will on the jury, on the judge, and on the entire trial, is the one who more often than not prevails. It's really a t.i.tillating thing. And I must say to you, and maybe this is a function of the fact that I'm in my fifties now, that t.i.tillation is as powerful for me as almost anything that you can conceive of. There's a moment when you're in a courtroom and you can look at the jury and realize that they're with you, that every nuance of what you do, every movement of your head, every question asked, every question left unasked, every pause, every hesitation, every emphasis upon a word is appreciated by that jury. And there's that oneness that you have with the jury. It doesn't always happen. Often it doesn't happen. But when it's perfect and when it's right, it's incredibly t.i.tillating. I guess that's the same feeling that a race car driver has when the race is going his way. When he has that control over the situation.

But for a lawyer, that power is even more exciting because it's a dynamic situation: at any moment it can turn bad and it can turn sour on you. It can be going your way throughout the whole course of the trial, and then one morning you can come into court and ask the wrong question or ask too many, or repeat the same point too many times and lose. So it's a very exciting, thrilling thing for me. I love what I do. But it's also very debilitating and very exhausting. It's emotionally and physically draining. It has resulted in my losing a marriage. And it has had a bad effect upon my health. I sleep three hours a night. My mind is constantly racing about the case that I'm trying. It has made me unfit to be in social settings. I can count my friends on less than a hand because I am frequently very distracted. I'm very nervous. And when I finish one trial I go to the next. And the sad part of my business is that a trial lawyer is only as good as his last trial. You can have tremendous results and then suddenly you lose a case, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm a loser. And I'm a loser until my next trial.

They say, and I believe it's true, that trial lawyers and surgeons have the highest percentage of drug addiction, of alcoholism, of eating disorders, of mental illnesses. I read in the paper every day of a friend that I knew-young, forties, fifties-dropping dead of a heart attack or having a stroke. It's a very stressful thing. It does havoc to your body and to your disposition. My boy has told me already that the last thing in the world he wants to be is a lawyer because his daddy is too nervous. On a weekend when all the other fathers are watching their kids playing soccer and enjoying the moment, my mind is involved with a slip and fall from a stairs in Harlem. Or a doctor who didn't properly diagnose cervical cancer or some other trauma.

So let's be honest with each other. It's vanity, okay? I love my job probably most of all because it appeals to my vanity, my sense of selfworth, which is really based not on one being a good person or a worthy person but upon an exciting circ.u.mstance and the opportunity to accomplish the impossible. To have a result which another lawyer might not get. Getting a million dollars when, say, another trial lawyer may not have been able to get that kind of money. Or examining a witness who is very hard to impeach, and then suddenly you hit pay dirt. That's what I love. That's why I do it.

A lot of money's being made, and clients

and other lawyers do not like to hear it

when somebody says, "Wait a minute."

CORPORATE SECURITIES LAWYER.

John Hart.

I spent five and a half years in the army, was an officer, enjoyed it, but knew I did not want to make it my career. It's a tough life, as I guess everybody knows. The routine- you always keep a bag packed, and your uniform ready to go, and you wait for somebody to call you and say you've just been placed on alert-it wears you down. It's limiting. I guess I wanted to do more than that with my time on earth.

I've always been kind of an intellectually interested person. I like having a wide range of ideas in front of me. I like a high level of intellectual stimulation. In college, I majored in political science and I found that fascinating and, basically, when I knew that I wanted to get out of the army, I decided that my interest naturally had gravitated to thinking that maybe law might be something that would open some interesting opportunities. I did not at that point think that I would be a business lawyer. That was actually far from my mind. I really thought I'd be pursuing a political angle, like working on Capitol Hill, drafting legislation, that kind of thing.

In any event, I got into a pretty good law school, did well there, and when I graduated, I found I had a lot of opportunities, including the chance to go into corporate law. I was interested in that-particularly in the idea of being a litigator, which is a lawyer who argues the cases of corporations in court. That seemed potentially both very stimulating [laughs] and very lucrative. And I was getting married and planning on starting a family, so the money thing was a real concern. So I decided I'd put Capitol Hill on hold for a while and I took a position with a midsized southeastern law firm. It turned out to be a very difficult, basically horrible experience. The firm, in fact, was breaking up-and later broke up-with partners literally going at each other's throats. I actually once stood by and watched two partners grab each other and try to strangle each other in the hallway.

