A Public Defender With God on His Side : Courts: Lawyer who is studying to be a priest has brought a breath of enthusiasm and teamwork to the overworked public defender’s office, colleagues say.

San Diego County Deputy Public Defender Richard Gates was skeptical when he first heard Jim Hammer’s unusual summertime proposition.

In training to become a Jesuit priest, Hammer--a lawyer and former prosecutor in Northern California--wanted to work in Gates’ office defending poor people who couldn’t afford private lawyers. But he only wanted the job until August, when he would resume his Jesuit studies.

“He wanted to touch base with the criminal justice system again before turning his attention to the higher authorities,” said Gates, the supervisor of the central misdemeanor unit, who acknowledges that he didn’t like the idea of a lawyer just “passing through.” “He could never have confronted a person more doubting than I was. But boy, did Jim ever convince me.”

Since his arrival in May, Hammer has won three of five jury trials he has argued--including one tough drunk-driving case that almost everybody said was unwinnable. Moreover, Gates and others say, Hammer has infused the crime-hardened, overworked public defender’s office with a new enthusiasm and a sense of teamwork that has done everybody good.

“We always knew that God was on our side, but this puts a new dimension to it,” said Deputy Public Defender Michael Roake, the training and recruitment director. “He has rekindled in others a sense of mission. . . . He’s been nothing short of miraculous.”

A lanky, boyish man whose speech is often punctuated by booming laughter, Hammer, 30, jokes that he sought out the long hours and low pay of the public defender’s office as a form of penance. But, in truth, Hammer says, after completing three of 10 preparatory years required to become a priest, he found himself missing the law.

“I love doing trial work,” Hammer said, kicking off his shoes during a recent quick lunch in his office. “Questions of guilt or innocence are the great questions of the world. To sit in the defendant’s chair and be faced with the might of the state--that’s a drama!”

Seen through Hammer’s eyes, every case is a fascinating morality play. The case of the Portuguese fisherman, for example, who was accused of taking 41 undersize crabs: state Department of Fish and Game officials said the man intended to keep the small crabs--an offense punishable by up to $41,000 in fines and 20 years in prison.

But, in halting English, the fisherman testified that, when his boat was stopped, he hadn’t yet had time to sort the crabs and throw the small ones back.

During the trial, officials displayed photos of the 41 small crabs they’d found in his catch of 455. They brought in the frozen, smelly carcasses of five crabs they had killed as evidence. The other 36, they explained, were thrown overboard after the boat had been towed back to port.

Hammer told the jury that officials had jumped the gun. If they had just waited a few hours, he said, the fisherman would have sorted the crabs, tossing all 41 back into the ocean where he had found them. Instead, he told the jury, “What we have here is five frozen crabs and 36 who had a long walk home.”

The jury ruled in the fisherman’s favor.

“That was a great case--a simple, hard-working guy,” Hammer said. “And 41 counts of not guilty--that’s more than I’ll get in my career!”

Then there was the case everybody said was a loser. Hammer’s client, a career Navy man with one prior drunk-driving conviction, stood accused of driving under the influence a second time. The prosecution had a witness, the man’s neighbor, who said he saw the man driving drunk outside his home. But the man insisted he was not behind the wheel. He told Hammer he wanted to go to trial.

Roake, Hammer’s supervisor, recalls that the judge who assigned the case pulled him aside to say there was “no way in hell” Hammer could win it. But that judge had never seen Hammer work.

“My client was going to lose everything he had,” Hammer said. If convicted, the man faced the possibility of six months in jail. He also stood to lose his job. “One of his supervisors sat through the whole trial. This was all he had. Everything was on the line.”

Hammer, meanwhile, had no witnesses, no evidence. All he had was the prosecution’s seemingly airtight case.

So Hammer started poking holes. The neighbor had testified he had seen the man in the driver’s seat, his profile illuminated by a street light. Was the car window up or down? Hammer asked. Wouldn’t there have been a reflected glare off the window--an easily remembered sight? The neighbor couldn’t recall.

