Cutting Edge of the Law : Public Defenders Focus on the Issues in a Pressure-Cooker Job

Bob Hall settles back in his Spartan cubicle atop Los Angeles’ Criminal Courts Building, waking up with a pot of freshly brewed coffee and the newspapers.

He is in his office by 7:30 a.m., a little ahead of the traffic on the freeway and on the building’s notorious elevators. That gives him a few minutes with the papers to keep abreast of new appellate rulings and an hour to work on the day’s cases before court begins at 9.

Hall is one of Los Angeles County’s 521 deputy public defenders. He is a senior deputy, representing the defendants accused of the most serious felonies, including murder, rape and robbery.

At 42, he has been a public defender for 15 years. The years of experience help him. They also weigh on him.

“Most people don’t stay downtown more than three or four years at a time because it is a pressure cooker here,” he said. “This is the cutting edge of criminal law in California.

“But the other side of it is that it is draining. You have a schizophrenic relationship with the job. You like the challenge, but you feel the stress and the pressure and the fatigue.”

Over the years, Hall has developed an accommodation with the job, learning never to dwell on the heinous acts a client may have committed.

“You try to approach every case in a professional manner. You try not to have any preconceptions about your clients. If you make a decision about the client, you are doing the job of the judge and jury,” he said. “You tend to become issue oriented, law oriented, profession oriented.

“If you don’t want to go nuts, you have to keep yourself distanced from your client.”

“Professionalism” has become a mantra for Hall, embodying his need to zero in on his clients’ legal problems, which he can do something about, and rise above emotional involvement with their social problems, which he cannot.

The most successful public defenders, he believes, strive to avoid personal involvement with defendants.

“You have to come to the realization that you are not a social worker, that you cannot solve all their personal problems,” he said. “And they have enormous social problems. Some are sociopaths.

“You can’t deal with that. You just can’t,” he said, his voice rising. “It is not part of the job, and it is impossible. Their problems go back so far that the intervention of a lawyer for a few hours is not going to do any good.”

Accommodation to the job includes a concerted effort to leave it at the office. It does not always work.

“There are some cases that just pop into your mind, and you can’t get them out,” he said, admitting that he still loses sleep over the responsibility for certain clients. “I don’t think you can ever completely leave these cases in the office. Sometimes you think of the legal problems at the darndest times, like 3 o’clock in the morning.”

On the other side of the building, his colleague, Joanne Beth Porat Rotstein--J.R. in the courthouses--has been at work since 6:30 a.m., making index cards on new appellate rulings and readying her own cases.

Up by 5:30 a.m., she has “put together” the dinner she will shove in the oven when she gets home and waved goodby to her sleeping year-old daughter, Allison, and her accountant husband, Ronald.

At 34, with eight years’ experience, Rotstein is also a top deputy, assigned to a single Superior courtroom and the three Municipal courts that feed it. She is entrusted with the future of defendants accused of the most serious crimes.

She has made her own accommodations to the job, which first attracted her because of the opportunity it provided for helping people.

Like Hall, Rotstein concentrates not on the ugly acts her clients are accused of, but on how she can protect their legal rights.

“You are always going to get that question, ‘How can you represent somebody who is guilty?’ ” she said with some resignation. “After eight years, that question doesn’t bother me as much as it used to.

“Every once in a while you get a case where you think, ‘This is just awful,’ but even there you just start looking at the facts,” she said. “That is my job, no matter how bad the case is.

“Zeroing in on the legal issues is the only way to do the job. Otherwise, you will go crazy.”

Just coming off a difficult two-month homicide trial in which her client was accused of kidnaping and shooting to death a man he had feuded with, Rotstein was so worried about catching up with her new batch of cases that she refused to take any time off to heal a round of bronchitis. She is still feeling harried.

“The worst part of the job is scheduling,” she said. “Sometimes you have to be in three places at once, and you can have knots in your stomach by the end of the day.”

Death penalty cases take the worst toll. Rotstein, who has worked the downtown courts for four years, assisted on one two years ago and now has her first solo capital case.

