VICTORY- A time for reflection...
Last week, I had a jury trial and I won the whole thing. Guilty as charged. Home run. Total victory. It's funny, because it is the first time in my career that I ever walked away from a jury trial with exactly everything that I was looking for. Even better, I achieved this win doing the job that I became a lawyer to do. So I got to thinking about where I am in life...
See, I was supposed to be a fireman. I knew it when I was a kid, then forgot about it for a while in my teenage years, and then found it again. When I was very small, my across-the-street neighbor was a fireman in Washington, D.C., and apparently was a pretty badass fireman at that. We knew that then, and I have confirmed it in my adult life. This guy was a Lieutenant or a Captain in a ladder company, and an overall good guy. As kids around the neighborhood, we couldn't have any idea what the reality of being a 1960's to early 1970's D.C. fireman really meant, but all we heard was the good. The only firemen we met were good guys. The only stuff we saw them doing was the fun stuff. My parents were always "G-men" of some sort. My mom worked "black ops" for the Army/DOD, and I still don't know what my dad did at the Department of Energy because he won't talk about it. It seems natural that a kid would look up to a fireman across the street. At least you know what that guy does. My neighbor ended up dying on his way home from work in a traffic accident when I was about 10.
Anyway, like I said, I forgot about the fireman thing for many years. I have written before on this blog that the first time I stepped into a firehouse as an adult, I was a little underwhelmed. But in the end, I got bit. Hard. I spent much of the time from age 16 to 21 conspiring to find a job as a firefighter. People call it "career" firefighter, or the ultra-repugnant "professional" firefighter (repugnant because plenty of volunteers do a professional job and lots of paid firemen don't, and vice-versa), but I always called it "paid" firefighter. I was an ate-up volunteer in a 4,000 run company, and I wanted some more. Trouble is, they never tell you that in the DC Metro, it is statistically easier to get into medical school than it is to get a job as a paid firefighter. Literally. No shit. I applied to many different departments and went through many different processes. I really only cared about the D.C. Fire Department, which in 1988 was hiring for the first time in about 6 years, or something. I took their written test and physical agility test and made the top third of the list (228/780 or so). The way the DCFD sold it, passing all the tests and making the list was almost a guarantee of a job. Imagine my despair when I placed higher on the list on the Fairfax County, VA, test!
So, on the DCFD list I sat for about two and a half years, waiting for "the call". They ran something like three academy classes off the list and then there was some budget problem that slowed down hiring to zero. I got pissed off about working bullshit jobs ranging from fast food to construction, and from gas station attendant to private ambulance attendant. I had become a little disenchanted with the way life had been treating me (or I was treating it?), and one day while riding in the officer's-side bucket of a firetruck, I had an epiphany...
I decided that I could only do so much good as a live-in volunteer firefighter who was waiting on the job to come through. I decided that to do some good, it would be cool to be a prosecutor. To be a prosecutor, you have to be a lawyer. To be a lawyer, you have to go to college. To go to college (for real) Matt will have to leave the WWW. Oh, and you have to do really well at college so you can even get into law school. OK. Fuck it. That's what I'll do.
So (leaving many other stories behind) in the fall of 1991, I moved to Richmond, VA, with a little team of kids from the fire department. With me was my brother, my girlfriend-soon-to-be-fiancee-and-current-wife, and another girl who we were in the junior FD with. One week after classes started, I got "the call" from the DC Fire Department. It was a Lieutenant with whom I had spoken many times, and he asked if I could show up for a final medical exam and to process for the academy. Shit. Shit, shit, SHHHIITTTT!
Did you every have one of those moments where you knew that you were making a life-altering decision? I had one there. I told the Lt. that I had just started school, that I anticpated finishing within 30 months, and that, yes, I was very interested in the job but I thought that I should finish school first. The Lt. agreed that finishing school was good for me, and good for the DCFD. He put me into a "deferred" status for education, and set some date in oh-so-far-off 1994 to reactivate my file.
I did really well at college. Somewhere between inspiration and motivation, I found legitimate drive. If I were any smarter, I probably could have turned that into something. MedicChris might say that I was Bluto Blutarsky, professional college student extrordinaire, living la vida loca in every regard. By 1994 I was a 23 year-old college senior applying for law school, having made up a year and a half of time by going to school every session from when I arrived to graduation. I had straight A's from the third semester until the end. My GPA was something obnoxious like 3.8 generally and 3.96 in my major. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors in my major and I did not get into law school.
