People v. State

A lot of people say they hate lawyers. I’ve never been a lawyer’s client or a party to a lawsuit and had to deal with one in that role, so I’m not sure why this is. I assume the haters have their reasons, but I wonder whether their hatred isn’t misdirected. Might they be making scapegoats of mere peons? Might their real gripe be with the legal system itself? Granted, the whole legal system is made up of people who went to law school, but why single out for special scorn those of us who labor at its lowest rung? We’re all responsible for our crappy system, but some of us are more responsible for it than others.

It wears on a person to stand in another’s shoes as his attorney while he gets screwed over by the “system” (scare quotes because there is no “system” apart from the people who make it up). And then to stand in another’s as he gets screwed over, and another’s. The client stands aghast, and how can I, as an “officer of the court,” explain or defend what’s happened? I can’t. You’ll just have to take my word for it when I say these people got screwed, and that it wasn’t just a matter of a close call not going our way. I’m not completely insane. I know when an argument has gone unanswered. It would be bearable if it was simply a matter of a close call not going our way, or if the “blown calls” were isolated incidents, or if there was an affordable way to get a timely and truly objective second opinion. What’s unbearable, and a motivation killer, is the realization that being right doesn’t necessarily matter, even when it’s important. If being right doesn’t matter, then we are all full of hot air, as the lawyer-haters charge.

UPDATE:

Norm Pattis offered a “Word of Encouragement” at his blog in response to this post. I tried to comment on his post, but my comment was a little too long-winded to be accepted as a comment, so I’m posting it here:

Thanks for the word of encouragement, Norm. It helped. And I will remember the specific, practical advice you offered for my next trial.

I don’t foresee myself giving up on the law, but certain areas of law I’m now practicing tempt me to forsake them more than others. The case that broke my heart in this instance, and other cases I had in mind when I wrote my post, were family law cases. These cases can mean as much to all involved as criminal cases, and yet they’re decided not by a jury but by a single judge. In a nutshell, in the case that broke my heart yesterday, a judge (and actually not even a judge – a magistrate) decided that because the mother of my client’s child had illegally run off with the child to another state several years ago without notice to my client or the court as to where she had gone, and because my client and his (now 6 year old) daughter had thereby been deprived of their relationship with each other, their relationship should continue to be severely restricted for yet another year. The seven weeks they were entitled to this summer under the parenting time guidelines were reduced (from the magistrate’s previous order just last September) to just two weeks this summer, all supervised. You see, “reunification” between the father and the child must occur before regular and unsupervised visitation may take place. Now, how such “reunification” is supposed to occur when my client and his daughter are only going to have two weeks of supervised visitation this summer, and aren’t going to see each other again until another week of supervised visitation over Christmas break, is a complete mystery. In Indiana, a parent’s visitation rights may not be restricted without a showing and a finding that such visitation would “endanger the child’s physical health or significantly impair the child’s emotional development.” There has been no such showing nor even such a finding. It’s a very high burden, as well it should be, because the law presumes as it should that a child’s best interests are served by substantial and regular parenting time with both parents. Even after I clearly pointed out to the court that no such showing or finding had been made, it apparently didn’t matter. He didn’t even revise his order to make such a finding, probably because he doesn’t believe that such parenting time would in fact endanger the child’s physical health or impair her emotional development. He apparently thinks that whatever he thinks serves the “child’s best interests” controls the situation, legal presumptions be damned. Moreover, there had been no showing and no finding of a “change in conditions” since the court’s order last September, even though such a finding is required before parenting time may be modified. The child’s mother’s own mother and sister testified on my client’s behalf at the hearing on mother’s petition for modification, based on their first hand observations of the parenting time between father and child that had occurred over spring break. The mother had no witnesses other than some guy from the local Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau, who based his recommendation not on an in camera interview with the child or with actual observations of parenting time between the father and the child, but solely on the fact that father and child had been deprived by the mother of their relationship with each other for the past several years. I asked the court to conduct an in camera interview with the child before he so severely restricted my client’s parenting time rights, to no avail. We weren’t adamantly insisting that the child jump into 7 weeks of unsupervised overnight visitation with the child, but had proposed a phase in process involving the mother’s family in the local area so that at least by the end of the summer father and child would be having such visitation.

The kicker is that, because the mother had waited so long to file her petition for modification, the court made its decision radically modifying its previous order at the beginning of the summer, when my client’s parenting time was supposed to begin. So now, any appeal would be moot, not to mention prohibitively expensive.

That’s a little more than a nutshell.

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