“Having a client sentenced to die bothered me a lot,” she said, even though that defendant was found guilty of fatally shooting two women and two young boys with a sawed-off shotgun.

“The case was real tough. The facts were really horrible,” she said after the unsuccessful defense attempt to win a life sentence by claiming that the defendant had not been one of the triggermen. “It was really hard for me to sit and listen to the jury come back with a verdict and hear the judge impose sentence.”

Rotstein was repulsed by the crime but also by public reaction to the sentence calling for another death: “I heard the victim’s family kind of cheering, and I just thought it was so sick. It was eerie. It was really horrible.

“But,” she said, “you are not doing those cases every day.”

Hall and Rotstein are two of the nation’s 7,000 public defenders--attorneys who defend those accused of a crime who cannot afford to pay a private lawyer.

Although their working conditions vary across the country, defenders share similar burdens:

Their “clients,” accused of crimes ranging from car theft to dealing cocaine to rape or even murder, are poor and usually uneducated, often alcoholics or drug addicts and frequently liars who complicate their own defense.

Often considered enemies rather than heroes of a crime-weary public, public defenders can face lower pay, higher workloads and poorer facilities and support services than prosecutors or privately hired lawyers.

They lose a lot. Deputies from New York to Los Angeles estimate that less than half of their misdemeanor defendants and perhaps 10% of their serious felony clients are found “not guilty.” They meet most of their clients in jail, confer with them in jail or courthouse lockups and, in the end, usually send them off to jail or state prison--or occasionally to the gas chamber or electric chair.

They get virtually no thanks and little respect. Even clients often protest that they want a “real lawyer.”

“We have clients we are fighting for who don’t even want us fighting for them,” said Robert Gevirtz, second assistant public defender in Cook County, Ill. “You get your gratification when you know you have done a good job and from your peers in the office. Nowhere else.”

Hall gathers his Manila folders, puts on a navy tweed jacket and straightens his conservatively striped tie.

Hall takes the now-crowded elevator down four floors and strides into court, affably greeting the bailiff and his opponent, the deputy district attorney, and nodding to the judge already on the bench handling another matter.

As a “floater,” Hall must appear in more courts than Rotstein and other deputies who are assigned to a single court. He juggles the schedule by going first to a court where the judge has a reputation for starting promptly at 9 a.m.

Greeting the court staff pleasantly is a part of the job. If a defense lawyer is rude, Hall believes, the staff may unconsciously take out their irritation on his client, handling him roughly or slowing the paper work.

“If you rub the court attendants the wrong way,” he said, “you put your client in the hole.”

Admitted by the bailiff, Hall moves quietly into the 15-by-15-foot holding cell to greet his client and go over the plea bargain before the court appearance, explain what will happen in court, answer any questions and generally reassure him.

‘Public Relations’

“Half of this job is organization and half public relations,” Hall said later between cases. “And success depends on how well you get along with your client.”

When Hall’s turn in the courtroom comes, he walks three clients through recording the plea bargains they have agreed to--two years each in state prison for one charged with joy riding and one charged with the sale of marijuana and four years for one accused of burglary.

The actual plea bargaining between Hall and a deputy district attorney usually takes minutes, sometimes negotiated in a phone call, sometimes whispered in court between cases. Convincing the client that the bargain is in his best interest can take hours or days.

“These were not big wins,” Hall said, rushing toward another court. “Sometimes all you are looking to do is damage control.”

But sending a client off to prison is not a loss to a public defender.

“What you do is redefine ‘win,’ ” Hall explained. “The public would define ‘win’ as ‘not guilty.’ But a ‘win’ to us might be a second-degree murder verdict instead of first degree. A ‘win’ might be the jury coming back with a lesser included offense like grand theft person instead of robbery.

“The way I define it is any benefit you can secure for the client, which is what we are supposed to do,” he said. “You just adjust the way you view things.

‘Not Guilty’

“And once in a while we win one in the sense of ‘not guilty,’ and then you really feel good,” he said. “But in the kind of cases I have now, my clients scare the pants off juries. So I don’t get many of that kind of win.”

Scariest to jurors, and least likely to be found innocent, Hall said, are those who “look menacing just in their general demeanor.”

