It's not just that my clients lie to me a lot, which will only hurt them --- it's that they're really, really bad at it.
[Originally posted on Singal-Minded]
My job as a public defender puts me in a weird place. I am my clients' zealous advocate, but I'm not their marionette. I don't just roll into court to parrot whatever my clients tell me --- I make sure I'm not re-shoveling bullshit. So for my sake and theirs, I do my homework. I corroborate. I investigate.
A significant portion of my job ironically mirrors that of a police detective. Every case I get requires me to deploy a microscope and retrace the cops' steps to see if they fucked up somehow (spoiler: they haven't). Sometimes I go beyond what the cops did to collect my own evidence and track down my own witnesses.
All this puts some of my clients of the guilty persuasion in a bind. Sure, they don't want me sitting on my ass doing nothing for their case, but they also can't have me snooping around on my own too much. . . because who knows what I might find? So they take steps to surreptitiously install guardrails around my scrutiny, hoping I won't notice.
You might wonder why any chicanery from my clients is warranted. After all, am I not professionally obligated to strictly maintain client confidentiality? It's true, a client can show me where they buried their dozen murder victims and I wouldn't be allowed to tell a soul, even if an innocent person is sitting in prison for their crimes. Part of my clients' clammed-up demeanors rests on a deluded notion that I won't fight as hard for their cases unless I am infatuated by their innocence. Perhaps they don't realize that representing the guilty is the overwhelmingly banal reality of my job.[1] More importantly, it's myopic to forget that judges, prosecutors, and jurors want to see proof, not just emphatic assurances on the matter.
But clients still lie to me --- exclusively to their own detriment.
Marcel was not allowed to possess a firearm. And yet mysteriously, when the police arrested him --- the details are way too complicated to explain, even by my standards --- in his sister's vehicle, they found a pistol under the passenger seat.
"The gun is not mine. I don't even like guns. I'm actually scared of guns." He told me this through the jail plexiglass as I flipped through his remarkable résumé of gun-related crimes. Marcel spent our entire first meeting proselytizing his innocence to me. Over the next half hour he went on a genealogy world tour, swearing up and down on the lives of various immediate and extended members of his family that he never ever ever touched guns.
I was confused why he perseverated so much, but I just nodded along as part of my standard early precarious effort to build rapport with a new (and likely volatile) client. What he was telling me wasn't completely implausible --- sometimes people are indeed caught with contraband that isn't theirs --- but there was nothing I could do with his information at that early stage. Maybe he thought if he could win me over as a convert, I'd then ask for the case to be dismissed on the "he says it's not his" precedent.
Weeks later, I got the first batch of discovery. I perused the photographs that documented the meticulous search of his sister's car. I saw the pistol glistening beneath the camera flash, nestled among some CDs and a layer of Cheetos crumbs. And on the pistol itself, a sight to behold: to this day the clearest, most legible, most unobstructed fingerprints I have ever seen in my legal life. If you looked closely enough, the whorls spelled out his name and Social Security number.
Public defenders are entitled to ask the court for money to pay for private investigators, digital forensic specialists, fingerprint examiners, or whatever else is needed to ensure a defendant in a criminal case is provided with his constitutionally guaranteed legal bulwark. The photographed prints here were so apparent that an examiner could easily rely on the photos alone to make a comparison.
Marcel had earned himself some trolling from me. I went back to see him at the jail, faked as much enthusiasm as I could muster, and declared, "Good news! They found fingerprints on the gun!" He stared at me stunned and confused, so I continued.
"Well, when we first met, you told me that you never touched the gun," I reminded him with an encouraging smile. "Obviously you wouldn't lie to your own lawyer, and so what I can do is get a fingerprint expert to come to the jail, take your prints, then do a comparison on the gun itself. Since you never touched the gun, the prints won't be a match! This whole case will get dismissed, and we can put all this behind you!"[2]
He was still reeling but realized I was waiting for a response. "You. . . don't need to do that," he muttered. I had the confirmation I was looking for, but I pressed him while maintaining the facade of earnest congeniality.
"But why not?" I sang in staccato, smile wide. "You told me. That. You. Never. Touch any guns."
