Courtroom Classroom Theater Church

As the first half of my Baby Sabbatical (TM) begins in earnest, today, I thought I'd discuss something scholarly. It has to do with client contact and courtroom demeanor in the context of mass indigent defense. And I mean specific to mass indigent defense. (I suppose some of my techniques could equally apply in other contexts, but I am not concerned with that here.)

Each day I enter a packed courtroom.  Each day I represent dozens of people at various stages of criminal proceedings against them. I stand in the center of the courtroom, gripping the podium as case after case is called.  It may be a pretrial on a case I know nothing about.  It may be a sentencing or a probation violation.  It may be a trifling traffic matter or a serious domestic assault.  It may be set for trial.  The witnesses may or may not have shown. The defendant may have more cases in the system that no one knows about yet. These are a paltry few of the possibilities.  At any rate, it is clearly in my interest and the interest of my clients that I stay focused on many issues at once involving several cases and many variables, all while standing at the podium in the eye of the storm. I believe someone once labeled it multi-tasking.  I prefer to think of it as situational awareness. It is an essential tool for any courtroom practitioner.

It's the same kind of tool used by a teacher in a classroom, an actor on stage, a priest in the pulpit.

Suffice it to say that, once court begins, I have entered a persona that allows me to succeed in the complex task at hand.  It may seem brusque. It may seem queer. It may seem rude. But the task at hand - protecting and ensuring the constitutional rights of the least among us in the Poverty Capital of America where I beg for justice and mercy for the poor as my father did before me before he died of a liquor-soaked broken heart - compels me to behave this way in the courtroom.

So, when someone steps in front of me to ask advice or gives me a "Pssst!" during court business, I either say without looking at them, "Not now," or give a look that you'd get if you interrupted my Hamlet, my physics lecture, my homily.  People find it utterly rude that I would refuse to stop the twenty things I'm doing at once to talk to them.  And, mostly, it's people usually looking for last minute advice because they know the judge will yell at them for not talking to a lawyer by now.

This interaction usually occurs in full view of others, often times recorded by microphone and/or camera.  A viewer may say, Gee, that lawyer's rude... or a viewer may say, Gee, that was dumb to interrupt that lawyer while he's clearly in the middle of several things at once.  I'll let the videos and transcripts speak for themselves.