I was devastated. So much so that I was having these nightmares where I actually dreamed that two of the partners I worked for-and this may sound unbelievable, but my wife can be my witness to it- I had nightmares where I'd wake up screaming because I'd dreamed that two skeletons were trying to strangle me. And, in the context, the way the dream was laid out with the office s.p.a.ce and all that, it became immediately apparent to me that the two skeletons in question were two of the partners I worked for, who were the most impossible people that I've encountered in my life. I've since had other dreams about work, and unfortunately most of them aren't very pleasant. But those were the worst nightmares I've ever had, and I had them with great frequency.

So I realized, after a little more than a year at that firm, that I'd made a very bad and possibly disastrous choice and that I had to get out. A friend of mine from law school knew about an opening in this particular office where I am now. They needed someone who had some securities experience, and I had done enough securities law that this friend of mine said, you know, "Talk to them." And that's how it worked out. I've now been in this position for almost six years. So more by chance than by design, I've become a securities lawyer.

This isn't exactly the stimulation I'd hoped for when I signed up for law school. [Laughs] Securities law deals with the legal aspects of raising funds for corporations, partnerships, all types of business ent.i.ties. It involves looking at and crunching a lot of numbers, oftentimes at very late hours of the night, and also being able to take the numbers and translate them into meaningful, logical, readable doc.u.ments. I very seldom, if ever, go into court. I'd say ninety-five percent of my time is spent negotiating and doc.u.menting business deals-contracts, drafting of stock prospectuses and registration statements, and various things like that. There's a lot of negotiation involved. A lot of drafting.

It pays well, and it's challenging-it's very challenging-which can be very rewarding, but I'd say at least half of the time I can barely tolerate it, because in a nutsh.e.l.l, basically, I have no quality of life.

This is a very large law firm. It's one of the world's largest. I work in a small branch office; the main offices are actually pretty far away. I'm a sixth-year a.s.sociate-which means I'm about a year to two years away from making partner-and I'm the most senior a.s.sociate in this office, but I'm not provided with a lot of the materials and support necessary to help me do my job effectively. It's really frustrating in the sense that of everybody who I'm responsible to, none of them are in this office. They are all in our main office, so I don't get any visibility. People a.s.sume, "Well, John isn't doing anything down there." So they tend to dump all kinds of work on me.

I'm at my desk at least thirteen, fourteen hours a day. Sometimes it's much more. I usually get into work around eight A.M. and already have three to four voice-mail messages and sometimes as many as fifteen e-mails, some of which were generated by partners in the other office as late as midnight or one o'clock in the morning. And these aren't "Hi, how are you?" e-mails-they address complicated problems, things our clients want done, and I have to start immediately dealing with them as if they were crises. Which they often are.

Securities law is a very stressful place to be right now. When the stock market is doing well like it has been for most of the last few years, everything is insane, everything is d.a.m.n the torpedoes, full speed ahead, had to have been done yesterday. A lot of money's being made, and clients and other lawyers do not like to hear it when somebody says, "Wait a minute." There's been lots of instances where people will get right into my face and yell at me, and in some cases-more than one-I've had people grab me and try to shake me or, you know, hit me, and I've basically had to take my arms and push them away and say, "You don't want to do this to me." It's not as bad as it was at my first firm, but it's pretty d.a.m.ned awful.

Every day is full of extreme, extreme stress. Even simple-seeming things are filled with stress-like conference calls. Because I'm not in the main office, often I'll spend a lot of time during the day on the telephone, and everybody's in the middle of a discussion, and somebody's saying, "Okay, John, you got that, you're gonna prepare a contract, right? You're gonna get to work on that, right? We're gonna have it by tomorrow morning, right?" And then the conference continues and there's n.o.body here I can turn to and say, "Help me get started." So the end result is usually, five o'clock in the afternoon is when my day really begins, in a lot of cases. Because the calls continue, I'm on interminable conference calls, and it's not really until all the calls die down in the late afternoon that I actually have the time to start drafting, and writing, and trying to remember what occurred four hours or more before, and start putting it to paper. So then I'm here all night.

This situation is compounded by the fact that I do most of my work for one particular partner in our main office. And, to put it mildly, he tends to be fairly distant-he's not what anybody would describe as the world's greatest communicator. He has a tendency of asking me two days after something should have been done, "We did that, didn't we?" And frequently my answer is, "This is the first I've heard about it." It makes things even harder than they already are.