Turned out Marcel might have accidentally touched the gun. So his prints could be on it. I had made my point, so I dropped the act. I explained to Marcel that the only thing lying to me accomplishes is to slow things down and worsen his own prospects --- how could I pursue any potentially helpful leads for his defense when I couldn't be sure I wasn't about to bumble into an incriminating revelation?
Marcel nodded sagely and claimed to understand, but he went on to lie to me many more times over the next two years that I remained his attorney. Marcel has and will spend the majority of his adult life in prison --- not necessarily because he lied to me but that certainly didn't help.
My first meeting with Kyle was useless. He insisted throughout that it wasn't him, that he wasn't even there. Now, personally speaking, if several witnesses claimed to have seen someone who looks like me, in my car, with my girlfriend in the front seat, commit a drive-by shooting in broad daylight, I would summon slightly more curiosity about who this apparent doppelganger might be. But Kyle gave me no leads, pantomiming an internal agony about not wanting to be a snitch, clutching at his stomach as if the mere thought was physically unbearable.
His tune eventually changed. "I need you to tell the prosecutor who was driving my car," he said."His name is Richie Bottoms." If the name hadn't given it away, I already knew where this was going,[3] and I was excited for the coming entertainment. I pretended to be enthused by his revelation, and let Kyle know that I had a "really great" investigator who's phenomenal at tracking "anyone" down --- even the elusive Dick Bottoms.
Based on his reaction, that wasn't the response Kyle expected; another illustration of a myopic theory of mind (not uncommon among the interpersonally inept) incapable of simulating anything but affirmation. He tensed up momentarily, but realized that he'd already committed himself to acting out a demeanor congruent with the "innocent client responds to helpful attorney" fantasy. Yet the only excuse he could muster up in the moment was that Richie wouldn't be found because he fled to Los Angeles.
I maintained what must have been an obnoxious level of optimism, explaining how "perfect" that was because my investigator "knew lots of people" there. My job affords me few if any moments of joy, and so forgive me if I overindulged in Kyle's vexation. I'll spare you a full accounting of the myriad reasons he gave why tracking down Sir Bottoms was a lost cause. Suffice to say that in addition to being out of state, Richie had maybe fled the country; also, Richie happens to look almost identical to Kyle, but also we might not even know his real name since he went by "Arby," and no one had his phone number, et cetera. . .
Even when we moved on to other topics, Kyle couldn't let it go, interrupting whatever we were talking about to repeat warnings about how tracking down Richie was going to be a total waste of time for my investigator and me. He was palpably angry, but had no viable outlet for his frustration, and so he just stewed, stuck with his lie. I kept my poker face. It's a stark contrast to my factually innocent clients, who cannot help but drown me with leads to pursue in the hopes that any are helpful.
The whole thing reminded me of Carl Sagan's parable of the dragon in his garage as a critique of certain unprovable religious beliefs. Can I see the dragon? No, it's invisible. Can I detect its fire's thermal image? No, the fire is heatless. Can I find Dick in Los Angeles? No, because now he fled the country.
There's always some excuse --- there's always some eject button allowing my defendants to evade specific evidence demands. No matter how ridiculous.
It's banal for my clients to deny the accusations, but a special breed takes denial to the next level by waging total jihad against their accusers. It's a sort of a reverse counterpart to the Narcissist's Prayer:
If they claim I was driving during the hit-and-run, they're lying. And if they're liars, then they exaggerated their injuries. And they're exaggerating because they're after an insurance payday. And we know they're after a payday because they sued their dry cleaners in 1993. And they're framing me to get money, which is how we know they're lying.
In these clients' telling, nothing is their fault. The random bystanders who randomly drew the unlucky witness card become a convenient scapegoat. Yet these clients are so myopically overwhelmed by the desire to bounce the rubble on a witness's credibility, they don't notice how implausible their story becomes with each new clause they tape onto their fabulist's scrapbook.[4]
Sometimes clients are self-aware enough to couch their denials in innuendo. Ivan, who was accused of [redacted], was waging the same Total War approach against Cindy, a social worker at the homeless shelter where Ivan regularly stayed. Cindy was a dangerous witness --- an uninvolved, respected professional who severely undercut Ivan's alibi defense about having never left the shelter to go on his [redacted] spree.