Then came Hammer’s closing argument, a 33-minute monologue that began with a reference to the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s just a piece of paper with funny lettering on it,” Hammer told the jury, rolling up a piece of typing paper and putting it to his lips. When he blew through the tube, it fluttered open.

“Today, you’re going to breathe life into it. The Constitution never becomes more real than right now,” he recalls telling the jury. “Are you going to wake up three nights from now and say, ‘Am I sure?’ ”

When the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, Hammer’s client started to cry.

“I put on the best case I could put on,” said James S. Cahan, the deputy city attorney who prosecuted the case. “The case that I had, he manipulated. . . . The true credit for the not-guilty verdict lies in Mr. Hammer’s abilities and in the jury.”

He added: “I have heard from other people, though I don’t share the same fervent enthusiasm, that his closing was very good. And that’s the definition of an effective counsel.”

“Jim is phenomenal, he really is,” said April Falcon, a third-year student at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, who clerked in the same office as Hammer this summer. Largely because of him, she says, she has decided to make defense work her career.

“I’m absolutely convinced that this is what I want to do. He’s really that tremendous of an example,” she said. “Because things are so busy here, the caseload is so big, and because it’s really sort of draining, it would be easier to keep your clients at a distance. Jim seems really willing to go beyond that. The people he works for really feel like, ‘This is my attorney. He’s going to go to the mat for me.’ ”

Hammer, who was raised in an Irish Catholic home, says he planned to be a lawyer all his life, inspired by an uncle who was a judge. But in 1986, after he took the bar exam, something changed. During a trip to Rome, Hammer went to confession at St. Peter’s Basilica and emerged with the knowledge that his mission was to serve God.

“It was really pretty mysterious and religious. It was really a call from God--I know that sounds hokey, but it’s true,” he said. “That’s when the great wrestling match with God began, and I lost--or won.”

The change was not immediate. Hammer took a job as a prosecutor in Alameda County. He had a successful year and a half, developing his oratory skills in several jury trials. But, in 1988, Hammer made one of his most difficult decisions. He quit and immediately began his religious training.

“It was something I resisted for a long time. I always wanted to be married and be a great trial lawyer,” he said. “But, after a year, the question really crystallized. I said, ‘This is what you are meant to do.’ ”

This summer, that decision led him to switch sides in the courtroom, and Hammer says transforming himself from prosecutor to defender has been a challenge.

“If I weren’t a Jesuit, there’s a good chance I’d be a prosecutor. The prosecutor has the power and the discretion to do justice,” said Hammer, who acknowledges that he loved being able to pick the cases he tried, going after defendants he believed were guilty.

The most difficult thing about becoming a public defender, he said, is learning that “my job is not to decide if somebody did something or not. . . . You have to trust in the system, trust in those 12 men and women. I have to do the trials (prosecutors) want to try. . . . The odds are really stacked against you.”

Those odds, public defenders say, can lead to burnout. As Hammer’s colleagues reflect on his summer stint, they wonder aloud if he could keep up his enthusiasm over the long haul.

Hammer, who hopes one day to teach law, smiled broadly as he considered the question.

“I’ve felt burned out at times, but each day I get recharged,” he said. “I try to see God in everything I see, from the prostitute to the prosecutor to the sunset. And I pray every day. That makes all the difference in my life.”

This week, Hammer’s last in San Diego, his colleagues continue to joke that divine intervention is the only explanation for a first-time public defender winning 60% of the cases he takes to trial. (According to officials in the public defender’s and city attorney’s offices, the average defense victory rate falls somewhere between 25% and 50%, depending on how the statistics are calculated.)

So, when Hammer rushes into an elevator on the way to court, the office staff now calls out, “Go get ‘em, Father!”

“This is a guy who cuts some of the cynicism out of you. . . . I wish I could keep him,” Gates said. “In fact, I keep trying to tell him that he can do more of God’s work by staying here. And we have a big, needy flock. But he’s faced greater temptations than I can give him. He has a plan for his life.”

Roake agreed.

“There will always be a place for him,” he said, “if he wearies of his line of work.”