Fuck the fucking police, fuck the fucking DA, and fuck the dumb ass judicial bench.
Theyre all fucking bastards and I hope they die slow painful fuckin deaths.
Swear to god this shit is a game to them. All they wanna do is “win” their stupid fucking chess game trial and refuse to see the lives they’re playing with Holy fuck they almost fucked my client up today and I’m so fucking heated holy fuck. Trial time. Hope it turns out well for him.
Send good vibes please.
Death to fucking amerikkka. :acab:
-your hidden pmc lib
Dude honestly shout-out to you. Public defenders are the best. You save lives all the time.
I know you don't do it for random internet strangers appreciation but God damn do I appreciate you.
Thanks, comrade. I appreciate when the efforts are valued cuz it means others also care about the working class and the struggle. Para social relationships help keep me sane, I swear.
:marx-ok:
:hero-of-socialist-labor: Public defenders are heros honestly. It's a pretty tall order to have to face down a totally reactionary legal system every day on behalf of the most vulnerable people in society.
I'm about to graduate law school, and don't really know what I want to do. Everytime I bring up public defender, people try to dissuade me like it's the worst job. I honestly feel like it's one of the few legal jobs that I actually align politically with.
Thanks Comrade, I have interacted with legal aid before, helping them out with the DSA, that is a good option. I didn't know that tenant work was most of what they did, just knew it was a part of it.
We need as much rep for the lumpen prole as possible! Housing, labor, even taxes.. there’s lots of ways to praxis, comrade. Feel free to DM this account. I’ll check it periodically.
What type of labor jobs are there outside of Unions? I'd love to work for a union, but there's not many around. I know a few professors that practice employment law, but usually on behalf of employers.
tbh I was going to intern for a public defender before Covid hit and torpedoed it. Really wishing it had happened, now my first real world experience is going to be for a hospital network next semester. Not exactly ideal, but I'll see where it goes, my supervising lawyer seems cool at least. Thinking about it now that actually seems like a decent path given how overwhelming the healthcare system can be for people, just don't really want to end up part of the machine that makes it overwhelming.
Thank you for the work you do, even though it's a terrible drain. I hope you have a great support network and you feel appreciated in your calling, even when it's as taxing as it was today. :heart-sickle:
Solidarity to you and defense attorneys everywhere I owe you guys probably a decade of my life.
:latam-solidarity: it takes a real down ass client to let us stick it to the fash. o7
:fidel-salute: I have to believe we'll win because the alternative is too horrible.
Solidarity comrade. You're doing a good and necessary job and I wish you the best.
Once in my misguided lib youth I was studying to get a law degree and become a prosecutor. Then mental health happened and put a stop to that. I'm sorry for a lot of the havoc dumping out of law school wrecked but today I'm deeply thankful that I didn't become a part of that evil system.
Glad that you’ve come out of the law school experience as a self-aware, healthy individual. And I’m glad to hear you’re a comrade.
We were all libs before we were radicalized. Except me. I’m still a lib.
I was raised by communists and then became a lib, thinking I could be the successful one. Then I dropped out because I was poor as fuck and couldn't balance work and school living on my own. Almost two decades later and I've become a committed communist and most of my older family have become yuppy libs and the ones that hadn't lost their way to anti-vaxx and qanon shit.
It's such a difficult environment to navigate and not come out a reactionary, this is why even internet "anarchist" libs that still have anti-communist brainworms get my critical support. They could be a LOT worse.
The internet lets us disengage at will and make up our own caricature of whoever we are speaking to, in person it's a lot easier to get people's ear.
In that second paragraph, you hit the nail on the head with how I see the reactionary tendencies of the working poor—see it in my clients and even family.
:10000-com: on point
It's our job to exercise patience, and navigate their brainworms with tact and understanding. Sure I've had some luck being assertive and bullying my best friend into rejecting the capitalist propaganda we were raised on, but that takes a certain amount of trust and ability to present oneself as an authority on a subject.
With folks I don't know so well I focus on the latter first, teaching people cool history facts about stuff less likely to trigger thought terminating cliches. I talk about the lesser known atrocities of the US or the more radical aspects of labor history and civil rights movements.
Once I get people asking me for my opinion on a subject only then do I start trying to unravel the more ingrained stuff.
I almost got cancelled on twitter just for saying that white people need to be the ones to deprogram our racist friends and relatives if we can...
People just jump to "oh so you want to team up with the boogaloos". Like no motherfucker do you read? There's a lot of idealists that want to ignore the fact that as conditions worsen even if more people are becoming leftists even more people are being targeted and successfully radicalized by fascists, opportunists, and other reactionaries.
This is part of my inspiration for the writing project I've been mentioning. I want to try to tackle the whole history of fascist radicalization , on why and how their ideas are spread (specifically the roots of decentralized online recruitment), and what we need to do on the left to combat it.
Hell yeah. We need comrades in all circles—especially in common spaces like the internet. Congrats on actively pushing friends left. That’s an area of praxis I need to brush up on.