His current cases, the serious felonies, include a plethora of accused cocaine and marijuana users and dealers. They also include a youth accused of raping a 15-year-old female friend during an after-school outing, a man accused of robbing a store owner at gunpoint and shooting him in the chest when the proprietor tried to grab the gun and a man accused of robbing three different passers-by at gunpoint and stealing a car and trying to run down both the car’s owner and arresting police officers.

He figures that 90% of his clients tell him only the partial truth but believes that “you have to go with what the client tells you,” keeping the client off the stand if he says that he is lying and preparing backup defenses in case his story changes in court. It is the jury’s job, Hall stressed, to decide the truth or fiction involved.

Between court appearances, Hall arranges for a special video display terminal that, connected to the court stenographer’s machine, will serve as interpreter for a deaf client accused of rape.

Routine Days

Hall has worked through Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Armenian interpreters but never a video screen translating verbal English to written. Even routine days have firsts.

During a brief preliminary hearing lengthened by the odd mechanical interpretation, Hall hammers away at possible discrepancies in the story of the adult victim, who says the defendant met her at a bus stop, followed her on and off the bus and then dragged her into a garage where he assaulted her. Hall’s client has told him that the woman offered sex in exchange for money.

Despite Hall’s efforts, the Municipal Court judge holds the man to answer for the crime in a Superior Court trial. Hall, his face benign, ignores an angry gesture from his client as he is led back to the lockup.

“Occasionally I get that,” he said, shrugging. “It’s their convenient way of directing anger at the closest source.”

Hall spends about half his time moving through courtrooms on routine guilty pleas and preliminary hearings, more when he is handling a trial. The other half is divided between preparing the daily cases and future trials and visiting clients in jails.

He usually brings his lunch and has it at his desk amid the Manila folders. Going out takes too much time.

Two or three afternoons a week Hall confers with his jailed clients.

‘Being Coddled’

“I wish people who say defendants are being coddled in prisons would just take the trouble to look at one. I spend a lot of time in them, but it is not time that I enjoy,” he said.

Although he dislikes the “oppressive” jails where he visits clients, he does not feel put off by the clients themselves.

Hall searches for a little good in even those accused of the most despicable crimes, reminding himself, “Fundamentally, you are talking to a fellow human being, one at the bottom who has done a bad thing, but still a human being, and you can’t forget that.

“Poverty is the overwhelming common denominator,” he said of his clients. “They usually were loaded on alcohol or drugs at the time of the crime, and most have had no traditional family upbringing.”

After so many years, Hall has little trouble separating his legal responsibility from his personal feelings about clients he calls “bad guys.” Because they have already committed 20 to 30 crimes, he considers new accusations of vicious acts “in character.”

It is the homicide cases against “seemingly innocuous people with nice families who just ran amok on one occasion” that get to him.

“No matter how experienced you are and how professional you try to be, personal feelings do creep in,” he said. “It is one of the occupational hazards. You sort of live with it.”

Rotstein, gathering up her own Manila folders, is ready to go to court. She lets herself in with her own key.

Even Superior Court Judge Judith Chirlin greets her as J.R., a nickname she acquired while working in the Inglewood branch court. Television’s “Dallas,” with its main character, J.R. Ewing, was shooting in one courtroom, and a client who could not pronounce “Rotstein” asked if he could call her J.R. The tag stuck.

Because the second public defender assigned to Chirlin’s court is in trial elsewhere, Rotstein is handed extra defendants who have been picked up for violation of parole. She never knows about them in advance, which hamstrings her schedule.

Her plan for today is already awry because one of her clients, whom she thought understood English at his arraignment, is demanding an Ethiopian interpreter. The only one who can be found to translate the Ethiopian language Tigrigna is not available until afternoon, when Rotstein had planned to be at Sybil Brand Institute talking to a client she refers to as “my lady” who is accused of homicide.

Death Penalty

Although the murder case is her first solo death penalty case, Rotstein feels confident that she can win a far lesser penalty if she can only spend enough time with the defendant learning about the case. The woman is accused of assisting in a robbery and homicide by working as a prostitute with a male accomplice who allegedly robbed and stabbed the victim.

