The pain of others

So I was fired for the first time the other day. This isn’t entirely uncommon for criminal lawyers – each of us has dozens of clients, small bosses with concerns or characteristics we often can’t or don’t care to accommodate. It’s rarely easy to satisfy customers who can be quite literally caged up and craving for any source of release, but, even when their gripes are well-grounded, the inertia of institutionalised ignorance, docility, or despair, or sometimes just good ol’ Canadian decency, mean that they’ll usually just stick with who they’ve got. Once in awhile though, someone with a sufficient allotment of gumption decides that they can do a better job on their own. This happened to me in the basement lock-up beneath the courthouse, down where the day’s inmates are housed in loud pens and shallow segregation chambers. It’s anywhere – the yellow-washed walls are always gouged with the same vain or desperate scrawling, philosophies of pigs and pride and rats and every kinky thing that can’t be shoved or shouted through the thin openings between cells. There’s a share of silence down there as well, lodged in the ones who curl on metal shelves or open toilet bowls, roughened bodies hunched over like plucked birds. My client looked up at me through his own shell of exhaustion – he had been several weeks in custody by then, brought in after a bad encounter with a false friend who, he said, had tried to steal his money. “I was defending myself!” he growled when I told him that I couldn’t see any openings in the case, “I was defending my wallet! That’s my law – that’s the law round here!” It wasn’t going well – the man had a terminal illness, and I’d spent my time angling for a meeting with the judge and Crown in the hope that his punishment could be tempered with mercy. But it had taken too long, and he was clearly seeing me as more barrier than bridge. “You’ve done nothing, no one’s listened to me in all the time I’ve been in here”, he moaned. “Not once has someone asked me for my story. And you keep on adjourning it, and I can’t spend another day in here!” It was true enough – training and experience have already taught me, for better or worse, to strictly manage people’s inclinations to hold forth in court – judicial ears, I learn, are rarely open to such ‘unseemly outbursts’. But what I might gain in decorum and (perhaps) eventual outcome, a man like him loses in autonomy. And at this point he obviously felt he’d lost too much. “Just get outta my way. This is just between me and the judge and the Crown.” I was there, though, when he raised his voice from behind the crook’s partition and asked, with remarkable expectancy and poise, “well, how about you just drop the charges, ok?” I was one of those who hid their grins at this, such impotent insolence.

He called me back two days later. Some times are too tough to go through alone, even if your only resort is a lousy lawyer...