I had a little problem. When I was working as a gas station attendant, et. al, I poked around at community college. Uninterested and unmotivated, I made some little mistakes like signing up for classes, not going and not withdrawing. I had a few big "F" marks in my "permanent record", which apparently counts at the law shool admissions offices.
So by August of 1994, I had pulled off the go-to-college-and-do-well portion of the plan, but law school wasn't happening. I was wait-listed all over the place, but not admitted anywhere. I was working an office job with my University, and basically considering my options. I figured that if the law school thing was a bust, I'd just end up at the DCFD like I had planned.
Sometime late in August of 1994 I was at work at my University job and I got a call from the admissions director at my primo numero uno law school of choice, asking if I was still available to start classes...TOMORROW. Frantically, I said yes. I gave my job 2 minutes notice, and took off across town to fill out paperwork. Upon reflection, it turns out that I had a properly placed friend who was connected at the highest levels of certain law schools, and I have every reason to suspect that he went to bat for me and got me into school by showing someone why my academics should be looked at twice. In case he ever reads this, Eugene, I am eternally grateful.
I have been back to the office to thank everyone for the opportunity, but I never saw "the man" again.
I registered at the University. I got assigned to classes. I signed myself up for a $45,000.00 school loan. I was handed a "welcome" package of papers and told to be back in the morning. Whew! I was in. Just under the wire, but in. I got home after what had turned into a really long day. The phone rang. It was a Lieutenant from the DCFD. A different Lieutenant. He said that he had seen that I was on education deferral, and that my "number" was up for the next academy. He asked if I was ready to go.
Did you ever have the same life-altering decision present itself twice in your life under excruciatingly bad timing and similar circumstances? Funny, this time it was easier. I told him, no, that I was in law school, and that I would have to pass. Ouch.
In the end, the Fire Department for the District of Columbia would have saved my ass twice if I had needed it to. I take great comfort in that. I also take great comfort in knowing that "I did it." I stand equal to everyone who has that type of job. Enough said.
So, I ended up going to law school. I found the entire experience to be very frustrating. That shit is hard. Additionally, it was the first time in my educational life where I was not among the smartest people in school. To the contrary, I was constantly feeling like a big dummy. There were some genuinely brilliant minds to contend with in that school. I always felt kind of like I didn't belong there. As a kid straight out of the voluntary ghetto life I had led in Woodbridge, bootstrapping into an ivy-league-wannabe law school left me as sort of a fish out of water with the other people in school.
To this day, I have never met an attorney who did not go to college straight out of high school. I know, there must be some out there, but I never met one. There certainly wasn't one in my class except for me. There were people who were high school/college/law school straight through types, second career types, ex-military, etc.
I finished law school and passed the bar in 1997. It took me 7 years to get the job that I have now. In that time, I tried some jury trials as a defense attorney. I have lost some jury trials and given up huge sentences. I have had some "wins". In the case of a defense attorney, the term "jury trial win" is pretty nebulous, encompassing everything from acquittal to a hung jury, and from a reduction in charges to a light sentence. Out of all of those trials though, I never had a case where I walked in and got exactly what I wanted out of a jury.
Jury trials don't happen all that often. If you are in a private criminal practice and see more than about 4 juries a year, you are either doing something wrong or just hauling too much ass. Because they are relatively rare, jury trials are special for everyone involved. Judges step it up a notch. Attorneys step it up too. Jurors themselves are cast into a strange new world where people do unreasonable shit. And a defendant has his life or his freedom at stake. It makes for a great day, most of the time.
So, last week I had this trial. My opponent attorney is in the public defender's office and was my daily adversary for about a year and a half before I changed assignments at work. He and I have become friends. He has what I feel is an astonishing ability to assess cases and convince his clients to take an appropriate course of action based on his assessment. He can look at a file and very quickly say "this is good" or "this is shit" or "that's real bad for my client". He has a reputation for pleading too many of his clients guilty, but I have no doubt that he has on average the lightest sentencing tendency of any attorney that I encounter. Oh, and by the way, if he actually tries a case, watch out, because something must be wrong with your case. I am quite sure that in cases actually put to trial against him I am not better than 50/50 against him. So I admire him greatly for his professionalism, and he routinely shows me areas where I sucked as a defense attorney.
