This is How a Heart Breaks

this is how a heart breaks, while the country burns

Music and the Law and Liberty and Justice for All

Oh Imaginary Best Friend Rob Thomas1…today I feel like I’m leading the last best thing about this country up the guillotine steps while the zombie apocalypse rages around me.

So it seemed like a good day to go listen to the album with that song from that episode of iZombie. To cheer myself up, like.

I am not cheered up.

I think the “justice system” broke my fucking heart.

I make a lot of jokes about accidentally going to law school because I did and it’s funny but also I probably belonged there more than anyone because I believe in the Constitution of the United States of America.

It’s not a perfect document by any means. You have to consider the source, and the fact that there were literally no formalized spelling or punctuation rules back in the late 1700s so it’s really kind of impossible to figure out what the fuck the dudes actually meant way back when so you have to treat it as a living, breathing thing and allow it to evolve and adapt with the ebbs and flows of social rules. It’s like a river, a continuum, and if you roll with the changes and don’t try to force permanence you can siphon off the most beautiful of ideals while maintaining modern social progress. It’s the best, really. I love the fucking Constitution.

I don’t have many memories from before middle school, but one that sits in my mind as crystal clear as the day it happened occurred when I was in first grade. When I was in the first grade they began every morning by having us stand and say the pledge of allegiance. But they never told us what the words meant and that BUGGED ME.

My six-year-old is obsessed with words, how they are spelled, what they mean, how some of them mean more than one thing and it’s just magical. He scolded me for not paying enough attention to they lyrics of his beloved Katy Perry because “the words are where she puts the feelings.” (I have been listening to some of her songs, and he is entirely correct on all counts, but I may have a bit of a predisposition to think so)

Thirty-four years ago his six-year-old mother asked the teacher if she could stay inside one recess to have extra time with the dictionary because she wanted to look up the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and make sure she meant them if she was going to say them every morning.

In my memory, the teacher is irritated at being asked to spend lunch inside, because obviously I could not just be left alone in the classroom. Having met many, many teachers over the past three decades, I suspect I am misremembering that particular bit.

I did look up the words, and I wrote them all down and I spent a few days thinking about them and I decided that I believed them with all my pure, earnest six-year-old heart. The way my eldest believes in Katy Perry.

I’m sure you can see how taking that little girl, mixing in a few thousand books then randomly sticking her in law school could be kind of magical. I was very much over the rainbow.

We took constitutional criminal law first year of law school. This first year class is required for everyone, along with a statutory criminal law class where you learn mostly state law and sometimes a bit of federal. For most, these will be the only criminal law classes they take, a couple of amusing pre-reqs that you take to pass the bar but it’s fun and interesting so no one minds taking them the way they do commercial paper.

After that class, the professor wrote me a letter and mailed it to my house. I’m still not sure if this is something she did a lot, or if she thought I was special somehow. It said some stuff about how it’s rare that someone who speaks well in class also does well on the written exam and that she felt I would go far in my legal career. Or something like that. It was kind of weird, but nice, and made me seriously start thinking about a career in criminal law for the first time in my life.

Within our three-prong government, interpreting the Constitution falls to the Judiciary. Constitutional law is a patchwork of Supreme Court decisions made over centuries by the most well-read, introspective minds our nation had to offer. They may have ideological differences, but the Justices of the Supreme Court were, to my mind, deep thinkers who made their decisions with deliberation and sound reasoning.

When the legislature devolved into a house of horrors during the Obama Administration I was not afraid. All the important laws were found in Supreme Court decisions, and the legislature can pass all the laws they want, but at the end of the day the Constitution and the courts reign supreme and no senator actually has the power to take my rights away.

When the presidency turned into a popularity contest won by an entirely unqualified and possibly functionally illiterate reality TV star I was a little afraid, because they gave that dipshit enforcement authority over the laws of the entire land, but fortunately most federal prosecutors are decent human beings at heart and they managed to adhere to the draconian principles being forced upon them if they hoped to keep their jobs while still holding some rational line in the sand. (Being a prosecutor, even a lowly one, is a LOT more political than being a defender because their “official position” changes with each new election whereas ours is basically just “fuck the government” forever and always. Which is funny, because the majority of defenders are FOR “big government.” We just want to make sure the government follows its own rules, that’s all)

Getting that job with the Office of the Federal Public Defender was cool, until I found out it meant I was a direct employee of the United States Judiciary. Then it became more like a religion than a job. I was a part of this big and beautiful thing that I loved and believed in and I felt special and powerful.

I used to tell people all the time it didn’t matter what fucktard they voted for, because the right to abortion was constitutionally protected. The Supreme Court giveth, and ONLY the Supreme Court can taketh away.

My friends think all these “changes” I’m going through are because of the cross-country move last year. They aren’t. That was just a coincidence of timing.

