And there are certain decisions that have to
be made by your client. Whether they want to plead guilty or not
guilty, whether they want to be tried in front of a judge or a
jury, whether or not they would like to testify on their own
behalf, whether they would like to be considered to be found guilty
on lesser charges, or if they want to go for all or nothing. Those
are their decisions. So, many times I’ve advised people to plead
guilty to a reduced charge or to a lesser sentence. You know, you
have a young man who’s 15, 18, 19 years old, and you would think
this is the guy you can sell something like 25 years to, because
they’re gonna get out when they’re 40-something, and they’ll still
have a life. And they say, “Fuck it. That’s like the rest of my
life. I’ll roll with it; let’s go to trial.”
I suppose there is a level of attention that
they get by going to trial. There is this whole idea of: “Are these
people actually going to come in and say this shit about me? Let’s
see what my brother really does. Let’s see if he really comes in
and testifies against me.” Or: “Let’s see if my fellow gang member
will actually come in and testify against me.” Or: “Let’s see if
these witnesses actually come in here and stare at me and say I did
that.” And it usually happens. And the poor guy winds up getting 75
years after turning down something like 20. But at that point it
doesn’t make any difference to them.
The kids that I grew up with—we didn’t want
to fight each other. We wanted to play baseball, and we wanted to
play Frisbee football, and we wanted to ride our bikes. So it just
wasn’t normal for us to always be engaged in some kind of fight.
But it almost seems like that is the norm on conflict resolution
now. There’s almost an expectation now that fighting is the way you
deal with conflict.
I think the violence comes from a lack of
social skills, it comes from the inability to deal with conflict,
and it comes from learned behavior. Unless you’ve got people who
are providing some sort of structure for children, some sort of
model on how to deal with conflict, they’re going to learn the
wrong way to deal with it. I think that happens a lot. It is very
intergenerational—learning the wrong ways to deal with
conflicts.
I had a case a few years ago, from the West
Side. One of the guys got his teeth knocked out—he got beat up,
jumped by these guys, got his teeth knocked out. So four months
later, his buddies see the guy who they think was responsible. So
they chase him down, stop him, broad daylight, summer afternoon—4
o’clock in the afternoon. They beat him with tire irons and a
baseball bat, until he’s just lying there like mush. Six guys on
one guy. You know, that kind of brutality, it’s just…there’s just
too much rage.
And obviously there are a lot more guns out
there. I mean, they’re usually coming from other states and straw
purchasers.33 My clients don’t tell me how they got their guns.
I’ve got cases now where people were using AK-47s—allegedly. In the
old days, I don’t remember any cases with machine guns. My
perception is that there are more guns now than there used to be.
There are a lot of gang guns, secreted in various areas, and
everybody has access to them. I would say 20 to 30 percent of the
firearms that show up in my cases have the serial numbers etched
off of them. You know, there are a lot of states in this country
where you can buy a lot of guns whenever you feel like it and those
get into the supply stream and they wind up in the wrong
places.
I recently started working with some
schoolchildren with the Constitutional Rights Foundation and the
Lawyers in the Classroom Project. We did this exercise called
“Martians from Space,” or something like that. The scenario is that
these Martians come in from space and basically tell you that you
can only keep 5 of your 10 constitutional guarantees within the
Bill of Rights. So which ones are you willing to give up? Of
course, I explain what the rights are and try to make them relevant
to the kids, and then the kids talked about which five
constitutional rights they’d want to keep. They all kind of caucus
with each other, and I was stunned to find out that they thought
that the most important right was the Second Amendment: the right
to bear arms. I couldn’t believe it. I was speechless. I really
was. The Second Amendment? I think it’s because they don’t feel
safe.
