Life as a Public Defender
BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. -- The courtroom was packed. There was a line of attorneys waiting to call their cases and almost every seat in the gallery was occupied. That's when it finally happened. A client I never met before looked me in the eye and said with venom in his very loud voice, "You're my fourth public pretender." Then he stormed out of the courtroom.
Public pretender. I had been warned that I would be referred to by this derogatory term. I was just surprised that it took a year until I actually heard those words from a client. My age -- I am older than most of my colleagues -- is likely the reason that it took so long to be initiated into the public pretender club. That was until I met Mr. Adrian Brooks.
I tried to call Mr. Brooks before the hearing but as happens with many of my clients, his number was no longer working. This case was over a year old so I expected the judge to schedule us for trial. Thankfully Mr. Brooks' former public defenders had done all the work necessary to prepare his case for that moment. The moment we first met, which was also the moment we were set for trial.
As soon as I returned to the office I asked our investigators to find Mr. Brooks and tell him to call me. I was hoping to talk to him before we took his case, with a maximum penalty of a year in jail, to a jury.
As our investigators searched for Mr. Brooks I spent the next week preparing for his trial. Luckily for me it was a cannabis case. Cannabis cases are my favorite cases to try. Most cases that I take to trial are ones where the marijuana is not found on my client's person. It is found in a place near my client and at least one other person. There's always someone else to point the finger at because of course it is never my client's weed. Mr. Brooks' case was no different.
The day of trial this public pretender was nervous that the client wouldn't show. I really wanted to go to trial because I knew we had a great case. The police report, which the state takes for gospel, is a page and a half long yet it fails to mention that there was a passenger in the car. I learned about this passenger when the officer told Mr. Brooks' former public defender about him in a deposition.
Mr. Brooks was speeding down Florida's Turnpike when he was pulled over. The officer said he smelled marijuana through his air conditioner vent while driving over 90 mph as he tried to stop my client's speeding car. The "odor of marijuana" gives law enforcement the right to search a vehicle. Yes marijuana was found but it was a small amount, unburnt, wrapped in foil and located in the car's center console.
As soon as Mr. Brooks walked through the courtroom door I ambushed him. I had in my hand a copy of my closing argument. I thrust the papers into his hand, looked him in the eye and said without stopping to take a breath, "I know you are angry at having four different public defenders but I have every intention of fighting my hardest to convince a jury that you are not guilty and I think we have a great shot at winning."
It was also important for me to let him know that if it wasn't for his former public defenders I wouldn't be as ready as I was for his trial. Public defenders move to another courtroom often and one of the main reasons is because it's hard to retain employees when the starting take home pay is about $2700 a month. I finished by telling Mr. Brown, "This is your case, you can help or not but I am ready so let's do this." By the end of the conversation I knew he was rethinking my label as a "public pretender."
I also knew the prosecutor had no idea that there was a passenger in the car. I debated whether to tell her. There were two people in the car the last time the state took my client to trial so I didn't think this information would matter. Since it was a different prosecutor I decided to show my hand to see if she would dismiss the charge. Since the police report made no mention of a passenger the prosecutor couldn't believe what she was hearing. She made me play the officer's deposition before she agreed that the charges would be dropped.
Things could not have ended any better for Mr. Brooks, the first person to call me a public pretender. I just hope when he tells the story about this run in with the law that he thinks twice about how he refers to his lawyers. The only pretending a public defender does is when we pretend we don't hear ignorant comments like the one Mr. Brooks made to me in that packed courtroom on the day we met.
The high profile trials of Manuel Noriega, Timothy McVeigh, OJ Simpson and George Zimmerman are among the important legal stories Kim Segal covered as a journalist for over two decades. While working as a producer for CNN, she began attending law school at night, and was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2005.
At 46, she left her television career for a position as a Public Defender in Broward County, Florida.