My friend tells me going into this trial "I got nothing". I know that he has never totally "lost" a jury trial. I think that he is playing rope-a-dope with me, and I tell him so. We did this trial. My side was pretty much open and shut. Lawyers and mechanics will tell you things like "You can't polish a turd" or "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" or "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit" when trying to explain that some cases are bad. Despite this, my noble adversary managed to get the jury to think about something other than finding his client guilty, and they deliberated for a long time. Too long. They asked wierd questions. They looked bad when they came out to ask questions. After two hours of deliberation, I wasn't feeling so good about the way I perceived things to be going. The jury came back and convicted the guy of everything. That was cool. It was also the right thing to do. No reduction. No change. No acquittal. Done and done. In what should have been a moment of heart-leaping-from-chest professional joy, I mostly felt bad to deal a big loss to my friend, who has his shitbag client to deal with.
With a little distance behind me and this trial, I have taken the time to look back and inventory where my life has been. Something more than fifteen years ago, in 1990 or 1991, almost on a whim, I decided that I'd like to be a prosecutor. It was a long, and often difficult, trip to get there. In April of 2006, I got to speak to 12 people in a box and say "Good morning. My name is [dtxmatt12], and I represent the Commonwealth of Virginia", before whipping ass on some dumbass criminal (no lawyer could save this particular guy from his own attitude).
A long-term goal fulfilled. Has it been worth it? The quick answer is yes, but so much other shit has gone on in this same time period that the answer is not that simple. I was supposed to be a fireman. You know, as my job. It just never happened, and this amazing other path came to me. I am a fireman. I have been a fireman for all of my adult life and was for part of my childhood. I often wish that I was half the lawyer that I am a firefighter. In the end, the same uber-smart people from law school are attorneys, and I look at myself as a streetfighter. The other little bit of reflection that I have had reminded me of the end of the movie "The Princess Bride". Inego Montoya and Westley 'The Dread Pirate Roberts' are getting ready to jump out a window to safety, when they have the following exchange:
IM: You know, I have been in the revenge business for so long, now that [I have achieved revenge], I do not know what to do?
DPR: Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make an excellent Dread Pirate Roberts.
Having achieved my longest-term goal ever, I really ought to be thinking of the next one before I friggin' die. Waiting on further inspriation, dear readers, I remain...
DTXMATT12
See, I was supposed to be a fireman. I knew it when I was a kid, then forgot about it for a while in my teenage years, and then found it again. When I was very small, my across-the-street neighbor was a fireman in Washington, D.C., and apparently was a pretty badass fireman at that. We knew that then, and I have confirmed it in my adult life. This guy was a Lieutenant or a Captain in a ladder company, and an overall good guy. As kids around the neighborhood, we couldn't have any idea what the reality of being a 1960's to early 1970's D.C. fireman really meant, but all we heard was the good. The only firemen we met were good guys. The only stuff we saw them doing was the fun stuff. My parents were always "G-men" of some sort. My mom worked "black ops" for the Army/DOD, and I still don't know what my dad did at the Department of Energy because he won't talk about it. It seems natural that a kid would look up to a fireman across the street. At least you know what that guy does. My neighbor ended up dying on his way home from work in a traffic accident when I was about 10.
Anyway, like I said, I forgot about the fireman thing for many years. I have written before on this blog that the first time I stepped into a firehouse as an adult, I was a little underwhelmed. But in the end, I got bit. Hard. I spent much of the time from age 16 to 21 conspiring to find a job as a firefighter. People call it "career" firefighter, or the ultra-repugnant "professional" firefighter (repugnant because plenty of volunteers do a professional job and lots of paid firemen don't, and vice-versa), but I always called it "paid" firefighter. I was an ate-up volunteer in a 4,000 run company, and I wanted some more. Trouble is, they never tell you that in the DC Metro, it is statistically easier to get into medical school than it is to get a job as a paid firefighter. Literally. No shit. I applied to many different departments and went through many different processes. I really only cared about the D.C. Fire Department, which in 1988 was hiring for the first time in about 6 years, or something. I took their written test and physical agility test and made the top third of the list (228/780 or so). The way the DCFD sold it, passing all the tests and making the list was almost a guarantee of a job. Imagine my despair when I placed higher on the list on the Fairfax County, VA, test!
