Another Change

And so I drag myself back to the blog. 

Actually I’ve been pretty busy since I last wrote.  Good, non-work things have happened:

I saw a friend in a Shakespeare In The Park version of Macbeth. 

I took Shining Black Bess down to Everglades City and got some stone crabs.

I’ve been a key element in my softball team losing all of our recent games. 

Old friends The Captain and Gabriel came down to visit, bearing Gabriel’s new CD  (which is quite awesome – a sort of rap/soul/reggae fusion that works.)  We ate Hatian (with the Unpronounceable Name) and Cuban, and hung out with some gators. 

The visit was too short, alas.

I’ve also been generally out – doing not enough bike riding, but: hanging out on Key Biscane for a birthday cookout; finally meeting The Sensibly Hellish Lawyer’s fiancé; meeting friends on Lincoln Road and Tobacco Road .

I haven’t read anything worth reporting on recently – Although I just started Hyperion, which seems promising.

Other than that it’s just been way too much work, not enough bicycling, not enough cooking.  I shouldn’t get a sense of personal accomplishment when I do my laundry on the weekend, but that’s pretty much where a brutal work schedule has left me.  Of course, it makes the few fun hours (see above) that much more precious.

**

I was also “promoted” to the felony division a couple of weeks ago.  Farewell Juvie.

Juvenile was strange for me – not the least of it being the lack of blogging, which provides a kind of recapping of the day I’m otherwise not getting.  Thinking back on my months there, my sense of time seems to float with every day being yet another in a round of depositions, case preparation, courtroom time, and trials.  I tend to forget small things – and hence miss the discipline that writing a blog entry provides.  Not that incidents like the dueling fruit vendor trucks, speeding down the same street every morning really *need* to be memorialized for everyone. . .

Anyway, the juvenile system is supposedly structured around “reform” – meaning that because there are no “penalties” for delinquent (kid crime) behavior, an accused child does not get a jury.  Usually.  There are always exceptions to everything.  Instead, the child goes in front of a judge for trial.  Needless to say, the character, experience, and jurisprudential philosophies of the judge play a large role in both how cases are disposed of (not guilty/guilty) and what reformatory measures are decided upon for each child.  Lest this sound too Dickensian, I should point out that parents, social workers, our office, the State Attorney’s office and the Department of Juvenile Justice are all involved in various stages of the process, and the end result at least has the benefit of having had a lot of persons putting their collective heads together.  However, this collaborative (to use the term very loosely) approach is also quite vulnerable to the pressures of a high volume of children.  Kids can slip through cracks very easily.  Granted, it’s been awhile, but I vividly recall being accused of laziness, recalcitrance, etc., while I was actually struggling with dyslexia.  And it’s not like *I* knew what was going on.  From my perspective, the other kids just got it, and I didn’t – and all the adults seemed to be in agreement that I was some kind of screw up.  So what’s to make of a kid who can’t complete a simple diversionary program because they keep missing classes they have to attend?  Who has the time to parse out what that child’s issues are and perhaps address them early on?

I had some good kids in Juvie.  I had some bad ones.  I had some good parents.  I had some bad ones.  There seems to be no particular pattern to the previous four sentences, in terms of how parent/child dynamics are arranged, beyond to say kids with out of control parents are already pretty handicapped. 

Trial wise, I went about 30? times (if you include dispositive motions and things I “third chaired” on so my interns could get trial credits).  I appeared in front of 6 judges for trial and about 8 overall. 

I was pretty pleased by the results of those trials - I had only two “losses” – meaning that the final outcome at trial was worse than the plea offer my client rejected.   Some cases we flat out won, while other cases we brought because we knew we could beat certain specific charges inside the case.  A handful of those cases are on appeal, so all this analysis is kind of preliminary. 

“Final” numbers say something about practice, but they’re also quite misleading.  They can’t account for cases that were “marginal” wins but, given greater time and resources, should have been “strong” wins.  And of course, I wonder about all the motions I lost, charges I lost, and cases I lost.  If I had an extra hour or two to put on each case, would the outcome have been different?   In some cases, perhaps not, but I’d rather be working in a system where I felt that when a guilty verdict (or a delinquent verdict) comes back, everyone knows that *all* the issues have been fully explored. 

But such is life.

More thoughts on Felony practice, if and when I get them.

Comments

[ambimb]

Hey, nice to hear from you again. Congratulations on your "promotion." It's a funny thing w/criminal defense that felony work seems to get the respect and the glory, supposedly b/c the stakes are so much higher there, while we all know that the stakes can be just as high or higher in juvie or misdemeanor land b/c that's so often where the downward spiral begins. Still, it's a different pace of work, different pressures and challenges, and it's good to be familiar with it all. I look forward to hearing what you think of it...