Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr

Author:James Forman, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

6

WHAT WOULD MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., SAY?

Stop and Search, 1995

Nobody liked working “duty day,” but as the name implied, it wasn’t a choice. About once a month, each of us in the public defender’s office set aside our cases and took a turn serving as a lawyer for the general public. Whoever walked or called in became your responsibility. If the issue involved the criminal justice system, you helped them directly. If it didn’t, you referred them to another agency or service provider. The original idea behind duty day was that a lawyer should always be available if somebody had a legal emergency and needed a public defender. The classic scenario we imagined was the person who called saying, “The police are at my door with a search warrant—do I have to let them in?” Calls like that did come in now and then. One of my first murder cases began when a mother called to say that her son was at police headquarters speaking to homicide detectives. She thought he might be a suspect and wanted to know if it was a good idea for him to be talking to the police. (Answer: No, it wasn’t.)

But duty day mostly involved issues that were less attention-grabbing. I once counseled a grandmother who feared that she would lose her public housing if she allowed her grandson to move in with her upon his release from prison; housing authorities were notoriously hostile to people with criminal convictions. I tried to help a man who called to say that he had been denied permission to visit his cousin in the D.C. Jail; jail officials later said that they banned him because, years earlier, he had gotten into a fistfight in the jail’s waiting room. I met with a middle-aged taxicab driver from Guyana whose car had been seized by police; they had arrested an alleged prostitute in the backseat and accused the driver of using the cab to facilitate prostitution. (This case had a happy ending when friends of mine from law school who worked at a big D.C. firm agreed to take the case pro bono. They got the cab back and won money damages after proving that the police had illegally seized it.)

By far the most common duty-day requests were from people trying to get their arrest records sealed. These cases were as difficult as they were frequent. In D.C., as in most of the country, there were few legal grounds to erase an arrest from your record, even if the case was quickly dismissed and never led to a criminal conviction. But despite the long odds of success, there was at least a way for individual citizens to make the request. They needed to file a relatively simple legal motion, and our duty-day job was to tell people about the law, give them a copy of the paperwork, and show them where to fill in the blanks. These consultations normally took less than twenty minutes.

But Sandra Dozier clearly had no intention of leaving so quickly.

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