Adventures with the Public Defender

I'm not going to say what city I'm in. I'm not going to say what law school I go to. But let it be known: an internship with the public defender is an object lesson in the fact that huge numbers of people are completely out of their minds. The public we defend routinely show up for their hearings drunk and/or high, and wearing--instead of the "Your honor, I've turned over a new leaf" outfits we told them to wear--long underwear shirts full of gaping holes, lycra halter tops designed for maximum boob display, or Scarface t-shirts depicting Al Pacino machine-gunning a crowd of people. As the old saying goes: "Dress for the job you want."

One morning the other week I arrived at work and mentioned to one of the lawyers a spectacle I'd seen on the way in: "I just saw this disheveled-looking guy doing handstands against the outside wall of the courthouse." He answered, "Sounds like one of our clients." That's the light side of the job. The dark side is that plenty of the people we represent are out of their minds in the sense that they consider it perfectly normal to shoot someone for looking at them the wrong way, to rape and slaughter a neighbor just because the opportunity arose ("And I'd been drinkin' forties all day, so you know...But I do regret it, most definitely.") Very, very, very occasionally we get a client who actually happens to be innocent: oh joy! But the other cases, well, they make a hell of a good argument in favor of law-abiding people getting concealed-carry gun permits. Just in case, y'know.

But it's hilarious at times. To illustrate, I offer the following testimony, overheard last month during the murder trial of Antoine "Wootchie" Jackson (names have been changed to protect the innocent-until- proven-guilty). On the stand is a witness for the prosecution, a fifty-something black man. Skinny. Gray hair. This witness is being hassled by a bad defense attorney who's trying to attack his credibility by dredging up every dubious incident the man's been involved in during his fifty-odd years on this earth, but she keeps mixing up her facts, which is driving him nuts. It finally provokes the following outburst from the stand:

"I did NOT shoot Wootchie inna head! Wootchie got shot inna head in, uh, in, uh, [name of local ghetto]. I shot Wootchie inna leg!"

During the above testimony Wootchie was sitting over at the defense table, looking just fine considering how many gunshot wounds he's received in his lifetime. The witness went on to repair his impugned reputation by explaining, "I was inVOLVED in a disPUTE with my WIFE at that time, an' she pull a gun, an' Wootchie attemp to come between us. During the struggle the gun discharged. So I shot Wootchie inna laig, but I drove him to the HOS-pi-tal, an I GAVE the gun to the PO-lice."

He's on the stand shrugging and shaking his head, as if to say, Why are you hassling me about this minor incident that I handled correctly? He adds that his shooting Wootchie in no way damaged their friendship: "We was friends. We was so close some people thought we was more than friends." I'm thinking, wow, I guess people in the ghetto are more progressive than I thought, but he clarifies: "People thought we was brothers." What ended up damaging their friendship was a later incident in which Wootchie robbed and murdered the witness's sister. Yeah, I can see how that might impact a friendship.