a public defender

I received a letter in the mail a few days ago. It was from a client. Nothing remarkable about it – 3 pages, handwritten, barely legible. The pages were of different sizes and came from different notebooks. I tossed it onto my desk; I was in the middle of something else.

Later that afternoon, I started to go through the mail again. I came across the same letter from the client. Scanning through the first page, I read words I’d read a thousand times before: please will you do this, please will you do that, when, when will you…when, when, when.

I flipped to the second page. The same handwriting – or so it seemed – except it was not from my client. It was from his daughter.

“Hello daddy”, she wrote, “when are you coming home? I’ve grown tall now – almost 4 feet! I also had to get glasses, but my little brother doesn’t have them.”

“We miss you daddy”, the letter concluded.

I’ve written before about our duty to our client. “It’s all about the client”, I’ve remonstrated time and again. It is, but part of understanding that it’s about the the client is to understand that the client is a person – not a file number or a docket number. The client has a family too, just like you and just like the victim. The family of the client may be the one that loses out the most when he goes to jail. Given the epidemic of incarcerations in this country, there are many, many broken families, some with no parents at all.

So the next time you’re feeling down or feeling like you just don’t care, take a second to think about who you might end up helping more than the client: the family that he could leave behind.