Jessica, 23, was riding a late-night MTA bus just after learning she was pregnant with her second child. Deeply upset by the news, she was headed home when a man approached her for sex. She screamed for help. But when it came, she was the one who ended up behind bars — locked up for disorderly conduct.
Representation? She could barely afford bus fare. Her freedom thus depended on one of the least appreciated cogs in the criminal justice system: the public defender's office.
Public defenders toil with short staffs and shoestring budgets to uphold that last bit in your Miranda rights — "if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you." But the criminal justice system is rarely shown through their eyes. The public at large typically views the system through the Law and Order lens of "the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute offenders." On the show, they are the revolving-door players who say hi and bye to Sam Waterston's ADAs each week.
But to people without means or money, they're the leads.
Even at a time when the flaws of our criminal justice system, and efforts to reform it, are at the forefront of local and national politics, the voices of public defenders have largely been confined to courthouse halls and happy hours after work. The lawyers in her office, Metro Nashville public defender Dawn Deaner says, have the best stories no one ever hears.
That changed last week, when Deaner called upon colleagues to stand before an audience at The Temple in Belle Meade and testify as to how they "defend Nashville." One by one, they rose from the crowd to tell those stories, putting names like Jessica's with their cases — mostly poor, mostly minorities.
"On behalf of Jessica," her attorney said, standing before the audience, "I defend Nashville."
Defend Nashville is the name of a new initiative from the public defender's office, a multipronged campaign to make its defenders a more prominent part of the judicial-reform debate. To provide insight into making the overstuffed sausage that is the city's criminal justice system, Deaner and her colleagues are speaking across Nashville, addressing crowds who aren't likely to find themselves facing criminal charges — and won't be relying on public defenders if they do.
Just such a crowd gathered at The Temple to hear about a city that few outside the halls of the downtown courthouse ever see. Motivated by the congregation's study of Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the synagogue has hosted a series of candidates' forums and events on the topic of criminal justice over the past two years.
For nearly two hours, Deaner and attorneys from her office delivered blunt truths about their day-to-day experiences. After opening with a short video featuring reflections from Nashville's public defenders, they told the stories of those for whom they "defend Nashville" — the Jessicas of the city — while describing how disproportionately the gavel comes down on the poor and minorities. If there's one big policy change that tops the city's needs, says Diane McNamara, who's been with the public defender's office since 1996, it's to "stop over-policing communities of color."
"I promise you, if you came to Juvenile Court one day, on a settlement docket, you would not think white kids in Nashville smoked weed," McNamara said. "You just wouldn't think they do it."
Other changes are needed just as urgently. A primary focus for Deaner is the crushing workload Nashville's public defenders work under, and the negative effect it has on their clients.
In fiscal year 2012 — Deaner notes the office doesn't have more recent reliable figures because it doesn't have staff to compile them — the Metro public defender's office handled nearly 26,000 cases with just 40 lawyers. They would have needed 28 more lawyers to meet Tennessee's state standards for how many cases a public defender should handle in a year — and those standards are the most grueling in the country.
Under Tennessee's standards, a defender shouldn't handle more than 500 misdemeanor cases a year. In 2012, Deaner says, lawyers working misdemeanor courts for her office took upwards of 1,000 cases each — and typically had less than an hour to spend on each one.
"Justice is both an outcome and a process, and as a result of that workload, we're getting both wrong," Deaner told the Temple audience.
Deaner said she instituted workload caps for the first time in September, which eased the pressure somewhat. But that also pinpointed another problem: Defendants who don't have a public defender are appointed a private attorney by the court. The state pays those attorneys $40 per hour, one of the lowest rates in the country.
The Temple audience reacted audibly to a chart breaking down Deaner's math. But she says the Defend Nashville initiative isn't just about speaking, it's also about listening to the community's needs from the office. Deaner says the office intends to reach out to the "client community" about their experiences with the system and the public defender's office specifically. The distrust that marginalized communities feel toward the criminal justice system, she says, often extends even to the attorneys appointed to defend them. She wants to better understand why, and to learn what her office can do to repair those relationships.
"Lots of our clients have the perception that the public defender's office is just a mill that's going to represent you and plead you guilty as soon as they can," Deaner tells the Scene. "We want to know if they have that perception, we want to know what they think needs to change to change that perception — and to change that reality, when it has been reality."
Toward that goal, in January the office held its first Participatory Defense Training session. The program aims to empower people facing charges, their families and communities by educating them about the process and what role they can play. The aim, essentially, is to "enlarge the defense team," Deaner says.
The office has also begun a court watch program, essentially inviting citizens to spend a day in court with a public defender to pull back the veil from the justice system's daily machinations.
At one point during the event at The Temple, the panel of defenders was asked if they had a list of policy changes they'd like to see. After a few responses, Deaner noted that "sometimes there's so much injustice happening so quickly, it's hard to keep up with it."
"As public defenders, we have been watching those injustices happen for decades," she tells the Scene. "And our clients have been watching those injustices happen for decades."