In yet another of our jail rendezvous, Ivan expounded at length about how Cindy's testimony was invalid because, as a social worker, she would be violating HIPAA.[5] The glaze over my eyes must have gotten too obvious for me to hide, so he switched tack, shuffled through his jail-sanctioned filing system (read: pile), and slid a flyer across the table about trash cleanup day at the shelter, with a smiling cartoon trash can picking up a baby garbage bag while announcing "Pick up a little trash, talk a little trash." It's cute, but what the fuck was I supposed to be looking at? Ivan stared at me grinning and expectant, but his demeanor quickly turned into disappointment at my ongoing silence. He snatched the flyer out of my hand and jammed his finger at the "talk a little trash" clause. "This!" he shouted, and then just stared at me again. I looked at the words that meant so much to him and nothing to me and just said, "Huh?"
His disappointment transmogrified into astonished anger. "Do I have to fucking spell it out for you?" he screamed. "I thought you were the lawyer here!" We had been ping-ponging across various aspects of his case for the last hour or so and I gave up on any posturing and reiterated my ignorance at the significance of the cartoon flyer. Ivan snapped, "Cindy is encouraging people to trash talk!" For, you see, she wrote the flyer. "I'm trying to show you that she's a fucking punk! And a liar!"
I immediately understood why Ivan was so attached to remaining within the realm of innuendo. Because as soon as he gave his claim some body ("We should infer lack of credibility from individuals when they author flyers that include garbage-related puns"), he knew how much of a dumbass he would sound like out loud.
Ivan moved on from the flyer, and instead asked how to disqualify a witness "for being a liar." I tell him that's not a thing,[6] which sent him into a further rage. "I need you to be on my side here but all I hear from you is 'NO.' Why are you working for the prosecutors?"
The manipulation attempts we just cataloged were comically inept, and fell apart with far less effort than it took to create them. Slightly more polished versions of these charades are regularly deployed within the Discourse™ but they're equally hollow and just as pathetic. So those are some of my clients --- individuals who cannot rise to the level of your average internet troll.
[1] There is a kernel of an exception that is almost not worth mentioning. The Rules of Professional Conduct 3.3 obligates me with the duty of candor. I am not allowed to present evidence that I "know" is false, which encompasses witness testimony. Some jurisdictions make exceptions to this rule for defendants testifying in their criminal trial (correctly, IMO) but not all. So assuming that a client truthfully confesses to me, assuming we go to trial, assuming they decide to testify, and assuming I "know" they're going to lie, then yes, this could indeed spawn a very awkward situation where I'm forced to withdraw in the middle of proceedings.
[2] I'm told I put on a good poker face.
[3] There was no Richie Bottoms.
[4] For example, Kyle asked if it was possible to present self-defense evidence on behalf of "Richie Bottoms," just in case.
[5] Does this sound familiar to anyone?
[6] During the editing process, Jesse was skeptical of this. "Wait," he asked me in a Google Doc comment, "there's NO way for one side to prove to a judge that a witness is so untrustworthy the jurors/judge shouldn't consider their testimony?" Correct. The closest rule is disqualifying a witness as incompetent, either for being too young, severely mentally ill or mentally retarded, or too intoxicated (on the witness stand!). Credibility is up to the judge/jury to decide, and if a witness has a history of lying, then it makes for a very easy credibility impeachment. Theoretically, in extremely rare circumstances, a judge could strike the testimony of a witness or find them in contempt, but they'd have to be seriously flagrant about their lying under oath. I have never heard of this happening.
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Notes -
I think that a lot of people in public-facing jobs have these kinds of war stories.
The joke, when I was in social housing, was that in about fifteen years there was going to be a lot of unwitting incest in the town, once all the kids grew up to be old enough to start dating. Because of social liberalisation and the explosion in A and B get together, B may already have a kid by another guy; they have a baby; break up and go on to new partners; A has baby with new partner, B has baby with new partner; rinse and repeat. If the kids take the mother's name, they may have little to no idea who the father is and subsequently who their half-siblings are. Then there's the "mom has one surname, the three kids all have different surnames" from when she does acknowledge the father, and again - if you know Dad is Murphy that doesn't much help if your half-sibling is named after their mother and you meet up.