Meanwhile in Chirlin’s courtroom, two clients have failed to report to probation officers but insist that they tried. The judge, herself, has had difficulty calling the probation office, so she releases them without bail pending their next court appearance.

“I can’t believe I got those two guys out!” Rotstein exclaims, after the judge leaves the bench.

That was a win.

Two scheduled cases have easily expanded to seven, and the interpreter is late, reducing Rotstein’s jail time and meaning that she will not get to the baby-sitter’s to pick up Allison by 5:30 p.m. and may have to work on some motions at home.

“I am just a sucker,” she said under her breath, wondering if she should chide her absent partner or ask for another backup to take some of the unexpected probation violation cases.

Regardless of her irritation over running late, Rotstein wins diversion to a drug program and avoids a jail term for her Tigrigna-speaking client, a first-offender on a cocaine charge.

Despite her goal of distancing herself from defendants and concentrating solely on their legal issues, Rotstein has a somewhat maternal approach to her clients. It started in her rookie days in Juvenile Court.

“There you are more of a psychologist, mother, social worker and still a lawyer,” she said. “Sometimes you are the only one who has ever listened to them.”

Tries to Help

Adult clients are tougher to deal with, but she still tries to help them.

Even adults whose only crime is drug use, she said, may benefit from “a push in the right direction.” Instead of handing them a phone number, she personally calls drug programs, probation officers or job interviewers for them.

“I do try to assist them, but I certainly don’t attend AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings with them,” she said, carefully drawing the lines by which public defenders survive. “I’m not a social worker.”

Conceding that many defendants are beyond the help of any constructive “push,” Rotstein reiterates the separation of responsibility that keeps her, Hall and their colleagues on track:

“I try to do the best for them legally. That is my job.”

Like Hall, she believes in spending time with clients in jails, beginning with an explanation of the charges and the possible consequences and stating clearly that they can accept her, represent themselves or pay for a private lawyer.

She deals with clients who lie--a reality for all public defenders--by discussing the chances of a jury buying the story.

“I’m having a hard time believing you, so what do you think a jury will think?” she asks. “I’m not going to be on that jury, and your mother is not going to be on that jury.”

Personal Contact

Rotstein finds the personal contact with her clients gratifying.

“You are doing something for them,” she said. “Legally, you are protecting their rights, No. 1.

“But some of these people I represent have not had anyone just to sit and talk to them, just to listen to them. . . .

“It is frustrating in that I wish more would follow through on what we discuss,” she said. “But I am never going to have perfect people. It is just not going to happen.

“I can want them to change, but unless they want to do it, I am just hitting my head against a wall.”

Coping with the job for both Hall and Rotstein means carefully separating work from their satisfying and very private worlds away from the office.

Hall leaves the teeming downtown at 5 for his rural San Gabriel Valley hideaway, soothing the transition with classical music in his car. A self-described “hi-fi nut,” he surrounds himself with classical or jazz music in his living room, and, if it has been a particularly rough day, eases into the back yard hot tub.

Given to workouts at the YMCA during court lunch breaks when he was stationed in Pomona, he has no time for exercise these days, feeling too sleepy in the morning and too tired at night.

He rarely discusses his day with his wife, Cyndi, a Pasadena legal secretary accustomed to mahogany paneled walls and genteel clients.

Trial schedules often preclude long vacations, but Hall has learned to take three-day weekends. He and Cyndi, his second wife, wander down to Laguna Beach or Santa Barbara in search of good restaurants and good movies or enjoy her gourmet culinary experiments with friends at home.

Most of Hall’s friends and neighbors do not even know exactly what he does for a living, and he likes it that way.

Loyola Graduate

A native Californian and UC Berkeley graduate, Hall spent two years in the Navy based in Yokosuka, Japan, then moved to Los Angeles to attend Loyola Law School.

Hall thinks that his job probably contributed partially to the breakup of his first marriage, and he wants nothing to interfere with this one.

