Posted on January 14th, 2009 by Dan
You can legally have sex with each other in Washington state.
This is a thing that comes up over and over again in the news, because sex = news, and people love to speculate hypothetically in such situations. If a twenty-three year old high school teacher has sex with an eighteen year old student, is it a case of felony sexual misconduct, or just icky and unethical?
In Washington, at least, the answer is the latter. The teacher can and will still be fired, and is likely to lose his license to teach, but he’s not likely to go to jail or have to register as a sex offender.
Predictably, some state legislators are all a-twitter with righteous indignation at the prospect of grown-ups being able to have sex with one another without their input. From the article -
Some state legislators are set on changing the law. On Monday, six state representatives introduced legislation that would make it a crime punishable by a mandatory minimum of five years in prison for a teacher to have sex with a student up to age 21, as long as the teacher is five years older than the student and at the same school.
Bear in mind that this isn’t restricting a school’s ability to fire the teacher in question, or even the state board of education’s ability to yank his teaching license. It just says that an adult shouldn’t be charged with a felony for having sex with another adult. You and I are still free to think to ourselves, that guy is a fucking creep. Just not a fucking criminal.
 (and, in case you’re wondering, the representative behind the push is this guy, whom we’ve determined, using our complex series of facial analysis algorithms and the intuitive talents of a witch doctor who operates a sliding-scale clinic down on E. Springdale Rd, spends most Friday nights trying to score crystal meth in Walla Walla with the local evangelical minister while yearning to meet Larry Craig in a bathroom somewhere.)
At least here in Texas, our legislators are busy working on things that make some real sense, like finally getting some damn college football playoffs going.
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Posted on December 31st, 2008 by Dan
If you want to get a feel for what rebellious lawyering is all about, check this out. It’s a tribute to Sharon Levine, a Houston-based criminal defense attorney, who passed away last week at the age of 38 after a battle with Hodgkins disease. It’s by Paul Kennedy, a Houston DWI lawyer.
One thing that the attorneys at our firm are good at explaining is that a guilty plea, even if it carries no serious jail time, probation, or fines, is still a very serious thing. A lot of lawyers aren’t big on explaining that in detail. Well, hell – some of these people are playing a numbers game, and if the client’s happy with a shitty deal, there’s no reason to get a better one.
A bad lawyer would have seen the case Kennedy describes as a major victory right out the gate. The client, two brothers who were charged with evading and resisting arrest for videotaping the police as they served a warrant at a neighboring house. They were arrested and charged and the case went to trial, where it ended with a hung jury. The prosecutor offered a deal – no jail time, no community service, no probation, and a one dollar fine in exchange for a guilty plea. The whole mess could have been resolved for a dollar.
Levine didn’t go that route. She advised her clients not to take the deal and to go back to trial. The second time around, the jury found them innocent.
There’s a chain from there that led to counter-suits, the downfall of a corrupt DA, more lawsuits, and other things, but that’s all after the fact. The thing started with a criminal defense lawyer who understood the difference between getting the client the easiest deal and getting the right one.
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Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Dan
You’ve already met David. He’s a lawyer. My name’s Dan. I’m not. I work in the office.
I didn’t realize that I was passionate about criminal defense until after I started working for a criminal defense firm. I had a background doing things (organizing, demonstrating, mischief, maybe some illegal entry or vandalism, etc) for causes, but as someone who’d always been lucky enough to not be arrested, it never occurred to me that if it ever got me into trouble, my only real line of defense would be a lawyer. Your justifications for whatever happened only goes so far – you need an advocate.
Criminal defense, at its best (as opposed to its worst, which is a topic worth discussing later), is the art of providing context. When a person’s arrested, the sequence of events leading up to it are stripped of context and presented as cold facts. The raw story on people can read pretty roughly:
- Guy fails to show up for probation for two years
- Gets picked up on three public intoxications
- Tests positive for marijuana and alcohol
- Fails to pay fees or complete conditions of probation
If you show that to a judge, generally revoking the probation is a no-brainer. But the context behind it changes the math. In the case above, the guy in question had been put on probation and screwed it up immediately – but before they motioned to revoke it, which would have landed him in jail, his family sent him off to Dallas, where he didn’t have any criminal contacts, to live with his aunt, who could help straighten him out. And it worked. He got a job, cleaned up, and lived a good life. He spent a year and a half working and staying out of trouble up there…
…and then they finally got around to dealing with the outstanding motion to revoke his probation.