So, on the DCFD list I sat for about two and a half years, waiting for "the call". They ran something like three academy classes off the list and then there was some budget problem that slowed down hiring to zero. I got pissed off about working bullshit jobs ranging from fast food to construction, and from gas station attendant to private ambulance attendant. I had become a little disenchanted with the way life had been treating me (or I was treating it?), and one day while riding in the officer's-side bucket of a firetruck, I had an epiphany...
I decided that I could only do so much good as a live-in volunteer firefighter who was waiting on the job to come through. I decided that to do some good, it would be cool to be a prosecutor. To be a prosecutor, you have to be a lawyer. To be a lawyer, you have to go to college. To go to college (for real) Matt will have to leave the WWW. Oh, and you have to do really well at college so you can even get into law school. OK. Fuck it. That's what I'll do.
So (leaving many other stories behind) in the fall of 1991, I moved to Richmond, VA, with a little team of kids from the fire department. With me was my brother, my girlfriend-soon-to-be-fiancee-and-current-wife, and another girl who we were in the junior FD with. One week after classes started, I got "the call" from the DC Fire Department. It was a Lieutenant with whom I had spoken many times, and he asked if I could show up for a final medical exam and to process for the academy. Shit. Shit, shit, SHHHIITTTT!
Did you every have one of those moments where you knew that you were making a life-altering decision? I had one there. I told the Lt. that I had just started school, that I anticpated finishing within 30 months, and that, yes, I was very interested in the job but I thought that I should finish school first. The Lt. agreed that finishing school was good for me, and good for the DCFD. He put me into a "deferred" status for education, and set some date in oh-so-far-off 1994 to reactivate my file.
I did really well at college. Somewhere between inspiration and motivation, I found legitimate drive. If I were any smarter, I probably could have turned that into something. MedicChris might say that I was Bluto Blutarsky, professional college student extrordinaire, living la vida loca in every regard. By 1994 I was a 23 year-old college senior applying for law school, having made up a year and a half of time by going to school every session from when I arrived to graduation. I had straight A's from the third semester until the end. My GPA was something obnoxious like 3.8 generally and 3.96 in my major. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors in my major and I did not get into law school.
I had a little problem. When I was working as a gas station attendant, et. al, I poked around at community college. Uninterested and unmotivated, I made some little mistakes like signing up for classes, not going and not withdrawing. I had a few big "F" marks in my "permanent record", which apparently counts at the law shool admissions offices.
So by August of 1994, I had pulled off the go-to-college-and-do-well portion of the plan, but law school wasn't happening. I was wait-listed all over the place, but not admitted anywhere. I was working an office job with my University, and basically considering my options. I figured that if the law school thing was a bust, I'd just end up at the DCFD like I had planned.
Sometime late in August of 1994 I was at work at my University job and I got a call from the admissions director at my primo numero uno law school of choice, asking if I was still available to start classes...TOMORROW. Frantically, I said yes. I gave my job 2 minutes notice, and took off across town to fill out paperwork. Upon reflection, it turns out that I had a properly placed friend who was connected at the highest levels of certain law schools, and I have every reason to suspect that he went to bat for me and got me into school by showing someone why my academics should be looked at twice. In case he ever reads this, Eugene, I am eternally grateful.
I have been back to the office to thank everyone for the opportunity, but I never saw "the man" again.
I registered at the University. I got assigned to classes. I signed myself up for a $45,000.00 school loan. I was handed a "welcome" package of papers and told to be back in the morning. Whew! I was in. Just under the wire, but in. I got home after what had turned into a really long day. The phone rang. It was a Lieutenant from the DCFD. A different Lieutenant. He said that he had seen that I was on education deferral, and that my "number" was up for the next academy. He asked if I was ready to go.
Did you ever have the same life-altering decision present itself twice in your life under excruciatingly bad timing and similar circumstances? Funny, this time it was easier. I told him, no, that I was in law school, and that I would have to pass. Ouch.
In the end, the Fire Department for the District of Columbia would have saved my ass twice if I had needed it to. I take great comfort in that. I also take great comfort in knowing that "I did it." I stand equal to everyone who has that type of job. Enough said.
So, I ended up going to law school. I found the entire experience to be very frustrating. That shit is hard. Additionally, it was the first time in my educational life where I was not among the smartest people in school. To the contrary, I was constantly feeling like a big dummy. There were some genuinely brilliant minds to contend with in that school. I always felt kind of like I didn't belong there. As a kid straight out of the voluntary ghetto life I had led in Woodbridge, bootstrapping into an ivy-league-wannabe law school left me as sort of a fish out of water with the other people in school.
