On trial lawyering and writing: When I last posted, I discussed my former day job — more a day-into-very-late-evening job — which was violent crime prosecutor, and how it has influenced me as a writer. More specifically: how a job such as that, which entails meeting conflicted and compromised people face-to-face in arduous circumstances, can give a writer a leg up in portraying the human condition fully and authentically.
Examples from my experience abound. Here's one, with a second to follow soon.
Title this one: Don't demonize drug dealers.
Many young prosecutors cut their teeth handling drug cases. I certainly did, in the middle of DC's crack epidemic in the late 1980s. There were no shades of gray in my perceptions about narcotics distributors. I saw them simply as people profiting from preying on the addicted, and in the process bringing violence to city neighborhoods that were already struggling.
Then I got to know one, very well. I'd moved from drugs to murders, in the rough parlance of a prosecutors' office. I met him in my first major homicide case. His mother and sister had been brutally murdered. On the night of the killings he'd come home to find a horrific scene — the people closest to him, mutilated — and in just minutes had somehow summoned the poise and courage to take many steps needed to lead the police to the killer, who was his mother's ex-boyfriend. He was an essential witness in the case. More than that, he was a hero.
He was also a drug dealer, and the defense at trial tried to attribute the murders to his associates and rivals, and indirectly to him. He took the stand and faced down the allegations bravely. The jury believed him, and found the defendant guilty of the murders.
I spent many hours with him in the months before trial. He was no kingpin. He'd hustled to get money for his family, put food on the table. None of what he made through the trade lined his pockets. He worked a regular job but it didn't pay much, this paid more, and he was good at it, so he did what he had to do for the people he loved.
I'm not saying what he did was right, and it certainly wasn't legal. But it was understandable.
He's in his 50's now, he's a family man with a good job, and his days on the other side of the law are far behind him. To the extent that he thinks about his past, it's only about how his mother and sister looked in life, and how they looked when he happened upon them in death.
In fact or fiction: To quote an Irish writer, every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.