A few years ago, I represented a young man
who was charged with two homicides. One was the involuntary
manslaughter of his brother—they were playing Russian roulette and
the gun jammed, so he struck it down onto the table to unjam it and
it fired and went through his brother’s torso and severed a major
artery. They lugged the kid in a car to the hospital and told the
police that he’d been shot by rival gang members. Eventually the
police investigated it and noticed the trail of blood coming from
the house. They spoke to some of the other participants, who not
only said that it was an accident but also implicated him in a
shooting that had occurred five months before, of a rival gang
member whom he had shot to avenge the death of one of his friends.
So this poor kid, who was under 18 and basically raising himself on
the streets and getting affirmation and reassurance and a sense of
being from these gang members, gets charged with first-degree
murder and also gets charged with involuntary manslaughter of his
brother. At the sentencing hearing, the father of the victim—who
had given a victim-impact statement aloud in court—shook my hand
with this look of reassurance, like, “I’m not holding against you
what you do for a living. I appreciate what you do for a living.”
There really wasn’t a whole lot to say to him, you know? I said,
“I’m sorry for your loss.” As a parent myself, it doesn’t matter if
your son is a gang member who gets killed by another gang member.
It’s still the death of your loved one, and it’s still a loss no
matter how you look at it.
Being a parent gives me a lot more
perspective on my clients. I’ve represented parents as well as
children who were charged with crimes, and that shows you the full
cycle of things and how people get to be where they are. Why did
this person turn out to be this person who goes around strangling
and murdering women? You know? What happened in his life to make
him this way? Well, maybe it was because his mother was a
prostitute and would put him in the hallway when he was 3 ½ years
old while she turned tricks, and maybe it’s because women never
really paid attention to him and always neglected him, and maybe
he’s angry because he never had a mother.
There are a lot of aspects to how I do my
parenting that have evolved after seeing what other kids have gone
through. When I think about my own children, I think about some of
the children that I’ve encountered during my years as a public
defender and how they got to be my clients and what it was that was
lacking in the parents who were supposed to be taking care to
train, protect and discipline them.
My clients—as they get older, especially if
they’ve had a checkered past—they’ve had their mother come to court
for them so many times, it gets to be to the point where the mom
just can’t do it anymore. Or it becomes shameful—here is a grown
man for whom a mother may have gone to juvenile court over and
over, perhaps even sharing her frustration with the juvenile judge,
saying: “I can’t control him.” A lot of parents will fess up to
that: “I can’t control him; he’s supposed to be in bed at 11
o’clock, but at 2 o’clock in the morning, he’s running the streets
with his buddies, hiding guns under the bed, bringing drugs into
the house.” So parents get burned out, and a lot of parents stop
coming to court. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times it’s
almost like, friends of the bride, friends of the groom. On one
side of the courtroom you’ll have all the cops, and the victims’
family, and the victim witness coordinator, holding the hands of
the victim’s loved ones. But oftentimes, the defense side of the
courtroom is empty, except for maybe a couple of people.
The victims usually have a few more
resources. If you’re unfortunate enough to have a loved one who was
murdered, the prosecutor’s office has somebody who will inform you
about the next court date. If you come to court, they will sit next
to you in court and explain to you what’s going on, provide you
with a lunch, perhaps even provide you with transportation
expenses, give you reassuring hugs and things like that. I don’t
really have anybody in my office that does that for the defendant’s
families. My office doesn’t have any social workers that will sit
with my clients’ families and hold their hand.
Losing a loved one is very difficult. It’s
very easy to focus that anger on the person that’s been charged.
It’s really difficult to try and overcome that—and I’ve seen it
over and over again, where I’ve walked into the courtroom for trial
and the friends of the victim—you’re getting the dagger eyes from
them because they’re still not over it.
The most fulfilling aspect of what I do is
hearing the words “not guilty” from a jury. Somehow, it’s
addictive, you know? Just hearing those words is intoxicating. I
mean, that’s what makes me keep doing this. Even though I know I’ll
hear “guilty” far more often. We’re just fierce competitors. It
sounds kind of cruel for me to say this: Everybody thinks the law
is a search for the truth, but that’s not what the law is. At some
point, I don’t really care what happened. It’s about strategy, it’s
about tactics, and it’s about skill and advocacy. Maybe the truth
gets lost. I don’t know. But it’s not a search for the truth. As
far as lawyers are concerned, it’s about whether the prosecution
can meet its burden of proof. That’s what it’s about.