EDIT: Actually a lot more hopeful to be working in the service for kids with additional needs. Everything from Down's to autism spectrum to mild learning disabilities to behavioural problems to wheelchair users. People on here often like to prognosticate doom for the Down's kids if they are permitted to be born and grow up, but my dude, I tell you: parents much more likely to be committed to doing best for the kid, much more likely to be two parents, and way less chance kid is going to grow up to be involved in drugs, petty crime, and a string of kids by different partners, not-so-optional extra includes jail time (not no chance but way less chance).
Yes, I've noticed a similar pattern regarding my verifiably low-IQ clients. They're so chill and easy to work with and overall have their shit together. I get whiplash when I see low-IQ reflexively correlated with criminality because while that may certainly be a component (from the standpoint of making it more likely to be caught criming) the far bigger problem is horrendously poor impulse control and sociopathic tendencies.
The problem with low IQ and criminality is that they're often used as catspaws and patsies by those just smarter enough than them to rope them in as disposable labour. When I worked as a school secretary, in a school catering for the lower rung of pupils in a designated area of deprivation (there was a pecking order of schools in the town and we were the lowest of the mainstream, below us were the special schools for the intellectually disabled), there was one kid there who fell into this.
Only child of elderly parents, he was in his mid-teens and tall and strong, they couldn't control him (and were a little afraid of him), he had developmental and behavioural issues. He suddenly was going around with all this money from unexplained sources, he didn't have a job and the parents were not giving money to him, so where was he getting it? It was plain that he was involved in some shady business, but he wouldn't tell what was going on and since he was inclined to throw hissy fits and was big and strong enough now to be violent, the parents didn't want to and couldn't press him on this. They were respectable people too, so this wasn't a case of neglect or 'third generation of misfits'. But somebody or other had seen the way to get him into doing shady stuff and using him as low-level criminal activity. I left the school before I found out the resolution of this, but I think the cops got involved.
So you get someone who flatters and treats them well, tells them they're better than the dumb old school that treats them as stupid, gives them money and new 'friends' and there you go - another patsy for the gang who will dump him with all the blame the second anything goes wrong.
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This (the impulse control, not sociopathic tendencies) reminds me a lot of when I used to work at a call center. The place paid minimum wage, which isn't much to live on even in northeast Wisconsin, and as you might expect they got correspondingly poor employees. I would on a regular basis hear people lamenting how they weren't going to be able to pay for $important_thing... right after they were talking about how they bought a new iPhone, or took lots of unpaid time off work. They seemed to truly not have any idea that the two things were related, or that the solution was to have more discipline about their actions.
The fact that I wasn't truly interacting with the full spectrum of humanity at this job (cause after all these were people who could at least function well enough to get a job) is something I have thought about over the years. Hearing your stories (you and @FarNearEverywhere ), I have no idea how you guys manage to do it. It sounds so frustrating.
I tell you: lawyers, cops, social workers, and low-level government minions in public-facing roles, we can swap the stories about "so this happened" "I got a better one than that" 😁
Back in my local government days, before I was poached into the big leagues of the Civil Service, I routinely had to kick out addicts shooting up in the toilets of our advice centres. I was responsible for a few centres in one of the most deprived cities in the most deprived areas of England and I had everything from drunk women headbutting the security class (who turned out to be perfectly sweet after, her husband had literally just died in front of her), to communicating through a 9 year old girl who could speak English but her mother could not, and trying to coach them through the complexities of applying for council housing, housing benefit.and so on, to dealing with families of people who were declared financially incompetent, and i had to authorize any spending. No, a QVC grill does not count as something your elderly mother needs, even if i weren't sure you were going to end up "looking after" it.
Oh yeah, see what I mean about taking advantage of the vulnerable and those dependent on them? You get to see a side of human nature that is less than edifying when you're dealing with these clients.
The ones who really need help, and can't access it, are the ones that are really painful to deal with, because you can see they need help and you want to give it to them, but it's not there. Be that budget cuts, they don't fit the regulations, or there just isn't something in place for their particular need.