The first things the judge saw, and the first thing the prosecutor was interested in, were those bullet points up there. It took a good lawyer – and yeah, maybe a rebellious one* – to provide the proper context for what had happened. And when they did that, the math changed. A judge who insisted that the guy would spend years in the Texas Department of Corrections instead considered the man as a whole human being, and made a decision to terminate the probation early, so he could continue living a rehabilitated life.
If you’ve got a background in progressive causes, then the people you’re fighting for are the people who deserve a little bit of justice. When I tell my friends from those circles that I work for a law firm, this is how they knew we’re still on the same side.
(Tupac said – and he was paraphrasing revolutionaries and radicals from Paulo Friere to Che Guevara here – that every revolutionary act is an act of love. It’d follow, then, that demonstrating enough love for people to treat them like whole men and women, when everyone else wants to reduce them to a rap sheet, is a revolutionary act. Says Tupac. And me.)
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Posted on December 12th, 2008 by David
Everything you see in the yellow pages explains how lawyers have earned our miserable reputation: the only thing lawyers seem to care about is whether or not you were hurt in a car accident. In our area of practice, criminal defense lawyers are hated by the general public simply for what we do. We are treated as second class citizens by the civil bar, and we are politically powerless and poorly organized because lack the financial resources of corporate law firms. Even if you rise to the level of being perceived as a good criminal defense attorney, you are viewed as prostitutes or martial aids in that your function in society is reduced to one simple mission: getting people off.
We are working to crush these perceptions.
Make no mistake: that is exactly what we try to do when the government has wrongly arrested our client, trumped up charges, or tries to convict on cases where no crime has occurred. However, in the vast majority of cases where our client may have done something to run afoul of the law, we spend much of our effort not trying to get the client off, but trying to get the client back on. Sometimes this involves referrals to therapists, sometimes it means going to a substance abuse evaluation, and other times it’s just talking to a counselor. Whatever the reason, we believe it is our job to help find a solution.
However, many lawyers have become disillusioned, disenfranchised, and disengaged from the rich tradition of our profession. Many lawyers also suffer from burnout, alcoholism, and poor health because of the current state of the adversarial litigation practice in our society.
We intend to resurrect the practice of law as a heroic endeavor.
We are fully aware that we are not the first group of lawyer-as-do-gooder to profession these revolutionary ideas. As law professor Gerald Lopez writes in the introduction to his book, Rebellious Lawyering, this has been happening for decades:
Over the next two decades my search for individuals who approach activist law practice from a different angle has turned up more of the same basic mix that Harvard Law School offered some twenty years ago. Most people doing progressive work have too often called to mind that first wave of lawyers who arrived in East L.A. during my teenage years, no doubt reflecting the law school and post-law school training they received. They have never much understood the relationship between what they do and what they hoped to change. And,worse still, they don’t seem much bothered by this lack of understanding or, for that matter, very willing to change.
Disappointingly, that’s been true of many professional and lay people working in and around every sort of workplace. Every sort of non-profit law office, from rural areas to metropolitan centers. Every sort of government job, from city and county administration to state legislatures and national bureaucracies. Every sort of for-profit law firm, from “hand-to-mouth” solo practitioners to resource-rich corporate attorneys. Every sort of law school and policy think tank, from low-prestige operations to elite institutions. Many people with progressive ambitions have tended only to buttress what they tried (at least initially) to reconstruct, even when they mean to do something radically different with their lives.” (emphasis added)
Here’s what we’re trying to do differently. We know that we’re not going to change the world with our little law firm in Austin. We know that we won’t be able to takeover the Capitol with the radical notion that social workers should replace probation officers, and that criminal defense is more important to societal health than criminal prosecution.
And we’re okay with that.
Our addition to the rebellious lawyers that were our predecessors is that we will make life better for one client at a time. It is our goal to take risks, to work hard for justice, and work tirelessly for our clients but to never lose sight of the fact that our first priority is to our families, our mental and physical health, and to our own happiness. This makes us better lawyers who are able to provide better service to our clients, and in turn, creates a working environment that makes it possible for us to do our best work and shake things up in the process.
In fact, our business model is what helped inspire dramatic changes in the way that we represent clients. From implementing strategic assessments to using social workers to doing a mitigation investigation in every case, we are constantly in a state of self-improvement.
Lawyers who are happy. Clients who are happy. If these are the benefits of rebellion from the norm, get ready to see your lawyer walk into court with a mohawk.
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