To this day, I have never met an attorney who did not go to college straight out of high school. I know, there must be some out there, but I never met one. There certainly wasn't one in my class except for me. There were people who were high school/college/law school straight through types, second career types, ex-military, etc.
I finished law school and passed the bar in 1997. It took me 7 years to get the job that I have now. In that time, I tried some jury trials as a defense attorney. I have lost some jury trials and given up huge sentences. I have had some "wins". In the case of a defense attorney, the term "jury trial win" is pretty nebulous, encompassing everything from acquittal to a hung jury, and from a reduction in charges to a light sentence. Out of all of those trials though, I never had a case where I walked in and got exactly what I wanted out of a jury.
Jury trials don't happen all that often. If you are in a private criminal practice and see more than about 4 juries a year, you are either doing something wrong or just hauling too much ass. Because they are relatively rare, jury trials are special for everyone involved. Judges step it up a notch. Attorneys step it up too. Jurors themselves are cast into a strange new world where people do unreasonable shit. And a defendant has his life or his freedom at stake. It makes for a great day, most of the time.
So, last week I had this trial. My opponent attorney is in the public defender's office and was my daily adversary for about a year and a half before I changed assignments at work. He and I have become friends. He has what I feel is an astonishing ability to assess cases and convince his clients to take an appropriate course of action based on his assessment. He can look at a file and very quickly say "this is good" or "this is shit" or "that's real bad for my client". He has a reputation for pleading too many of his clients guilty, but I have no doubt that he has on average the lightest sentencing tendency of any attorney that I encounter. Oh, and by the way, if he actually tries a case, watch out, because something must be wrong with your case. I am quite sure that in cases actually put to trial against him I am not better than 50/50 against him. So I admire him greatly for his professionalism, and he routinely shows me areas where I sucked as a defense attorney.
My friend tells me going into this trial "I got nothing". I know that he has never totally "lost" a jury trial. I think that he is playing rope-a-dope with me, and I tell him so. We did this trial. My side was pretty much open and shut. Lawyers and mechanics will tell you things like "You can't polish a turd" or "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" or "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit" when trying to explain that some cases are bad. Despite this, my noble adversary managed to get the jury to think about something other than finding his client guilty, and they deliberated for a long time. Too long. They asked wierd questions. They looked bad when they came out to ask questions. After two hours of deliberation, I wasn't feeling so good about the way I perceived things to be going. The jury came back and convicted the guy of everything. That was cool. It was also the right thing to do. No reduction. No change. No acquittal. Done and done. In what should have been a moment of heart-leaping-from-chest professional joy, I mostly felt bad to deal a big loss to my friend, who has his shitbag client to deal with.
With a little distance behind me and this trial, I have taken the time to look back and inventory where my life has been. Something more than fifteen years ago, in 1990 or 1991, almost on a whim, I decided that I'd like to be a prosecutor. It was a long, and often difficult, trip to get there. In April of 2006, I got to speak to 12 people in a box and say "Good morning. My name is [dtxmatt12], and I represent the Commonwealth of Virginia", before whipping ass on some dumbass criminal (no lawyer could save this particular guy from his own attitude).
A long-term goal fulfilled. Has it been worth it? The quick answer is yes, but so much other shit has gone on in this same time period that the answer is not that simple. I was supposed to be a fireman. You know, as my job. It just never happened, and this amazing other path came to me. I am a fireman. I have been a fireman for all of my adult life and was for part of my childhood. I often wish that I was half the lawyer that I am a firefighter. In the end, the same uber-smart people from law school are attorneys, and I look at myself as a streetfighter. The other little bit of reflection that I have had reminded me of the end of the movie "The Princess Bride". Inego Montoya and Westley 'The Dread Pirate Roberts' are getting ready to jump out a window to safety, when they have the following exchange:
IM: You know, I have been in the revenge business for so long, now that [I have achieved revenge], I do not know what to do?
DPR: Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make an excellent Dread Pirate Roberts.
Having achieved my longest-term goal ever, I really ought to be thinking of the next one before I friggin' die. Waiting on further inspriation, dear readers, I remain...
DTXMATT12
posted by DTXMATT12 at 9:01 PM
4 comments