At the same time, I'd say this guy works at least seventy-hour weeks and he expects everybody else to go just as hard as he does. He has a wife and three children, and I think he literally never ever sees them. On the face of things, at least, it doesn't seem to bother him. It's very difficult, though, for younger lawyers who do try to stay in touch with their families when you're working with a guy who has a family, but really, it seems incredibly low on the list of his priorities. I can't tell you the number of times I've given up holidays to be in the office-basically to please this guy-and then paid for it, you know, with a screaming fight with my wife. Not to mention the exhaustion that comes with never getting a real vacation.

I think, in certain respects, this job is tougher than the army. It's just very harsh. And I'm not alone in thinking this. There's not a single corporate a.s.sociate, or for that matter, a lot of junior partners, in this business that I've talked with, who-if you get them over a beer or a drink where they're feeling fairly comfortable and secure and able to talk to you about the situation-would not admit to you that is an extremely frustrating life to be in. And that oftentimes they would be happier, they think, if they actually were the client, say in business or in banking, or plumbing, or anything-as opposed to being a lawyer. [Laughs]

Basically, the reason I keep at it, and this is going to sound kind of strange, is that my wife is from this area, she is very happy to be here, and this is the only firm of its type here that does the kind of law that I have now trained for and worked in over the last seven years of my life. It would be very difficult to break out. It would be impossible to break out and do this at another firm in town, so I find myself basically saying, "Well, as long as I can do this to keep the family together, that's what I'm going to do." That does not, however, keep me from looking around, including trying to convince my wife we need to move away.

It's a deal with the devil. And it's eating me up. I used to be the kind of person who believed that even though bad things happened, and there were bad people, that most people were generally positive. That most people, given the right circ.u.mstances, usually would do the right thing. Now I'm not so sure. I think people are a lot more self-interested than I used to think they were. I've just seen too much.

I had a client track me down at the hospital and curse me out when my wife was about to give birth. I told him what was going on, you know, "I'm at the hospital, my wife, you know, a baby-can I call you later?" And he wouldn't stop. What kind of person does that?

I'm not a happy guy. I'm much more short-tempered than I was seven years ago. I find I have a lot less patience in dealing with general mundane situations after you've been working twenty-plus hours a day. A lot less patience. I don't think it's helped my family life, dealing with my wife and my child-or my friends for that matter. But the family's the big problem. There's an awful lot of lip service that's given by a lot of big law firms to family time and quality of life, and family values and all that, but I see very little really being done to make a difference with people who either have families or would like to have families. As a result, I think a lot of lawyers' families are really struggling.

The only thing I really feel like I totally enjoy at this point in my life is running. It's very difficult to depressurize when you've been in the kind of environment that I'm in every day, even-you know, I have like a reasonable drive home, reasonable being fifteen to twenty minutes-and even then, it's just not enough to depressurize. But running clears my head. It always has. So even though it means sometimes I may be taking runs at, like, eleven or twelve o'clock at night, I bring my running gear with me to work and, when I've had a bad day, I just go out and take a jog for like forty-five minutes to an hour just to try to get transitioned out. Lately, though, after a really tough day, I find even that that's not enough.

The area I live in is pretty quiet at night, it's safe. So I just run around, sometimes, for as long as it takes to feel okay. And sometimes that's a really long time.

Courtrooms are isolating, scary,

chaotic.

SOCIAL WORKER.

Elizabeth MacLean.

I work for a public defender's office in the South Bronx, providing representation and counseling for criminal defendants in the Supreme and Criminal courts of New York State. My clients are people who've been charged with everything from homicide to rape, s.e.xual offenses, domestic violence, drug sales, drug possession, and so on. Mostly drugs.

My role is to advocate for them in any way possible. I'm part of their legal team. I do everything from trying to get the handcuffs a little less tight, to going to visit them in a mental inst.i.tution, to pet.i.tioning the judge or D.A. to try and get them into an alternative-toincarceration program, like a drug treatment program. Sometimes I help their families as well, say by maybe getting a relative into a jobtraining program.

Our office is located in one of the "nicer" parts of the South Bronx. It's a downtownish area. We're right across from one of the central welfare offices for the city, a couple of methadone clinics, a couple of bodegas, a big mall. And we're about a block away from the criminal courthouse and the family courthouse, which are in one building that kind of dominates everything around here. I describe it as the Death Star. It's made of gray cement, and it's pretty much windowless. It's a very imposing exterior, which is also what it's like inside. The courtrooms are isolating, scary, chaotic. Just really meant to intimidate people. We-the defendants' lawyers and social workers-often talk about the physical and emotional strain involved in just being in the courthouse.