The primary issues I had, is the amount of time I was allowed to give to help. There are a lot of resources in England you can access, but it requires knowing about them and how to access them. Housing Benefit in one place, Council Tax support in another, Emergency food/fuel support in another, Emergency Emergency food support in another, emergency housing somewhere else, Jobseeker's etc. etc.
We set up "One Stop Shops" to try and cover as many of these as possible in one place, and we were able to pull in tax people to come down a few days a week and people from local housing associations (low income housing that used to be council run, until it was spun off in the 80's/90's), and people from Jobseeker's and the like. But it was a big undertaking which required a lot of organization and that was just for a single city. And appointments were always jam packed.
Universal Credit in theory was supposed to resolve a lot of these issues by wrapping up pretty much all national level help in one place, but it also cut the amount you could get in total, and had a pretty terrible roll out. And it sill left local level help up to each local authority.
Oh gosh yeah, it's a full-time job trying to figure out what is available, do you qualify for it, and then trekking from office to office and spending hours waiting.
There were about three different childcare subsidy schemes in operation in Ireland, which were phased out but there's still two different ones at the moment. It should be easier, you would think, to scrap them all and give one standard payment to everyone regardless of income, and I think that's what the government is trying to do, but man. One payment if you're a lone parent, one if you're in education but not currently employed, and I can't even remember what the third was - how are ordinary people supposed to keep track of all this?
It's because it's all done piecemeal. You get somebody deciding that it would be a good idea to campaign on "Subsidy for lone parents of three cats!" or the like, and other people who are genuine about animal rights, and a politician who is looking for a cause to champion so they can plaster the media with pieces about "My sterling work on behalf of cat-owners", and then if that gets passed, it gets stuck on top of all the other schemes for pet owners (domestic), then the farmers' lobby goes "what about my sheepdog, why discriminate against working animals?" and that gets bodged on top of everything else, and you have a patchwork of bits'n'pieces legislation and trying to figure out the regulations, instead of one single Act For Animal Owners (but then the vegans would probably protest about that, or the Non-Human Animal Companions Cannot Be Owned, Only Loved set would have conniptions).
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I once had a coworker whose solution to avoid driving drunk was having his underage girlfriend drive him home. Except she only had a learner's permit.
As it turns out, you can get a dui for being drunk as a driving instructor.
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One of my favourite things about working in the funeral industry was that you got a really good cross-section of the community, because everyone dies. Really helps open your eyes to the bubbles that we all live in.
My wife is a funeral director and we definitely bonded over our shared perspective of society's less glamorous underbelly.
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Sooooooooooooooooooo.......
Can we get another one?
Well, let's see. Trying to think of a funny one, rather than a sad one.
Okay, so as the new person, I get the job of overhauling the physical files with all the housing applications and weeding out the outdated, cancelled, and duplicate ones.
So we have Eastern European people (I won't get more specific about the country than that) still living in the country in the immediate post-Celtic Tiger era.
A and B are a couple, put in for social housing. C and D are a couple, put in for social housing.
Later on, turns out A and B have broken up, and C and D have broken up. It happens! So A goes back home to the old country, D remains here with her kid - and B and C take up as a new couple. And put in a new application this time as the new couple.
Well, okay, fine. None of our business to judge people's romantic entanglements.
Then B and C break up. Okay, scrap that application.
But wait! C now has a third bite at the cherry for True Love, as he takes up with yet another woman (this time an Irish woman) and moves to her home town which is still in our area to deal with, so - you've guessed it - another new application for housing with the new snookums.
Only it turns out this is his fourth bite at the cherry, because before he came here, he was married with a kid and then divorced back home. So, counting to date that I know of, Romeo has two ex-wives, one ex-partner, and one new partner.
Who may or may not be still his new partner, because they later allege they've broken up (and yes, that he's maybe taken up with yet another new woman). Only it may be the same woman, and they're trying to fool us, because they think they have a better chance applying as separate applicants or something?
Anyway, eventually all the applications are dropped, I have no idea if Romeo is now shacked up with Number Five (who may be Number Four), but like I said - none of our business unless and until they're looking for social housing 😁
It's seriously astonishing how much rizz some of my clients have. While incarcerated, Marcel garnered up an endless list of new girlfriends (almost all of whom had no criminal record and had steady respectable jobs) who would show up to his pointless court hearings and even email/call court staff when things weren't going his way.
