A Guilty Verdict

"IN could just watch a good brain surgeon for a few months," a certain high school teacher was fond of saying, "then I'm sure I could operate just as well as anyone with 13 years experience." Laws prevent such hands-on medical training, but if he tried operating that way anyhow, it's easy to predict his fate. Dozens of contract-waving literary agents would scramble past his shabbily dressed public defense lawyer and one of the first would be the type that signed up James S. Kunen on "The Making of a Criminal Lawyer"--the story of Kunen's two and a half years as a public defender in the District of Columbia.

The U.S. has more lawyers per person than any other nation and perhaps as a consequence of our fascination with "The Law," we seemingly buy more lawyers' autobiographies than any other people F. Lee Bailey, Harvard Law Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, and Wyoming lawyer Gerry Spence have all brought their legal battles from the courtroom to the book stores. As the most romanticized bailiffs, criminal defense lawyers have led this charge though they represent only a small fraction of all lawyers. A still tinier minority work as public defenders representing the accused who can't afford an F. Lee Bailey's legal fees or pique the legal interest of a scholar like Dershowitz.

Kunen uses the same autobiographical form that Bailey and Dershowitz do, but can't replicate the excitement and force of argument of his more senior colleagues. Kunen's book is dull, probably duller than most of the corporate contracts Law School grads do write--simply because his two and a half years working in the Washington courts were particularly dull. A street punk arrested for smoking on a bus inherently carries less drama than a Claus von Bulow on trial for murder. A Dershowitz arguing constitutional law before the Supreme Court is naturally more interesting than this rookie public defender arguing in Juvenile Court over a street fight. Street fights can be powerfully addressed but Kunen fails to make those he dealt with illuminating and infects them with his standard dryness.

Kunen dulls even one of the dullest stories ever committed to print. In an attempt presumably to add literary dimension to his work, Kunen adds trite and unimportant observations.

It occurred to me that "on the street" is a strange place for a middle-class person to want to stay, but because most defendants hang out there, it's become a term of the trade for "not in jail." When you think about being in jail, you realize how important being on the street is Whatever you want to do, and wherever you want to go, you have to start on the street.

The attempts at sympathy for his largely poverty-stricken clients fail as well.

I drove Eric [a juvenile defendant] and his aunt down to the station in my new Mustang [later stolen] through searing sun-bleached boulevards that reminded me of Florida, L.A., or Mexico, and reminded Eric of nothing, since they were all he had ever known. I think that the simple fact of never leaving the city must be one of the most insupportable conditions of poverty, but I wouldn't know.

One might think that the lack of quality medical care, or lawyers who can't think beyond such insights would be among "the most insupportable conditions of poverty." But, I wouldn't know, either. Of course, I wouldn't write a book about not knowing.

But it's hard to criticize Kunen for rambling off his point--rambling on about an insane boy he meets on a train--when Kunen never establishes what the point is. He once tries explaining things to a client with a story observing one of those great truths the Kunens of this world always observe, "everyone likes a story." His use of evidence crosses the realm from the odd into the truly bizarre. Key legal points and statistics are attributed to private conversations, but the word "motherfucker" gets the lengthy note. "For an interesting discussion of the psychological implications of the expression 'motherfucker' (and comparable insults in sixty-six languages) see Edgar A. Gregerson, "Sexual Linguistics," Annals New York Academy of Science. Vol 327 (Language, Sex, and Gender)."

Interesting facts simply get thrown in every now and then without apparent connection to either the narrative or any grander scheme. He speculates that all FBI agents might not use electric razors and cologne because one-eighth of them are accountants. We also learn that the U.S. has more prisoners per country than any country except the Soviet Union and South Africa and then Kunen goes right along writing about...what?

Certainly When College grads finally enter the corporate firms of Wall Street, they usually call it a sell out. They have, so the argument goes, desorted public service and entered an oral world of corporate law.

But Kunen quickly--and probably inadvertently--dispells the myth of public defenders as ethical gods. "Deception is not deceit," Kunen says, "Lawyers and magicians practice deception. Dishonest people practice deceit." With that said, Kunen brazenly describes a client's parole status at a sentencing hearing. All of which proves Kunen doesn't need a top partnership to be a sleaze. If Kunen dispels the popular myth that public defenders are somehow more ethical than higher priced lawyers, he only adds to the impression that they simply got the thin envelope from law schools that would offer them more than a shot at defending indigents.

Similarly, Kunen pursues a discussion of the controversial exclusionary rule--a court-concocted device that excludes illegally seized evidence from the court--by mouthing the generic legal rights justification. "Of course it's terrible for guilty people to go free," Kunen writes. "That's the price we pay for not having cops crawling in and out of our houses. Everybody wants something for nothing." That the United States didn't have cops crawling in and out of Court earlier this century merits neither observation or reflection.

Something for nothing, ironically, is what Kunen presumably got for this, his third book. The issues Kunen alludes to in his rambling and sleep-inducing narrative imply certain important questions and he shows one of many ways not to answer them. He solemnly quotes Adams saying "Better that Many Guilty Shall Go Free Than One Innocent Should Suffer" which sounds fine the first twenty times one hears it in third grade American History, but rapidly declines in enchantment value from then on. Inevitably the problems with justice in the streets will be debated nationally and will hopefully receive the full scrutiny that simplistic pseudo-experts like Kunen cannot offer.