The court officers consider us bleeding hearts. They look down on us. We're shat on, basically. You know, because the D.A.s, the cops, the judges, all the courtroom personnel, they all think we work for the sc.u.m, the slime. We work with the evil people. We're closely equated with our clients, in that this person is evil and therefore you're defending evil. They seem to forget the whole civil rights argument, the whole Const.i.tution, the idea that we might love our country because everyone has the right to a fair trial and counsel and all that.

At the moment, I have thirty-seven active cases. Meaning that I am actively trying to do something for thirty-seven different defendants. Then I probably have fifteen other cases where I check in on the person once a month, maybe because they've been incarcerated and I'm helping them get visits with their kids in foster care. So I have about fifty cases total. Which is not that bad. [Laughs] At my last job, I had a hundred and twenty cases.

I get my cases from the defense lawyers here. They go to the arraignments and decide which defendants need social workers. And they come back and say, "Hey, Elizabeth, I've got this case, I'd like to see if we can get this guy into an in-patient drug program." Or whatever. So I talk with the lawyer a little bit about the defense objectives, the time frame, et cetera, and then I call the Department of Corrections and ask for the client to be produced for a visit with me. They are supposed to be produced by the next day, but at least half the time they are not, because Corrections messes up and sends them to the wrong borough or just doesn't send them at all. Actually, a lot of the times, they'll lie and say that the client refused to come. Because, again, this system is f.u.c.king totally hostile to these people.

And I'm sorry I'm swearing all the time. But that's another thing-incredible swearing-you have to learn to be okay with that. It's the language of the court.

But, anyway, regardless of Corrections, eventually I get to see the client, and I explain who I am and then I do kind of a psychosocial interview. I explore their family, schooling, employment history, religious history, drug history. I ask them if they've been in the army. Basically, I'm trying to get a sense of the context of this person's life that has led them to be involved in whatever incident led to their arrest. And I'm looking for things I can pull on that are sympathetic.

After the interview, I do investigations about the facts of the client's life, the facts about the crime, and I compile a report to show that, okay, this is someone who's had a rough time. These are the reasons they should be given an alternative to incarceration, or get probation, or whatever. Everyone in the court is like, "Give us your sob story." But we try and craft really careful and thoughtful reports. Because, you know, we're trying to keep people out of jail. We don't believe that incarceration works.

For example, I'm dealing with a seventy-nine-year-old man who has sixty-nine violations for driving with a suspended license. And he's supporting a family of something like fourteen-including grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He's the only one working. He looks like he's about to keel over dead, he falls asleep in my office sometimes, but he's doing demolition work in areas where there is no public transportation. And he's like, "f.u.c.k if I'm not going to drive." And he keeps getting arrested, so he's looking at a year in jail. So I'm writing about his way of seeing things, culturally and in terms of his generation. I mean, he's this huge old guy, raised in the South, nicest man you could ever meet, you know? An old, very traditional African-American man who believes that he has to work all the time to support his family. There is no reason in the world to incarcerate this person.

My results are not usually very good. Success for me is like-it's different in every case. With this older man, I'm hoping he'll just get a fine. And I'm reasonably optimistic about that. But with most cases, well, sometimes it's we get the defendant life instead of two lives, so maybe there's a chance of parole. Or maybe it's like he's going away for thirty years, but there's been a therapeutic breakthrough. Or we get the cla.s.s dropped from a felony to a misdemeanor. Or sometimes it's [laughs] well, he jumped bail and went AWOL to the Dominican Republic and that's probably a better thing since this was a crazy case against him. It completely varies. But, I mean, obviously success is a pretty qualified word here.

It's very frustrating for everybody involved. I mean, it's just incredibly-we get yelled at constantly by these people, the defendants and their families, just because it's so intensely frustrating and unfair. I have to take it and try to sort of create a shield for myself. And understand that it has to be let out on somebody, and it might as well be the defense team-at least here it's a safe place. But sometimes it's very painful.

I've been working with a fourteen-year-old young man who started his life at age four when his mother shot his father to death in front of him. She was a victim of domestic violence for years and the kid often witnessed this. She was pregnant at the time, eight months. Her husband hit her so badly that he perforated her abdomen and she had guts hanging out over her belly. It was a real bad scene. She was put in jail, but later acquitted. The kid was hospitalized at age four. And that's where he began. So he's had a lot of problems in school, a lot of problems with behavior.