That's fascinating, because in general the people we were dealing with had no problem going from one partner to another, but they were not high-quality. When I see the complaints about "Bob is a louse and a terrible guy and yet he can get as many women as he wants, while decent guys get the brush-off", my internal monologue there is "yeah but have you seen the kind of women Bob gets? you don't want those kind of women, my friend". Same in reverse for the women - yeah, they can get boyfriends with no problem, but the kind of boyfriends they get are all Bob.
So if Marcel was able to smooth-talk the ladies who were a better level than that, I'm impressed 😀
But it's true, there are some people you look at them and go "How in the name of God are they able to get any woman/man they like? and not just trash, respectable ones at that!" Truly, the mysteries of human attraction have not yet been fathomed by science!
I've listened to enough of Marcel's jail calls to know how quickly he can switch from complete charmer to "I will end you if you fuck me over" side when he was talking to his women, and I have to assume he got that back from when he used to be a pimp in his early days. I also watched him represent himself during a trial and he had hands-down the apogee of public speaking confidence. Absolutely rock-solid and unfazeable, despite no beta-blockers and lots at stake. He fit enough traditional alpha male checkboxes that it wasn't completely surprising.
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Korwa.
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It is frustrating at times. It's not (despite all the commentary on here about IQ 90 types, sorry gang but there's a bit too much self-satisfaction about being Really Smart at times) the obviously less intelligent who are the trouble; quite often they know they can't cope with the likes of government forms so are willing to do what you tell them.
It's the types who have imbibed from school (sometimes) but more often social media and media in general that they have Rights. Nothing about responsibilities, mind you, but they're sure they have rights. Often they've picked it up from British/Australian/American TV shows, which makes it even dumber when they're protesting about 'you should be doing this for me' and you can tell they've picked it up off an American cop show or the likes.
(This is where I pause for the ritual teeth-baring at the 'only a few crazy kids on college campuses' notions; it's all very well for the child of middle to upper middle class parents, attending a good college, to protest about their right to sixteen piercings and three abortions; they're going to end up okay and go on to a career in activism from student activism which ends up with them in nice, PMC professional positions. It's the lower middle-class to working class kids who imbibe these notions, end up with sixteen piercings and three pregnancies, and are most definitely not going to go on to the PMC salaried position who are the ones ending up in trouble).
My go-to example of this once again comes from social housing; a couple of sisters who were Anglo-Irish (that is, born in London of Irish immigrant parents) and hopping back and forth between London and their parents' hometown (where I was working) according as they thought they'd do better off social welfare and love-lifes (breaking up with boyfriend, heading back to England or Ireland as the case may be, taking up with new guy). Anyway, they lob in an application for social housing. Given that we are not a borough of London they didn't immediately get placed in accommodation, and they turned up to argue in their English accents that this was racism, we were being racist, it was discrimination.
They were every bit as white as the rest of us. But they'd learned that "Racism!" is one of the magic words to force government offices to give you what you want. Well, they could yell "racist" all they liked, but the fact that (1) white, as I said (2) Ireland during a recession and (3) none of the rest of us were young enough to have gone through the "-isms and -phobes" conditioning at school meant we were not impressed and that yelling did not, in this instance, get them what they wanted.
I would much rather deal with the honestly stupid but trying their best, than the likes of the ignorant who know just enough to try and game the system.
Ah well, it's a great life if you don't weaken!
That's the definition of a luxury belief.
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I don't think one more anecdote will add anything to this, but this reminded me of a very similar experience I had in my 20s with a roommate (literally named Bob, funnily enough) who could never be counted on to pay rent or bills on time. He was a waiter and constantly used the inconsistent pay as an excuse, while also regularly drinking at least a six pack (usually two) of Pabst Blue Ribbons every single day, along with being almost constantly high from weed which he bought. When I pointed out to him that maybe he could cut back on beer to only a single six pack a day or maybe even just half a six pack a day and even did the math for him in how much money that would save each month, the very idea seemed like a revelation to him and also a complete absurdity, because obviously he wasn't going to cut back on beer, what was I, crazy?
As someone who had grown up in a very privileged bubble with very privileged and intelligent people, this was a learning experience for me.
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