I came undone on June 24, 2022. When Roe fell, it wasn’t just another day and another ruling. My faith in this country was irreparably shattered that day. All the sunny optimism I can muster can’t get it back.

I have to write a brief. I’ve been trying to write it for two months now, and time is running low. But it hurts to write it.

I’m steady but I’m starting to shake, and I don’t know how much more I can take…

It was supposed to be an easy, nothing brief. The appeal of a guilty plea with a pre-negotiated sentence. No big deal. 20 hours of work, tops. But I found something.

This is what I do. This is what makes me, me. What makes other criminal defense attorneys widen their eyes and say “I’ve heard of you.” I find things in cold records. I make leaps that make absolutely no sense and turn them in to strong legal arguments.

There is something here. I have an argument. But I have to invoke Gideon.

Gideon v. Wainwright is the 1963 Supreme Court decision that declared that under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments all criminal defendants charged with crimes potentially carrying jail time in either state or federal court had to be provided with an attorney to represent them.

Federal Defenders celebrate March 18 as a holiday, every year. Not by taking off work, but by working extra hard and sending cheerful emails to all their list servs about how great it is to be a warrior in this fight. It’s nice. I like Gideon Day.

This year was the 60th anniversary. I didn’t celebrate.

Two years ago I would have been burning to write this brief. I would have been pacing around the house, raging, calling colleagues to brainstorm, wanting to get the wording just right.

Right now I can’t stop the tears from falling on my notebook and the ink keeps smearing as I write. (Yes, I do my first draft long hand. It’s my process, slow as it may be)

What if I invoke Gideon and the court says “hey, you’re right, this IS a Gideon violation” but then instead of overturning the defendant’s conviction they just overturn Gideon instead?

If Roe can fall, Gideon can too.

But I can’t NOT invoke it.

I might make bad law.

I might kill one of the last things I still believe in.

And I HAVE TO. To not raise it would be to concede that it doesn’t matter.

Did you know Joseph Heller made up the phrase “Catch-22?” Totally coined it, just like old William Shakespeare used to do. Good as Gold is a better book though.

This is all I can take

I don’t think I can do this anymore.

This is how a heart breaks

I think being a lawyer broke my heart and destroyed my faith.

I think this is my last case. I don’t think “lawyer” is going to be my back up plan.

I believe I’m just plain tired

That’s a different song, a different band, a different lifetime, yet it’s still so fucking true.

I went to a 90s bar trivia night in New Orleans the other day. We missed every single question in the second round but they gave us a point for our team name because my friend put down “Matchbox 2023” and the guy said it doesn’t get much more 90s than that.

At some point I started drunkenly ranting about Michael Crichton (it’s a long story) and drunken words were exchanged with the emcee and it came out I had been a federal public defender and all of a sudden the repartee stopped and he said “thank you for your service.”

At this point Laura dragged me back to the table and started hissing in my ear “he’s not making fun of you, he means it, just say thank you, seriously this isn’t a fight he isn’t mocking you I swear” because people make fun of public defenders A LOT and she knew that look on my face.

I talked to the guy later. He really wasn’t mocking me. I cried so hard.

But it also go me thinking: it kind of is like being in “the service.” It’s kind of like being one of those front-line COVID nurses.

I did compassionate release for the Middle and Western Districts of Louisiana during COVID. Dozens and dozens of people writing me letters, saying they feared for their lives, begging for mercy and help and it was my job to be their lawyer but first I had to decide if they qualified, because time and money are limited and we can’t take every single case just because they ask. I asked my boss what the criteria were, and she said that was for me to figure out. I told her I didn’t feel qualified to make such a call, and she said none of us do but someone has to and we’re the guy.

COVID was kind of a lot for me.

And it isn’t just COVID. Everything about being a defender is brutal. The endless pictures of dead bodies and the psychological exam results and the bad childhoods and the using drugs to escape and omg the child pornography cases that left me vomiting in my office wastebasket time after time.

A couple of years ago I worked up the nerve to tell my boss I wanted her to appoint conflict counsel on a case because I did not feel mentally strong enough to do the appeal in light of the facts of the case. I prepared myself for a fight, to have to explain why I should be permitted to be so weak as to make someone else do this one.

None came. She said “I understand” and conflict counsel was appointed. It’s a hard job. This is known.

And maybe it’s okay to “retire from service” after only ten years.

Maybe ten years is enough. Maybe I’ve done my share, and I can go do something else, and stop retraumatizing myself on a regular basis in the name of helping others.

Maybe I’m not quitting, or giving up. Maybe it’s just someone else’s turn now.

I think this will be my last case.

I’m ready to be a former defender now.

And that’s okay.

Becoming Alternative is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider subscribing to my substack at https://becomingalternative.substack.com/ or making a one time gift at https://venmo.com/u/rmfontenot

  1. I totally stole this from The Great North ↩︎
Share the Post:

Explore More Posts