Thought the old bastard at the PD's office who was "training" me was crusty and interesting until I realized he was simply too shitty a lawyer to make it anywhere else. He refused to read anything. He would ask for a brief on a case he was working on, but made me explain it to him rather than read it. Once, I pulled a brief completely out of my ass and when it won for him he was forced to read it. I am sure he did not understand it however as he told everybody it was "brilliant" when in fact the only reason why it won his motion for him is because the deputy prosecutor and his intern were even dumber than we were. A lawyer who went to law school with this old fraud told me that he never cracked a book. Instead, he would pay some poindexter $10 the day before an exam to tell to him everything the geek had written down during class.
Fully 1/3 of the PD's there (an office in a mid sized city) had DUI's of their own. One probably murdered his wife and got away with it. The senior defenders sat on their asses all day drawing huge salaries while the new ones fresh out of law school did all the work for bupkiss. They acted like private practice attorneys who had done brilliant work and earned the right to behave this way but since it was on the public's dime I do not believe they deserved $120K per year to spend half the day with their feet up on their desks and their fingers laced behind their heads, shooting the shit with each other, flirting with interns and being douchbags.
I devoted a year there until I wound up in the hospital with exhaustion.
I tried the Prosecutor's office in a tiny county seat some distance away from the mid-sized city. Not to sound too much like a malcontent who can't get along anywhere, I couldn't get along with those pricks. The head cheese (aka "the elected"), spent his days pandering to the public and the county commissioners and his smarminess prompted me to constantly argue with him just to try to get a rise out of him.
The second in command (aka "the chief") was a soft-spoken neo-hippie who appeared to embrace liberal views but who in reality merely used this front to disguise his true identity...that of the little dog in the Warner Brothers cartoon who runs kiss-ass circles around the big tough dog, panting and exclaiming, "We're gonna get him, huh Butch? Huh, Butch? We're gonna get him good, right? Huh? Huh? Huh, Butch?!!"
Next up was the juvie prosecutor, whose job I was taking. Though he had never learned this job properly, he spent my first entire week sitting in a chair in my tiny office doing a big brain shit all over me of everything he thought he knew about the job. He thought he was god's gift to the law and blustered loudly in the office, although in court you had to lean forward and turn up your hearing aide to hear his timid ramblings. He liked to walk around talking about the "punks" he was prosecuting and how he was going to "punch them in the head." I found out later that he had gone up against a pro se teenage girl in trial once, and on the basis of her viewings of "The Practice" she beat him soundly. Privately I referred to him as "shithead." Nothing fancy, mind you, just "shithead."
The others consisted of a Bush lover---and I don't mean the ladies---, a bitter, hairless young man who couldn't laugh at a joke unless he told it but who killed all comers at trial, and a third year law student who was having a hot and heavy affair with the Bush lover's wife. Three of the other four legal secretaries were all married to local law enforcement, whom the elected referred to as "our team" in the staff attorney meetings.
I was the only woman. "Shithead" and the elected had run off the last two female attorneys in the office, and according to courthouse lore "Shithead" had made one of them lock herself in the ladies room and cry, and the elected had started having staff attorney meetings without inviting the other, prompting her to move to greener pastures. Since both of these things also happened to me, I have no trouble believing them.
I quit them, not only because they were a bunch of self-righteous pricks, but because they were bad lawyers. I do not believe prosecutors are true lawyers. They see themselves as avenging angels but in fact they are cowards and pussies who can't handle real world law. Three of these attorneys had been in private practice and couldn't cut it. They have a 95% win rate as prosecuting attorneys and think it is because they are fucking brilliant when in fact they have a 95% win rate because they only take cases to trial that they think they can win and because most defendants are guilty to some extent, let's face it. But they aren't real lawyers, because real lawyers do what they believe is right, and prosecutors do what their elected tells them to do. Real lawyers aren't supposed to do that. It's right in the canon of ethics that we are supposed to look our boss lawyer right in the eye and say, "I disagree with you and refuse to handle my case that way." If you do that with an elected, he can fire you because he works for the public and you work at the pleasure of the elected.
But I stayed in the tiny town and opened a private practice. So here I am. The Lawyer of Tiny Town.
