INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice Read Online Free PDF Page A

out, was looking not for brilliant students, but for people who could talk, drive, and take chances, and were willing to work for free. It had my name written all over it. I promptly lined up a public-interest summer grant and fired off an application.
     
           The DC PDS investigator internship was exactly as advertised, and within a week I found myself wandering around southeast DC looking for a guy named Slim who had supposedly witnessed a robbery. It was a disaster. Alabama Avenue in the mid1980s might as well have run through Alabama itself. It was rural poverty writ urban --as if the tumbledown homes of the Deep South had been shoved together by some huge earthmover. There were low concrete bunkhouses with doors swinging from one hinge, playgrounds filled with dust or mud depending on when it had rained last, and people everywhere, crowding the little cement slabs that served as ground-level verandas, sitting on decaying chairs or plastic milk crates, huddling around card tables chockablock with dominoes, smoking, drinking, and fanning themselves in the humid summer sun.
     
           I stood out.
     
           It wasn’t just because I was white, though that certainly helped, but also because I had the stiff walk of the neophyte and the nervous look of the out-of-place kid that I actually was. No one would give me the time of day. Good luck finding Slim.
     
           Nevertheless, as the summer wore on I began to take to the work. It was endlessly fascinating, exposing me to a world I had never really known --a world where people lived by street names, where drug commerce and violence lived cheek by jowl with working families and hopscotching children, where the first assumption was that I was a cop; the second, a rich junkie looking for a fix; the third, a parole officer; and beyond that the hopped-up kids of Alabama Avenue had no idea what to make of me. In time, as I adjusted to the expectations of Southeast, I began to both love it and understand it. By the middle of the summer I’d learned how to track down witnesses, ask questions, and dig up information that would prove useful in the rapes and murders and robberies I was investigating. I’d learned every street and alley in the Quadrant, and could talk my way into almost any house. And most every night I brought home the fruits of my investigations to the lawyers I worked for --hard-charging, dedicated defenders whose passion for their work inspired me every day to find more, and to dig deeper.
     
           My time in DC transformed me. It turned a college kid’s diffuse sense of right and wrong into a focused and rigid moral framework. That first exposure --to the criminal justice system, to poverty, and to the macabre hierarchy of criminal defense lawyers --radically altered the next two decades of my life. It gave me a purpose.
     
           Law school was, for the most part, full of overindulged kids looking to become lawyers either to please daddy or to bring home the big paycheck. Worse, with L.A. Law sexing up corporate work every week (Arnie Becker got laid twice a show), the fetid focus of law school life became who could get a job at the fanciest firm. This only compounded the pathological competitiveness of the entire law school experience.
     
           I didn’t bother to talk to law firms during my first year. I knew exactly where I was headed for the summer: back to the streets of DC and the Public Defender Service. My second summer, though, was different. My dad, who dreamed of telling his friends about how his son was going to work for a Wall Street law firm, argued stridently that before I went off to spend (read: “waste”) my life being a public defender, I should at least explore the opportunity costs.
     
           And that’s what I did: Dewey Ballantine is about as fancy and white-shoe as a law firm can be. It also had the distinction, in 1990, of being among the highest-paying law firms in