Hope you post your writings here. I could use em.. :thinkin-lenin:
This will definitely be the first place I post anything. If you want to read up on the source material I'm working off so far check out Kathleen Belew's Bring The War Home, and for a less thorough but similar work Robert Evans' The War On Everyone which is free on soundcloud along with this article a comrade from discord sent me on the subject.
I'd really love for this to be a collaborative affair.
Law school politics was weird. We had a "leftist" student organisation at law school but it was mostly aesthetics for popular kids. I never felt comfortable around them, in fact I preferred hanging out with the conservatives as they were a bunch of dorks like me and somehow had less cutthroat careerist vibes than the "leftists" and centrists did.
Ha!! Yeah the libertarian gun-clubbers seemed to have better legal takes than the rad-libs. That environment is weird af. I don’t miss it one bit.
spoiler
Except for the amount of p/bussy but I swear I’m volcel now.
People raised by reactionaries are either prude weirdos or freak weirdos.
Whether their weirdness leans left or right seems to be a coin toss, and is entirely unrelated to the former.
Depends on the county. I have a good manager who keeps us at A floating number of about 50 cases. I’d say I litigate like 1/3 of them—suppress, trial, work up dismissals, etc.
Sometimes you can’t help but plead cuz the alternative launches your client to the sun. Other times you end up pleading cuz you realize the DAs didn’t “do their work” and will later up charge shit to felonies and add multiple counts, etc. most of the time the client is just to scared—and you can’t blame em when they’ve been chewed up by the system and all.
But holy shit when you find an issue and you can convince a client to run it, you make it work and find the time to litigate it cuz you can fuck the DA up or cross the cop and call them everything short of a bastard and basically de-arrest folks in slow time. Pretty dope but still pretty draining and pretty much turns you into :marx-joker:
Depends on the county. I have a good manager who keeps us at A floating number of about 50 cases.
Meanwhile I'm over 300 lmao, like you said it really depends. And this is probably the best county to be a PD in the state I'm in, I've heard it's worse everywhere else here smh. Keep fighting the good fight!!!
hoping to be able to become a public defender in the future. in my country it pays well and we have a huge amount of law grads here, so it's pretty competitive but i feel like being able to help people in our shitty bourgeois justice system is one of the most rewarding things you can do with a law degree. most jobs for law grads seem absolutely soul-sucking too.
Keep at it! It’s gruesome but it’s one of the few roles that aligns my politics with my job. You might like it too.
Most of the people I went to law school with ended up working for capital and that’s :pigpoop: tbh
You can.. but at the end of the day, the jury wants credibility so you have to be real careful. For instance, it’s hard to sell mental illness without history nowadays. It’s also hard to change bad facts.
You definitely present facts in a way that creates doubt though—cuz the DA has to “meet their burden” (as dumb as that shit is lol). So sometimes it’s your only defense and you gotta fuck shit up somehow with a stacked deck against you.
It certainly does. A lawyer's job is getting the best result for his client, not to find some objective truth. While outright lying is often too hard to pull off convincingly you can certainly frame the facts in your favour, play up the good parts, omit the bad parts and deny everything your opponent can't prove. This goes for civil as well as for criminal cases. There's a lot of bullshit artistry involved in lawyering.
Hundred percent. Bullshit artistry is literally awarded. I dunno how many times I’ve seen judges be sweated by stupid verbiage and grandiosity.
"well I'm just a backwoods country lawyer but (proceeds to deliver the entire rest of the opening argument in Latin and Ancient Greek)"
I do the whole “if I may be heard on a small issue your honor (proceed with synonyms for poopoopeepee)”
So like, what would happen if during a trial you reminded the jury that police are often encouraged to lie to a jury, and when found out rarely face any consequences for doing so. That, there is no real requirement they engage with the court on a good faith basis. And also many places have hireing restrictions that prevent people from joing the police force if they score well on intelegence testing.
Just completely blow up the spot and show youtube videos of cops planting drugs on random people. The just chant shadow of a doubt.
Oh you could bring up bias, quotas for hiring and promotion, etc. but it really depends on how much leeway the judge is able to give you. That shit is all dependent on the culture set by the judicial bench..
I know that in some counties, defense attorneys have a lot more leeway than I do. Our judges suck
Man, I can't imagine how frustrating that would be to being up police bias, a clealrly well known and doccumented fact, and the judge is just like "pbfbfbffb, nah"
I think they would need to get the balif out for me if that happened.
Oh yeah. Sometimes I wanna say “fuck you you fucking bastard” to the judge but I have to bite my tongue or my client and future clients get fucked hard.
___
I've had that same thought. It just seems factually obvious and that the judge should remind jurors how often cops can be shown to be lying, with videotape, and almost never face prosecution.
:sankara-salute:
But really, the clients are for surviving this fucked up system. At the end of the day, they’re the ones enduring the real shit, you know?
I know a public defender who could probably be pulled left with a little effort. Any tips?
Honestly it’s literally listening to them and asking them what the alternatives to the crim system would be. Once they can see alternatives to incarceration, you can start tee’ing up the convos that say “the whole system is built to protect the bourgeois/capital”
I’ve been trying this with my coworkers and I feel like I’m making progress. :maduro-salute:
