One of the most deeply impactful experiences of my life was my five years spent in practice representing juvenile clients charged with crimes. The first two years I spent as a public defender. The last three years while in private practice our firm took primarily court appointed cases. I represented both juvenile delinquents as well as dependent children (those who were abused, abandoned, neglected, habitually truant or ungovernable – amazing how readily that still rolls off my tongue all these years later) who violated court orders placing them in foster care, most by simply running away.
“Junior Slime Balls”
I learned a lot from my clients, no small irony since the
point of the juvenile justice system, as it self-servingly referenced itself,
was to try to rehabilitate minors who had run afoul of the law. A good part of
that rehabilitative effort was the counsel we offered them to help them stay
out of trouble. In essence our advice was that if they simply followed the
rules, they’d avoid future run-ins with the establishment.
But, over time, I came to see that the establishment was not
terribly interested in their rehabilitation, their reconciliation with the
individuals they had harmed or their restoration to their communities. The
prosecutor who announced in a pre-trial hearing one Friday morning that all of
these juveniles were “nothing but junior slime balls waiting for a chance to
show us their worst” signaled to me that for most of the agents I worked
with, the juvenile system was little more than a waiting room for the adult
penal system.
We should have listened to them.
Worse yet, with the defunding of rehabilitative services for juveniles, the state felt justified in trying juveniles as adults. Before I finished my time at juvie, I would participate in the defense of three young men accused of murder then looking at Florida’s electric chair. The oldest of them was 17. Even the conservative SCOTUS would finally rule that the practice of bloodthirsty states killing their juvenile offenders was cruel and unusual. But had it been left up to Florida, that would never have happened.
I Realized I Was Part of the Problem
Worse yet, I came to the conclusion that my presence in that
system and my own tireless work on behalf of my clients lent the impression
that the system worked, my clients had received the constitutionally required legal
representation. Thus, those subjected to the power of the system had received
justice, the implication being that they somehow deserved whatever we wanted to
do to them. This, of course, did not account for the heavy stacking of the
letter of the law and the legal system against the poor not the least of which
was the disparate funding of the public defenders vis-à-vis the state’s
attorneys offices and the staggering case load public defenders were required
to carry at any given time.
It was a minimalist meeting of the requirement of the Sixth
Amendment on a good day. And in the end,
I decided that as a beneficiary of that system, I was a part of the problem by
helping maintain it. I left the practice of law to become a priest and an
academic. But I took my stories with me seeking venues for their telling which
could hopefully make the difference on the intractable system that I was unable
to make as an attorney. My writing is one of those venues.
My juvenile clients had told me from the beginning that they
felt the system was stacked against them, particularly those who were brown and
Black. Between their poverty and their ethnicity, they began life with two
strikes against them. By the time they got to me, they would demonstrate major
educational deficiencies, psychiatric disturbances and in many cases, substance
abuse, all of which I would have had tested and dutifully documented for
pre-sentencing reports, virtually none of which the state had funded programs
to address those rehabilitative needs.
At one sentencing when I objected to the judge’s sentence of
my client to Dozier, noting that it was unlikely that any of his clearly
demonstrated rehabilitative needs would be addressed by that sentence, he
simply said to me, “Well, Mr. Coverston, there are no programs to meet those
needs. What would you like me to do with him?” Somehow the state’s legal
obligations to its citizens had become the defense attorney’s job since we
obviously had nothing else to do.
[Source: Miami Herald]
I tried hard to
dissuade my young clients that their cynicism vis-à-vis the system they faced
was a helpful response. Before the scales fell from my eyes, I was an idealist,
reminding the state agencies I confronted in the courtroom of the In RE:
Gault decision that demanded juveniles be treated differently from adults
and reading the agents of the state the provisions of Florida Statues and its
administrative code spelling out their duties, which I inevitably followed with
the question: “So where has the state met its duty here?”
I wanted to believe that the system could work. And I wanted
my clients to make that sharp right hand turn away from criminality and into
productive roles in their communities. I believed in redemption. And I believed
in restorative justice. But over the years, I, too, became cynical. And increasingly
I came to think that perhaps my juvies were right.
Impunity, American Style
When the felon-in-chief first ran for office he boasted he
could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and get away with
murder. At the time it seemed so outrageous that most of us could not take such
a statement seriously. Eight years down the road, we now know that not only could
it happen, with a judicial branch of the government captured by his minions
(like the judge rejected in her first attempt at confirmation now a paradigm of
the failure of impartiality in delaying an open and shut case on government
documents at Maro Lago), it could be done with impunity.
Image: Paramilitary Massacre Site, El Mozote, El Salvador
That’s a word I learned in Latin America where U.S. trained
and armed paramilitaries wasted entire villages of people and got away with it,
thus emboldening them to engage in further atrocities. But I didn’t have to go
to Central America to know the concept. My juvies were telling me this years
before, even as I did not want to believe what they were saying.
As my juvie clients sometimes said, “Justice means just
us.”
I have kept my license with the Florida Bar all these years
since I stopped practicing in 1991. I do so partly because I had to work so
hard to attain it. And I do it partly in honor of my Dad who so strongly
believed in me as an attorney and made it possible for me to become one. My
license is inactive and I am not permitted to practice law though I could
reactivate it with some intense continuing legal education.
But that isn’t going to happen. I tell people the happiest
day of my life was my last day as an attorney. Not only was I temperamentally
unsuited for the hypercompetitive and often cut-throat nature of the legal
profession, I had lost faith in the system. And I have repeatedly found over my
professional lifetime that I simply cannot work for those I do not trust or
respect.
The question I wrestle with now is whether I wish to
continue supporting an institution that no longer even pretends that it is
anything more than a thinly veiled means of protecting the interests of the
privileged and powerful or withdraw my presence completely from this once noble
profession now on life support. I realize that the latter decision would have
no impact on this corrupt system I revile and the $170 a year I pay in dues
would not make much of an impact on my income. But, as always, in the end I
have to live with myself.
Either way, I think it is important that I say something
this day that is probably long overdue. My juvie clients were right about the
system and my idealism regarding it was unfounded. I owe them an apology. So
does our state. And this week, so does our country. But they should not hold
their breath on it coming. And I don’t
need to tell them that.
Image: Monument to the Lost Boys, Dozier School, Marianna, FL
Post Scriptum: I post this on the eve of the 248th
birthdate of America. Like many today, I wonder if this will be the final such
celebration of this country I have known, loved and served for 70 years now. It
is a thought that keeps me and many others up at night.
I know there are still good judges in America - I have actually worked for some of them - and I have
several friends who remain in practice. I admire their tenacity and their
devotion to their clients even as my own ability to work within the system in
which they daily toil has long since withered and died. The truth is, in an era
like our own, we need good lawyers and judges more than ever. To them
all, I say Godspeed. And to our republic - as long as we can keep it (Franklin)
– I say Happy Independence Day !
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an
unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected
don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and
to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? - Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.
Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to
complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami
Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston, 2024
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