If I’ve learned anything in my law practice, it’s that people can’t control how they feel. Everybody wants acceptance from family and friends, nice things, opportunities – everybody – these are desires universal.
I often represent people who, having pursued these basic desires, find themselves in trouble. My cases have myriad issues, but one issue seems to underpin so many problems: the sense of rejection. This is quite apparent in criminal cases – crime is a social disease, after all.
To illustrate: not long ago, I represented a juvenile in the nearer Atlanta suburbs. We’ll call him Darryl. He was out of his element – a Black boy, about 15, living in Atlanta proper, arrested in an outlying county. At a busy convenience store, Darryl was sliding through the passenger side to take a woman’s purse as she pumped gas. Impulsively, he decided to jump into the driver’s seat and take her car too. The woman noticed and, in trying to stop him, sustained injuries to her eye and arms when thrown across the pavement.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Darryl made it down to an inner city street, where, after a brief police pursuit, he flipped the stolen car with four other children, the ones he wanted to impress, inside. Somehow, they all survived.
Brought back to the suburbs to face justice and a slew of charges, Darryl landed in the local Youth Detention Center, where I went to visit him. I’ve learned to reserve judgment about facts and law until I have an idea how a defendant feels, which so often guides how things play out in court. Overcoming my own repugnance is not easy, especially when I’m being lied to.
Darryl, however, didn’t lie to me – children don’t lie as well as adults, in my experience. He told me he hated his parents but cared about his grandmother, who had been calling me to check on him. In fact, she visited him in jail from Atlanta at great inconvenience to herself. Much of Darryl’s family was either homeless or locked up, but she hadn’t given up on him – he was the “baby.” Until he was sentenced, Darryl was genuine and respectful toward me, and he did not expect sympathy. He seemed curious that I was interested in his life.
The state moved to put his case, an aggravated assault with bodily injury, into Superior Court, which the Juvenile Court granted. Because of the confessions of the children, the video from the gas station, and the video of the eventual chase, Darryl and I decided he should plead guilty. He was sentenced as an adult to prison, not the heaviest sentence – with parole he’ll likely be out of custody before he turns 20.
What struck me about Darryl was how completely he had internalized the rejection surrounding him. Most of the Black people around him did not want to deal with his problems, and the discomfort of the mostly white faces in the court system was on display. Darryl may as well have been made of antimatter. The victim, a gracious nurse who is Black, forgave her attacker in court, despite her injuries and being put out of work for weeks, but forgiveness only made the white faces more uncomfortable. The judge did not relish his duty. Darryl’s grandmother, having made the long bus journey again, cried quietly before leaving wordlessly – she’d been through this before.
For a moment in court, it seemed like the weight of all Atlanta’s hatred had fallen onto this child’s shoulders. Still, he had made a very bad decision – no one had forced him. I shall not forget his eyes – suddenly hard, brimming with rage and sadness, defining himself by the events around himself, as children do. You made me this way and now you’re punishing me for it, he seemed to be thinking.
At the end of his case, Darryl was unhappy with me too – just another person who’d let him down. That was discouraging, especially when he knocked some legal papers out of my hand. Maybe he got what he deserved, I thought. Certainly, the law allows for this procedure and punishment in such cases.
Then, in my truck, I reflected on the victim sorry for Darryl and not for herself, on Darryl’s grandmother making her way back downtown, on the white judge’s sad reticence, on my own difficulty in relating to this broken boy. I reflected on the curious sparkle in Darryl’s eyes when we first met, then of his childlike fury in court – he is a child. And I thought, if of children is the kingdom of heaven, modern Atlanta and its adults have some work to do.
Douglas D. Ford is a commercial litigation and criminal defense attorney in metro Atlanta.
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