Depending

Since before we moved to Madison, I have been seeking employment with the Public Defender's Office. You can read more about my career choice here. In my most recent interview, they asked me to prepare a five minute story to tell (trial lawyers must, above all else, be good story tellers). This is the story I shared....

I first saw Tobias Carrington when he limped into the courtroom. He was the defendant in the murder trial I had been assigned to attend as part of my summer internship. Tobias looked young, barely a man, and was easily recognizable because one side of his body had limited mobility, almost as if he'd suffered a stroke. Then there was the huge dent in the side of his shaved head, accompanied by a large scar.


According to the prosecution, Tobias was at his grandfather's apartment one afternoon when he went on a shooting spree. He shot his grandfather's friend, shot his grandfather, then turned the gun on himself. Only the first of the three victims' wounds was fatal. The grandfather wasn't much of a witness, however, since he had been drinking wine, doing crack and smoking marijuana all day and was more than a little inebriated at the time of the shooting.

The trial took four days, the jury deliberated for less than two hours, and Tobias went to prison for over twenty years, more time than he had yet been alive.

I had heard around the office that Tobias had a court-appointed lawyer. It wasn't a Public Defender, but a private lawyer paid by the state because the defendant could not afford to hire an attorney. Upon first glimpse, the lawyer reminded me a little of an older version of Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch. The resemblance ended there. He wandered aimlessly through a disorganized opening statement, based principally on the idea that Tobias had been shot in the top of the head, not your typical mode of suicide. It wasn't a bad argument, just based more on conventional wisdom than actual evidence in the case. I became increasingly uncomfortable as the attorney stumbled through cross-examination and fumbled with the introduction of evidence. As he ignored dozens of potential objections, I began to wonder whether this lawyer was even familiar with the word "hearsay." Though I only had two years of law school experience, I knew enough to be fully aware that the prosecutor was getting away with a lot. Even when the defense attorney did recognize that something was amiss, he lacked the ability to keep the evidence out of court.

While the prosecutor had a raft of circumstantial evidence, there were several loose ends that he never tied up. There was evidence that another person came into the apartment, shot all three of the men there, and left before the police arrived. But, the defense attorney was unable to highlight this evidence sufficiently. In fact, he struggled with almost all of the evidence to which the prosecutor decided to object. The most important moment of the trial, for me, happened toward its close. A forensic pathologist (the sort of crime scene expert you might see on CSI) testified about his inspection of Tobias's "self-inflicted" wound. Through inspection of the wound and various tests, he had determined that the wound could not have been sustained from a gun held any less than three feet from the defendant's head. In other words, when the gun that shot Tobias went off, it was at least three feet away from his head. So, unless he had extraordinarily long arms for someone so short, Tobias could not have shot himself.

The problem, of course, is that this testimony was given late in the hot afternoon on the third day of trial. The expert testimony was somewhat complex and dry, everyone was tired, and I'm not sure anyone but me was even paying attention. The defense attorney did not ask his witness to explain the significance of this evidence, nor did he do so himself in closing arguments. In fact, he never mentioned it again. He did not even have the witness repeat the information for emphasis. It dropped off the radar entirely, and probably did not come up during the less than two hours the jury spent deciding that Tobias was guilty. Two hours to erase two decades of a man's life.

I wanted so much, in all my inexperience, to stand up and give the closing argument, connecting for the jury all of the pieces that created reasonable doubt as to who exactly pulled the trigger that day. But it was left to a stumbling, wandering rehashing of the same ineffective arguments from the defense attorney, who didn't seem to have planned what evidence he was going to introduce, let alone how he would summarize it at the close of trial. Was I convinced that Tobias didn't do it? Not completely. But I was also not convinced that he did, at all.

As the trial was nearing its end, I got in an elevator with two women I had seen in the courtroom all week. Recognizing how much I had been there as well, one of them asked who I was, what was my connection to the trial, and was I a reporter? I explained that I was an intern with the Public Defender's Office and that my supervisor had asked me to attend the trial because we were preparing for a trial with a few of the same expert witnesses and some similar evidence. I then asked what her connection was with the trial. "That's my son," she told me. "I'm Tobias's mother." My heart ached for her, and I didn't know what to say. But, I'll never forget what she told me next. She looked me in the eye and said, "When you're a lawyer someday, you be a good one. We depend on you. You're all we have."

While I had been thinking about it for months, that conversation tipped the scale toward me seeking work as a Public Defender. I want to do it, not because everyone is innocent and not even for the Tobias Carringtons of the world. I will do it for those who, like Tobias' mother, love the defendant, guilty or not, and need to know that, guilty or not, they have had the best defense available.