There have been times when I wasn’t feeling
very good about being a lawyer, and it took me a long time to have
some kind of faith in the system again—that there is some
redemption out there. Maybe there is a way to right wrongs. But if
I had stopped being a lawyer after nine or ten years I would have
never found that out.
There have been a lot of people that have
come in and out of my life. Right after my juvenile court years, I
would sometimes walk into a grocery store and get: “Hey, you
represented me,” or something like that. Some of my clients I
really, really like, and it’s like: “Oh my God, how did we wind up
here?” But others are just set in their ways, and they’re just not
going to change. They’re just damaged. What I’ve realized—what I’ve
come to learn—is that once someone is about 16 or 17 years old, it
becomes really difficult to rehabilitate them. You really have to
get them at a young age—to try and disabuse them from acting out.
Because, after a certain age, they are basically goners.
—
Interviewed by Emily Ce Anderson
Endnotes
32 See Kevin Davis, Defending the Damned:
Inside a Dark Corner of the Criminal Justice System (New York:
Atria Books, 2007), 34. This book offers a compelling and
insightful look into the Cook County Public Defender’s Office.
33 According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun
Violence, a straw purchaser is an individual who buys guns for
people who are legally prohibited from possessing a firearm or for
individuals who do not want their name linked to the gun. Straw
purchasing is an illegal firearm purchase and is a federal crime
that can result in a felony conviction. People can serve up to 10
years in jail and incur fines of up to $250,000. For more
information on Illinois gun laws, or gun laws in other states, see:
http://smartgunlaws.org
The Whole World Stopped
AUDREY WRIGHT
Audrey Wright is an unlikely—if
forceful—advocate for violent ex-offenders. In 1998, she lost her
24-year-old son, Gordie, in a drive-by shooting. But instead of
wallowing in hatred for young people who turn to violence, she
decided to help them find better futures.
The result is Gordie’s Foundation, a
vocational-training program for ex-cons located in West Englewood,
a South Side neighborhood where the rate of youth homicide is
nearly five times higher than it is citywide.
As this interview begins, Wright indicates
that she is not feeling well and almost canceled our meeting. She
seems impatient to get through the conversation, and keeps her coat
and hat on as she recounts the traumatic story of her son’s death
and the way she chose to deal with that loss.
You just don’t give up on communities. You
don’t just give up on young kids. You know? I don’t know what kind
of heart people have when their kids get killed and they just go
home and sit down. They don’t do nothing. They got to get up and
say, “Let’s fight. Let’s stop some of this.”
I have a 12,000-square-foot building that I
train people in. I have about nine things in my building that I
teach. I have carpentry, with weatherization. I have janitorial. I
have the barber school. I have industrial sewing. I have embroidery
and screen-printing, so ex-felons can get a job or open their own
business. I have a city inspector, who teaches heating for me on
Saturdays. Did you know that a heating and air guy that’s been
taught by a city inspector can go out and start his own business in
his own neighborhood? You see what I’m saying? He don’t have to
worry about looking for work at McDonald’s and whether he got a
record.
Those are things that I do to help the
community. We have a counselor. We can recommend some place to go
if you are homeless. I have a young lady that always tries to put
aside 13 beds for me. These are things that are important to people
on the street.
It was 1998 when my son got killed. When he
walked out the door that night, he said, “Mama, I’m going to get me
some cigarettes.” And I begged him, “Please don’t walk around that
corner. You know how these people be.”
He went out of my house at 15 minutes to 12.
At 12:01, my son was shot. At 12:49, my son was dead. It was like
the whole world stopped. And you know what he said to me before he
walked out the door? He said, “Mama, you got to turn me loose
because if God get ready for me, there ain’t nothing you can
do.”