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 -
What's your job by the way? I've dealt with similar scenarios when I volunteered as a low-income tax preparer. I remember one guy who came in with his sister or whatever and who wanted to claim three kids as dependents even though he earned $500 the whole year. His sister earned way more and could plausibly claim all three kids, and we sort of gently and patiently tried to explain to them that there was no net profit to be gained from spreading the kid deductions/credits around. Of course they didn't believe us and concluded we were a barrier to their scheme and left in a puff.
I've bounced around different clerical roles in local government, from education to social housing to where I am now, working in a specialist service for children with additional needs.
I've often joked about "I worked in education and thought I was cynical after that, then I went into social housing and realised I wasn't half cynical enough". I come out of a rural/lower middle class background and remained pretty much in that milieu all my life. I haven't personally been in contact with the really hardcore of petty criminals etc. but with job experience have encountered the types who are products of broken homes etc.
And for some, from even an early age you can see the trajectory to ending up in jail, which can be heart-breaking (it's terrible to be able to forecast that a fifteen year old is going down that path) or grimly satisfying (at least one kid on an early school leaver programme who was sly and nasty about using others as catspaws, and I have no idea what happened him afterwards but I thought to myself that one day he was going to play his games on someone who didn't give a shit and end up stabbed or something).
There's also the cycle of "this is the third generation and I see no reason it won't continue"; grandmother had broken marriage, family life problems, wasn't able to really raise her kids; daughter ended up like mother with single parenthood; baby is probably going to grow up and end up the same way because environment, environment, environment. No positive role models. All the limited supports and help from outsiders not going to make up for the raising the kid will get at home. There's a real tension between the rights and freedoms of the individual, and the right/capacity of the state to intervene. Err too much on one side, you get the horrible stories of abuse. Err too much on the other side, you get the state being little tin god and grabbing kids out of homes in order to indoctrinate them in whatever the current orthodoxy is.
Many people are not that capable, because of understandable reasons in their lives, and best that can be done is support and help them. Of course, there's never enough capacity for that, because money money money. But then you have the actively malicious, selfish, and vicious types.
Your story of the guy and trying to claim for dependents sounds all too familiar. Sometimes it is just stupidity and ignorance, sometimes it is someone trying to pull a fast one. The real problem is that some idiot friend or acquaintance tells them "Dude, you do this thing, it's free money! The government owes it to you!" I wouldn't be at all surprised if some 'friend' or family member convinced them that if he claimed instead of his sister, because he was so low income, he would end up with more money because the government would pay him some sort of rebate. That the tax credits for the three kids would be paid over to him since he wasn't making enough money to be taxed.
Once those ideas get lodged into people's heads ("I know Mickey Murphy and he told me he's getting this money!") you cannot get them out. So yeah, they do believe when you don't go along with the brilliant scheme that you are trying to cheat them out of it. Of course you are, you're there in an office with an official form so that means you work for the government and everybody knows The Man wants to keep you down and cheat you out of your rightful due.
No disrespect to the profession of lawyers, but there's one ambulance chaser firm in town who make a speciality out of taking cases for clients like this (sue the council, get €€€€€) and the poor boobs have no idea that even if they get awarded €10 grand or whatever, the lawyer is making sure to eat most of that in fees and what they'll come away with is a couple of grand, at most. Which then gets blown on partying, treating their friends, and their local supplier of fun substances.
EDIT: I complain about social workers, but in the social housing job my boss's boss was a former social worker, and a genuinely lovely woman. Knew enough not to be taken in, but still compassionate enough not to be burned out. Much nicer and less black-hearted view of the world than I had 😀 That was heart-breaking at times too, because we administered grants for elderly and disabled people to get help maintaining/doing up their houses so they could continue to live at home, and every month (because we were in the post-crash austerity period) it was "okay do we refuse the very elderly woman or the liver cancer patient?" because not enough money to award to everyone who qualified. The boss's boss was brilliant at begging and wheedling more money out of the government department funding us, but of course everyone in the country was begging for money and you just could not get enough. Get the budget up to €2 million? Okay, that takes care of the three year backlog, but now what for the new applications?
That's also why I think our banks should have been goddamn left to fail. They got bailed out by huge government contributions and support, they continue to make profits, and the ordinary taxpayers of Ireland can just twist in the wind for all the repayment they got. But I suppose the economists would say that that would have been a bad thing.
I see a lot of overlap with what you describe.
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.
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" 😁
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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