My son, Patrick, started law school this fall. The climate is different than when I began, although since it seems like only yesterday, I don’t know why things should have changed. I didn’t become a lawyer to get rich, but admit at that time there was no serious concern about getting a job or earning a living. Our bottom line was pretty good if you were willing to work.
As a first year law student, I was interested in crusading for the rights of criminal defendants, but law school has a way of redirecting future lawyers, and the Perry Mason syndrome – the trial lawyer fighting for the wrongly accused – eventually disappeared.
Still, I graduated in love with the law and a court system that vindicated rights and resulted in justice. Like most of us graduates, I was convinced of the sanctity of the system, the validity of its decisions and that justice was served. That’s not to say we didn’t quickly figure out that America’s rich fared better than America’s poor. Still, for a long time, I believed jury verdicts were almost always right.
Since that time DNA evidence emerged and revealed serious flaws in our criminal justice system. News coverage of select matters like the O.J. Simpson case and the recent Casey Anthony verdict have raised eyebrows. On a recent weekend home from law school, my son called my attention to two cases. In the first, it was reported that 54-year-old Roy Brown approached a bank teller with one hand under his jacket and announced a robbery.
The teller dutifully handed Brown three piles of money. He took only a single $100 bill, saying he was homeless and hungry. Brown surrendered the next day, telling police his mother didn’t raise him that way, and explained he needed the money to check into a detox center because he was hungry and homeless. Brown was sentenced to 15 years in prison for first degree robbery. That is 131,400 hours in prison for taking $100. In some states, you can shoplift $250 and it is only a misdemeanor.
The second case Patrick brought to my attention concerned the CEO of one of the country’s largest mortgage lenders who was sentenced to only 40 months for his part in a $3 billion scheme which contributed to the sixth largest bank failure in U.S. history. The contrast is striking. Even the most ardent believer in judicial equality must now carefully ponder the difference between what is judicially correct and what is justice.
Some lessons are clear. Our system is often tougher on those who threaten violent crime or deal with drugs than on white collar criminals. The fact that thousands of lives can be harmed, or even destroyed, by a white collar criminal is viewed as less ominous than the threat of physical violence, or the role drugs play in causing violence. This may have something to do with the fact that those who can afford to hire high powered lawyers to spend lots of time on their case will obtain better justice than those who can only afford lower paid lawyers with large case loads.
These realities don’t mean the system is bad, and we are all aware, as exemplified by the infamous McDonald’s coffee spill case, that purported results can be deceiving. That case became a symbol for frivolous lawsuits and greedy plaintiffs. It was reported that a lady was burned because she drove her car with coffee between her legs, and then won millions of dollars as a reward for her stupidity.
A closer look reveals Plaintiff Stella Liebeck was a 79-year-old grandmother who was a passenger in a parked car. The coffee spilled because she was holding it between her knees to remove the lid. Stella sustained third-degrees burns over her body, including her genital area, was hospitalized for eight days, required skin grafts and suffered permanent scarring. The coffee was hotter than it needed to be and apparently McDonald’s kept producing extra hot coffee for economic gain, despite hundreds of prior incidents. Liebeck purportedly offered to settle the case for $20,000, and settled for $640,000 after the jury verdict. McDonald’s now forbids the serving of coffee at such a high temperature, so perhaps the system worked exactly as designed.
A second look at the recent cases might reveal that the CEO of the mortgage lender had led a truly exemplary life and was peripheral in the financial scheme. Perhaps the homeless bank robber had an unsavory history or a past criminal record. It’s easy to make snap judgments, and the longer I’ve been a lawyer, the more lessons I’ve learned about jumping to conclusions. In fact, that lesson is part of being a good lawyer. As attorneys, we advocate for our clients, all the while knowing there is another side to the story. Perhaps justice lies somewhere in between. Today, our profession’s negative exposure in the media is constant, and lawyers are facing more economic uncertainty than they did when most of us graduated.
Nevertheless, despite the atmosphere, we are still producing individuals who want to take up the cause of justice, do some good and right some wrongs. Maybe one of them will be American’s next great lawyer.
©2011 Under Analysis LLC Mark Levison is a member of the law firm Lathrop & Gage LLP. You can reach Under Analysis LLC in care of this paper or by e-mail at comments@levisongroup.com.