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  • A Public Defender's Primer
  • Gabriel Urza (bio)

Author's note: The names and identifying information of specific individuals in this essay have been changed to conform with attorney/client privileges and to protect the confidentiality of both attorney and client.

You will get the interview through a family friend, three months after your graduation from law school. At the time of your interview, a surprising percentage of your knowledge of criminal law will be derived from network television. The public defender's office will share the building with the county social services department. In the elevator ride up to the sixth floor, cinch up your tie and try not to make eye contact with the seventeen-year-old gangbanger standing next to you. Do not try to translate the Spanish tattooed in thin script along his neck. Do not smile at the three-year-old boy whose hand the gangbanger is holding. The boy will not return your smile.

The chief deputy public defender will be a short, round man wearing a pale-yellow suit that would have been fashionable twenty years ago. The Chief will have the corner office on the top floor of an oppressively functional municipal building in downtown Reno, three blocks from the town's courthouses and one block from the Sienna Casino. If you had time [End Page 93] to look, you might see the house you were raised in, just a mile or so to the north. When the Chief tells you, "We have a spot opening up in the next few weeks," it will not occur to you that someone will be leaving the office. That they will have reasons to quit this job. Instead, the only thing that will register is the possibility that you will have a job. A paycheck that, even if it's not huge, will be much, much more than you've ever earned before. Mentally, try the paycheck on for size. It fits; in your head, you've already purchased a new mountain bike.

"If you want it, it's yours," the Chief will say, and then his tone will swing toward deadly seriousness. "We're looking for a two-year commitment, more or less. Obviously, some folks just aren't going to make it two years, and we deal with that. But we're asking for a verbal commitment. Two years." This will catch you off guard. Up until this point, the conversation's been light, informal. You will have talked about your uncles, who worked as district attorneys in the eighties. You will have discussed your law school's football team. But the Chief has turned the conversation in an instant. This is a test, you will think, though later you will see it for what it is: a warning. But because you've always been a pretty good test taker, and because that mountain bike your brain has already purchased has eight inches of travel in the rear shock and Ultegra components, you will answer decisively. You will answer correctly.

"Of course," you will say. Take a moment to observe your surroundings. A quick inventory of the Chief 's office will reveal boxes marked "Jaccobi Murder Trial 1999," plaques and mounted badges, a sea-green pleather couch against one wall. Say: "I believe in the work you do here. I have no intention of leaving."

In your small, windowless office, you will receive a file cabinet. The cabinet will be wheeled in directly from the Old Attorney's office and will be occupied by a couple hundred manila files. Go ahead. Open the cabinet. As you read through the files, you will come to the understanding that each manila file represents the following: at least one misdeed, at least one victim, a likely punishment. Because you are a new attorney, the Old Attorney will have removed the most serious offenses from the cabinet, cases that [End Page 94] carry potential sentences of greater than twenty years. But still. Take out a piece of scratch paper. Estimate that each of the two hundred files carries an average maximum prison term of five years. Complete the appropriate calculations. Realize that the file cabinet carries somewhere...

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