The Criminal Defense Division is divided into boroughs. I worked in the Manhattan office, so we represented clients who were accused of committing crimes in Manhattan, regardless of where they lived. In a typical year, Legal Aid will represent over 85% of the accused in New York City. From my first day on the job, I was instantly impressed with the quality of the legal representation afforded to clients of Legal Aid. If you talk to an average person you meet on the street, there is a general misconception that because Legal Aid lawyers are overworked (which is true) and incompetent (which is completely false), criminal defendants really do not get any defense at all. While I am in no position to know whether that is true or not outside New York City, in NYC nothing could be further from the truth.
When I accompanied lawyers to their initial interview with clients in the holding cell behind arraignment court, I was struck by how much interest they took in their clients’ situations. They would carefully listen as a client explained events, and methodically took down all relevant facts. Then the attorneys would ask for witnesses who could corroborate the client’s story, getting every last bit of identifying information about the potential witness so that he or she could be located. The lawyers would subpoena all sorts of evidence – surveillance tapes, incident reports, etc. – and pour over them in detail.
When I would walk down the hallway of our office, I would see lawyers intently reading the statutes and definitions of New York State criminal code, parsing every word in an attempt to demonstrate how their clients’ alleged actions did not fit the definition of the crime of which they were accused. I would hear lawyers pleading with the assistant district attorney, making persuasive arguments and using negotiating tact, to send their client to a drug treatment or therapy program instead of prison. I would estimate that on average (and summer is the busiest time of the year for crime, so my perception might be a little skewed) at any given time a Legal Aid criminal defense lawyer has 80 open cases, meaning they are somewhere in the process between arraignment and sentencing. But when you see a Legal Aid lawyer working on behalf of a client, at that moment in time, you would think he or she had only one client. Such was the work ethic, knowledge of the criminal justice system, dedication, and passion for their work.
My role at Legal Aid was that of investigative intern. Basically, I was a detective for the defendant. Because as a society we have the police and police detectives to gather evidence and witnesses that incriminate the defendant, it is only fair that the defendant has someone working on his behalf to gather witnesses and evidence that might be exonerating, or that raise any doubts about the reliability of the evidence against that defendant.
I worked on a huge variety of cases – from petty shoplifting and vending without a license to rape and sexual assault, from possession of marijuana to selling large quantities of heroin, from minor assault to armed robbery. The sheer number and variety of cases I was exposed to was a very educational introduction to the criminal justice system. I was assigned to investigate cases for one attorney, although I investigated a few cases for several other attorneys in the office, as well. I liked being paired with one attorney because my work was constantly reviewed, evaluated, and critiqued so I could improve my skills as the summer progressed and become more productive and valuable to the office. Over the course of the 12 weeks, I probably investigated 100 cases.
To illustrate what my responsibilities were, let me describe a typical case – a robbery at a bodega late at night in which the defendant was apprehended 12 hours after the crime occurred. The key to a fruitful investigation is starting as soon as possible – that is when people’s memories are clearest and it is least likely that they have changed addresses or phone numbers. First, I would look at the case file and read the criminal court complaint against the client – this might be only 2 days after he was arrested and charged. The criminal court complaint says what the defendant is charged with, in what way the defendant’s actions constituted the crime with which he was charged, where the alleged crime took place, and the name of the complaining witness (i.e. the person who was robbed, or the person who called the police.)
I was then ready to investigate. I had the name of the complaining witness. I would go to the bodega where the robbery occurred and ask around for the complaining witness. Let’s suppose I found him and he was an employee at the deli counter. I would flash a Legal Aid identification card and say, “Hello, my name is Robert Rogers, I’m with Legal Aid, I’d like to ask you about…”At this point, there could be several responses from cooperation to refusal to talk. Usually, the witnesses that I encountered did not have a firm understanding of the criminal justice system.