That basically sets the stage for the "crime," which was he and his friend had a toy gun and they jumped into a livery cab and pretended to hold it up. So he's charged with robbery in the first degree and possession of a weapon. Even though it's a toy gun, there's a clause in the law that allows him to be charged with having a weapon. He's fourteen and usually this case would be tried in the family court, which is more rehabilitation and treatment oriented, but the charge means he's going to criminal court which is more of a punishment court. And he's looking at six years in an adult correctional facility. Attica, Elmira, or something like that.

The judge is supposed to be the "sensitive" judge in the system and he's just an a.s.shole. He says things like, "I don't think treatment works for these kids," and just sends them away. He's been really rude to my client-demeaning him, demeaning us. The kid is now locked up and he's shackled, with his hands in protective mittens, 'cause one time he got really mad and acted out. I mean, f.u.c.k, he's fourteen years old! And he's in court handcuffed with this cloth around his hands so that he can't move.

This kid, he's just really angry now. He's angry at his mother for things that have gone on between them. He's angry at the judge who's a hard-a.s.s. And he's angry at us, he's yelling at us. And his mother is giving us a lot of anger, too. She keeps saying, "Well, why can't you get him into a hospital?" Or this or that, and we've spent so much time processing with her-this is what we do, this is what the options are, and this is the case. I've probably spent more time on this case in the last three months than any other case. It makes me angry that the options are just not there-there's lockup, there's psychiatric hospitalization-and he doesn't need either of those things. He needs something in between and I can't get it for him.

To see people treated that way, it's horrible. I mean when I think about this kid going to prison-I mean, I'm just so sad and I know-I'm angry, and I was just about to make a sarcastic comment like, "Well, you know that's the way it goes," or "f.u.c.k it," or whatever. Because it's too sad. I mean, it's sad, but I almost can't verbally admit that.

You have to compartmentalize. That's really the key. I think that's really what I do. On this particular case, the fourteen-year-old kid, he's getting sentenced today. And I think I've kind of shut myself off from it-at least emotionally. To a certain extent you really have to do that. I mean, you need to have a certain connection with the client to do good social work, to do good counseling, but you also have to have the ability to give yourself s.p.a.ce and distance so you don't go nuts.

I actually really love this job. [Laughs] It may not always sound like it, but it really fits me. I'm argumentative, I like to yell, I like to negotiate. And I believe very, very strongly in what we're doing here. And I like getting these people help when I can and-even when I can't-I like being on their side. This is the perfect setting for me.

Most of the things I see, I don't really consider crimes. The bulk of my cases are drug related, people that are either selling or using. And I don't see it as this person is evil cause they're dealing, even if they're dealing to kids. Sure, it's not great, but I just don't look at it that way. Maybe I've trained myself to look at it that way, I don't know. I think they're misdiagnosed by the criminal justice system. I think they're the result of larger structural problems in the South Bronx and America. They're poverty problems. And so I just look at it differently. My opinion is this is ridiculous that these people are being charged and incarcerated like this.

Real crimes are thought out, like taking someone's credit card and using it illegally. Like cold-blooded murder when you're planning to do it and you do it. Not being mentally ill and not being on drugs. Rape is a real crime, domestic violence is a real crime, but so much of what we get is drug related and just f.u.c.king bulls.h.i.t stuff. I mean it isn't bulls.h.i.t, but it is bulls.h.i.t. That's how I look at it, anyway. That's my worldview. And I'm very comfortable with it.

But it's hard, you know? For all the obvious reasons and then for a lot of other reasons, too, it's isolating. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a very, very different kind of neighborhood from this. It's quite an affluent neighborhood. Most of my friends live there and they don't necessarily want to hear about what I do. They certainly don't ask about it. Sometimes I talk about how I see people getting stopped and searched in the middle of the street here in the South Bronx, illegally. And I talk about the incredible civil rights violations that are going on all over the place, and they're like, "Yeah, but you know there's problems up there, and they need to-" There's just no vision of what's actually going on up here and no ability, I guess emotional ability, to hear about it. I've really been shocked about that.

And my family, well, I don't really talk to them about my job very much. I grew up mostly in northern Maine. It's not so different from the South Bronx as you might think. The poverty up around there is very similar-it's not urban poverty, they can go out and shoot animals to eat so there's not as much immediate need for money to buy things, but when I go out here and do a home visit in some of these huge buildings, these projects, there's no electricity, sometimes there's no water, the toilet doesn't work. It's not that different than my neighbors up in Maine. But in Maine, people's behavior is not criminalized as much. There is law, and people are doing the same things-they're stealing from each other. But they're not all going to jail in huge numbers and there aren't the racial problems. When I talk to my family about what I see here, they're just like: "How do you do it? How do you do it?"