WIR #7-8: That switch in your head

I'm way behind in my Week In Review series, which I hoped would be a weekly summary of the highlights of my experience as an intern for a local public defender's office. Somehow, just after week 7, I dropped the ball, and now memories of those weeks are hazy.

I do recall that I got to speak with a couple of clients who are mentally ill, which isn't that unusual since many of our clients are arguably mentally ill to one degree or another. My experience has been that these clients require a lot of patience, and to a large extent they just want to be listened to and to get some affirmation for what they're thinking and going through. I went to jail and talked to one client who's now serving the last three months of a year-long sentence and he was very distraught that he'd been forgotten, that no one outside the jail cared about him or even knew where he was, and that maybe he'd never get out because did they even know why he was in there, anyway? It was a little strange, actually, because I and two attorneys had to do some research to figure out exactly why he was there, and for a little while we thought he had, indeed, been forgotten—it looked like he'd served his time and we couldn't see any reason he was still in jail. Turns out, we were missing some records, he's supposed to be there, all is as it was supposed to be. And once we figured all of that out, and I explained it to him, he calmed down. We haven't heard from him since (he hasn't called the office to ask for help). Part of helping people as a public defender really is listening, providing reassurance, and just letting them know they're not alone. Sometimes that's the best you can do.

Somewhere around week seven or eight I also got to see videotape of a supposed "confession" one of out clients made to the police. I can't say anything about it, really, except that it was shocking the tactics the police used to get this person to say exactly what they wanted him to say. Truth is irrelevant on this tape; the police had an agenda and they hammered on it until their agenda became the "suspect's" agenda. I wish every law student could see something like this in his/her first year of law school. But I also wish I had some basis for comparison. Is this normal police conduct, or was is this an unusual interrogation? The attorneys in our office can't say for sure since this is among the first taped confession they've received from the cops. The attorneys are more or less outraged about it, as well, so I feel like my shock has some basis.

But watching this video and thinking about it got me to thinking: It's like people have a little switch in their mind. It's something like a fear switch, or a guilty switch, or a trust-in-the-system switch. Whatever variable it's switching, it works like this:

Person A views a video like this and says, "Oh my gosh! That's horrifying! We can't allow the police to treat people that way!"

Person B views the same video and says: "That guy was lying all along. The way he acted in that video shows he was lying when he said he didn't do it. That's awesome police work that they finally got him to admit his crime. Thank goodness we have such great police!"

Some people can switch back and forth in their minds between being Person A and Person B, and this is a valuable skill. I can kind of do it; it's interesting to try to imagine what the prosecutor is going to say about this tape, to guess which little bits he/she will pick on to convince him/herself that the police acted appropriately.

Other people don't even realize they have such a switch in their head; they're permanently programmed one way or the other. Where this programming comes from would be an interesting question to explore, but what matters is where the switch is set in people making policy and law. If Person A (i.e. a public defender) is making policy, defendants might get more of a fair shake. If Person B (hello John Ashcroft) is making policy, kiss your civil rights and liberties goodbye.

Note: We have a huge prison industry in our country; more people per capita are in prison here than in any other country in the world, I think . So how did we end up w/so many people switched to Person B?

Posted August 2, 2004 06:42 AM | 1L summer