I found that the best way to get a witness to answer your questions was to just let them gab at first. Then I would go back to the beginning and ask very detailed, pointed questions to get a clear understanding of what happened and try to find consistencies and inconsistencies in the story. In this type of case, I would want a detailed physical description of the perpetrator to see if it matched up with the client’s appearance. I would want a detailed chronology of the night the incident occurred and a list of other people who were in the store at the same time. I would write all of this information into paragraph form in the first person, so that I would have a statement from the witness in his or her own words. Then I would ask the witness to read it over and sign it. Now I had a very valuable tool for the client’s defense – the complaining witness had provided a specific version of events 48 hours after an event. As part of this investigation, I would also look around the store for surveillance cameras. If I saw one, I would note its location and come back later with a subpoena to have the videotape sent to the lawyer I worked for to review. I would also pursue statements from other witnesses mentioned by the complaining witness. If the complaining witness told me a frequent customer was in the store at the time of the robbery, I would try to locate that customer and try to get a statement, or at least get informal information.
One thing about working for criminal defense – you have to be comfortable representing people against whom the evidence of their guilt is overwhelming. I certainly dealt with many of these cases. In one particularly hideous example, there were five eyewitnesses to a stepfather’s sexual assault of his stepdaughter. In other cases, clients were caught right on camera shoplifting, or they sold drugs to an undercover police officer who immediately arrested them. People would ask me, why do you even try to defend these people? The answer is not because I want to live in a society where rapists, robbers and drug dealers are running around free. The answer is that it’s because I believe in the system. In my opinion, what makes the USA ‘American’ are the constitutional rights afforded to every citizen. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Every criminal defendant has a right to a lawyer who will strenuously attempt to raise doubt about his guilt. We cannot disregard these rights for any individual at any time without jeopardizing all of the others for all of us forever. Defense counsel should vigorously poke any holes, raise any inconsistencies, and point out any contradictions in the prosecution’s case. The prosecution should lay out all the evidence they have. And in the end, let the jury decide. Everyone – prosecutor, defender, judge, police, jury – has a role to play and if each fulfills that role to the utmost of their ability, then justice will prevail.
Nevertheless, it is particularly satisfying when you find strong exonerating evidence for a client who you genuinely believe deep down in your gut is not guilty. In one case, the client was charged with using a stolen credit card to buy a few hundred dollars’ worth of goods at various stores. The complaining witness was a respectable businessman who had been on a business trip to New York. He claimed that he lost his credit card on the sidewalk late at night, realized it was missing when he got into a taxicab, called the credit card company to cancel the card when he got back to his hotel, and filed a police report in the morning. He said he had no idea who had stolen the card. At first this seemed quite plausible. The client was a middle-aged prostitute who had spent a third of her adult life in jail, and had a history of mental illness and substance abuse. She claimed that she had his permission to use the card because he had bought her services and did not have any cash on him, so he had given her the card and told her to send it back to him when she was done in an envelope that he had addressed. Except she could not produce the envelope. Her story seemed totally implausible. But that’s why you investigate. From the beginning, there were elements of his story that did not make sense to me. If he had called to cancel the card, shouldn’t it have been cancelled immediately? Why was she caught in the third store she went into the next morning, and not the first? If he had dropped his card on the sidewalk where he said he did, then how did she know what hotel he was staying at? I realized that the key question was when, if at all, did he report the cards missing, and did he report them as “missing” or “stolen”? If he really called the credit card company late at night, her story made no sense. But if he waited until the next morning, maybe it was because he realized what a stupid thing he had done the night before and regretted his actions hours later. After subpoenaing the phone records of the credit card company, we learned that he had never made any call at all. The card had never been reported missing. The client had been arrested because she could not produce ID to verify she was the cardholder and a store clerk became suspicious and called the police –not because the police were tracking a stolen card. The man who seemed like a model citizen had lied, and the woman who seemed totally unbelievable had told the truth. She was released from jail.
It is very rewarding to have a summer job in which you work to achieve just outcomes on matters of guilt and innocence, freedom and incarceration. I am now a junior economics major. In addition to law, I have a strong interest in the economics of healthcare policy. I plan to study the issue and research a senior thesis that adds constructive information to one of the biggest domestic policy dilemmas of our time: how to give first rate healthcare to all Americans without breaking the bank. If possible, I would like to go directly to law school after college. After a summer of seeing many parts of many different trials and some appellate proceedings, I find the actual drama of the courtroom more thrilling than ever, and want that to be a central part of my career. I want to litigate cases in front of juries, and I also hope that I can argue cases that shape the law before appellate courts.