You ever have a strong sense of the road not taken in your life? Not necessarily regret, but just a sense of what might have been if. Sometimes I get this feeling that life is like a video game in which multiple versions of the same story exist side by side dependent on upon key choices. In one version of my life, I am living in the southern United States representing people accused of capital (death penalty) crimes.
About 2 pages into attorney Bryan Stevenson’s brilliant real life To Kill a Mockingbird story: Just Mercy: a story of Justice and Redemption, I had stopped reading to Google bar review courses and look for jobs defending people facing the death penalty.
This was one of my alternate universe lives and I came pretty close to living it. I went to a public interest law school (SUNY Buffalo School of Law) because I wanted to do this. Ignoring the advice of my boyfriend (now husband)’s grandfather who said “the problem with going into criminal law is that most of your clients are criminals,” I took all the classes most oriented to criminal law. I even took a special class on federal law and a special class on the doctrine of habeas corpus (latin for “you shall have the body” — which is highly relevant to capital crimes–this is part of the legal doctrine that makes it illegal to detain someone without charges but also false charges). I worked for the Federal Public Defender in Oregon one summer under the great Steve Wax (who retired a few years ago after 31 great years in that role). And upon graduation, I applied for a public defender fellowship at Georgetown University Law School (and very nearly received it– see Post on how I lost a prestigious Georgetown Fellowship due to sexism) .
All of this was with the goal of representing people accused of capital (death penalty) crimes. As wrong as I believe the death penalty is, it is that much more wrong that it wildly disproportionately is applied to people without financial means and African-American men. It is said that a “capital crime” is a crime where people who don’t have the “capital” are sentenced to die. And that is in large part true. Almost no one with an extensive legal defense gets sentenced to death.
By the grace of God, I still stayed in public interest law (so many of my fellow law students did not find a way to do that) and got to have a career representing consumers and workers in Congress and the California legislature. And although I have no regrets about that decision–it was a thrill to be of service in that way. And although I have now left even that behind for ministry, I am nonetheless finding myself wistful about the path not taken.
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| Michael B. Jordan |
I will continue to read Stevenson’s marvelous engaging story of his crusade to represent Walter McMillian, an African-American man from Monroeville, Alabama (the same town in which the famous To Kill a Mockingbird story took place) sentenced to die for a crime he, and large portions of the town, insist he did not commit. It’s such a great story in fact that it’s being made into a movie next year starring Michael B. Jordan (Black Panther) as Bryan Stevenson–you know its big time when a star like that has been hired.
I can’t wait to see how this story comes out, how the movie is and how my life comes out. Will I take the Alabama bar next year and move to Montgomery? Stay tuned…