“I have the best of both worlds,” he said, smiling happily at his wife over his favorite dessert of ice cream with chocolate sauce at Pasadena’s Parkway Grill. “I have a great job that I love. And I have the best home life in the world that helps me get away from it. I couldn’t do the job if I didn’t have that.”

Rotstein, New York born but brought up in Los Angeles, also finds refuge in her Westchester home and her family, viewing her small daughter almost as a joyful avocation.

She and her husband, Ronnie, started splitting household chores even before their 1977 marriage when she was finishing a political science degree at UCLA and starting law school at the University of West Los Angeles. He does the laundry and handles the dry cleaning. She does the shopping and the cooking.

They enjoy Hawaiian vacations with Allison and weekend dinners out without her.

Rotstein plans to have one more child, figuring the extra work that may mean will be more than offset by the relaxation children provide her.

Before Allison, Rotstein worked out at a gym four or five nights a week, went out to lunch almost every day, worked three out of four Saturdays and visited clients in jails some evenings.

Personal Indulgence

Now she squeezes the work into an intense 6:30 a.m.-to-4:30 p.m. day with no lunch hour and only talks about exercising. She allows herself one personal indulgence, a long-standing, 8 a.m. Saturday appointment with the manicurist. But Allison is her main recreation.

“I still think I am job oriented, but she is helping me relax,” Rotstein said. “In the evening, I can play with her. I just sit there and talk to her and watch her. I get her food out and then put her in the bath.

“That hour between feeding and bathing her I really relax. My friends who are at home all day can’t wait for the husband to get home and take the kid. But to me it is fun to take care of her.”

Without such outside interests to balance their days with seamy people involved in seamier crimes, the two public defenders say they might develop skewed views of life.

“We are in the kind of business that police officers are. We both see the worst aspects of human nature, the people at the bottom of society that do things the rest of us wouldn’t do,” Hall said. “But in general, I look to the good side of people.

“I am certainly more cynical about the system, but I hope not about people,” he said.

Although Hall considers the overburdened courts highly efficient in processing cases and values his own work in protecting defendants’ rights, he said the legal procedures do not deter crime.

“There were 25,000 people in California prisons 10 years ago and 65,000 now, and by 1991-92, there will be over 100,000,” he estimated. “Are we safer now?

Not the Answer

“I don’t feel we are any safer, and I see crime that you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “So locking up people ain’t the answer. When people do crimes, they don’t think of the consequences. It is not a risk-benefit analysis.

“What I do every day is uphold the Constitution, but that has nothing to do with crime,” he said. “What goes on in the streets has no relationship to what goes on in court. Statistically, something over 60% are going to re-offend, so we are not dealing with crime at all.”

Hall’s self-described cynicism does not extend to the court system itself.

“That really does work,” he said. “The guilty are generally punished, and the innocent are set free.”

Rotstein’s eight years of defending the accused has led her to another observation. About 80% of her cases, she said, are somehow related to drugs.

Evidence produced in those cases has convinced her that drug selling and abuse permeates public schools, even at the elementary level. Because of that, although Allison is only 1 year old, Rotstein is already thinking of sending her to private school.

Even the comparatively comfortable Los Angeles public defender’s office (“Compared to others around the country this is like a palace,” Hall said. “We actually have a waiting room with magazines!”) has aspects that make its employees feel a little like second-class lawyers.

The 18th-floor district attorney’s office has been painted twice since the Criminal Courts Building opened in 1973, Hall pointed out, while theirs has never been painted.

The district attorney’s office has a nice library with a librarian, while theirs one floor above is meager and has no librarian.

The government pays for prosecutors’ business cards, Rotstein noted, while public defenders must buy their own.

Difficult Clients

Despite such little annoyances and the difficult clients, the hectic schedules and the thankless, high-pressure work, Hall and Rotstein, like most of their colleagues, plan to stay.

“There are some terrible days, and there are some crazy days, but I like it,” Rotstein said. “I get to help people.”

“It really is lawyering at its essence. It is not delegating to some junior lawyer the research. You do it yourself. It is not having somebody go in and argue for you. You work for yourself,” Hall said.

“It is as close to the pure practice of law as you can get.”