Partially because of my job, I sometimes question my own mental well-being. I’ve always worried how things might unfold and a day of uncertain pleas and testy jail visits can leave me feeling raw. Oh, and throw in white-knuckling it for 45 minutes behind a dump truck between the Canton and Cumming courthouses, talking to my client’s distraught family members. Yes, my wife, I am using my earphones.
Who has time for compassion in these troubled moments? I feel like I’ve heard it all before – there is no end of trouble.
I’m no bleeding heart, and my clients stand accused of troubling things. I’ve stood by a young woman bawling in court. She sat in her wheelchair closer to the judge and I wasn’t sure she’d make it through the plea, not because she was having second thoughts, but because she was so completely shattered. She was accused of D.U.I. and vehicular homicide, having hit an oncoming vehicle head-on, with the impact crippling herself, severely injuring the other driver and killing her six-year-old daughter in the back seat. There were first-responder bodycam videos – not a good look at trial.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
I never doubted this woman’s sincerity, even as the other driver’s family accused her of crocodile tears during their victim impact statement. It was still a mother who’d lost her child, even though she’d caused it.
What is compassion, then, especially in a case such as this? It’s not pity – that doesn’t really help in my world – I don’t have time to shoulder that much pain. Maybe compassion is recognizing that we all have the same feelings, however damaged those may be.
We are a human family.
That’s not easy to say when we see what people are capable of doing to each other – my criminal clients considerably so. However, without feeling more, we remain divided. Compassion is no religious claptrap. It amazes to watch emotions play over a jury during a trial – 12 folks angry, sad, shocked – it restores faith to me, faith that our system still pays attention, at a basic level.
That I take some public defender cases adds that extra oomph, but let’s not make a big deal over it. Indigent clients with drug and mental issues may draw more attention to our society’s problems, and there is inequality at play, but we all know that life is unfair, even in America. My custodian friends in the Cherokee County courthouse seem happier than many of the lawyers.
Compassion runs deeper than the law. Without compassion, we can destroy our own blood families. Every family has that wayward person – I remember my proud and worthy grandfather, a truly good man, locked in a life of resentment with his only son. My mother lived a good life, but her brother and father never sorted it out, resulting in the addiction death of the former and the lengthy bitterness of the latter. Forty years later, the story feels like yesterday.
Even more compelling is that, without compassion, we can never forgive ourselves for the errors each of us has made. I meet with clients in jail, as they try in vain to justify their crimes and I wonder what really separates me from them besides the plate glass. When I tell them their possible (and sometimes well-deserved) sentence, I think how unforgiveness itself is a cruel prison, cut off as we become from others.
Sometimes, as attorneys, we rush out of the jail not so much to escape the building as to escape our clients’ psychological torment.
Indeed, an attorney knows the law and wants to promote and enrich himself – I certainly do. But, though our legal system is generally impartial, compassion is not really in the lawbooks. Self-promotion and enrichment alone so often end in deception and disappointment for a lawyer – I see that all the time.
Some criminals can never own up. Some crimes are hard to own up to. Sometimes the plea offer is so bad that we may as well try the case. And try it we do – enough of the pontificating. Let’s see what a jury does – although I may not like your odds and I may be repulsed by what you’re accused of, I will stand in your corner.
And, however broken you are, I’ll listen to you, even though you resist me. Broken people resist -- and we’re all broken, especially these days.
I remind myself each morning, compassion cannot wait, because rough things are happening. We can’t wait for some abstract heaven when hell is gaining on us. And, Mr. Sartre, sorry but I’m going to change your words a little – hell is lack of compassion.
Douglas D. Ford is a commercial litigation and criminal defense attorney in metro Atlanta.
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