JUNE 22, 2020 – In my first year of practice, I handled “misdemeanor prosecutions” under my firm’s contract with a small suburb. Most cases involved traffic violations, though occasionally a bar scofflaw produced disorderly conduct charges. I usually negotiated deals but drove harder bargains in DUI cases. Several went to trial, which I relished for the experience, since no one at the firm much cared about the results.
That was my only brush with criminal law. Thenceforth I focused on business law. The only criminal defense lawyers I’d encountered were in those first-year misdemeanor cases . . . until the matter 25 years later (see yesterday’s post).
My impression of criminal defense lawyers wasn’t positive. They were scruffy “solos,” more “cowboy” than intellectual. Perhaps that bias was chiseled into my memory by the lawyer I often encountered in my misdemeanor cases—chain-smoking, craggy-faced, who actually did own horses and wore cowboy boots to court. To scuff his image further, he chewed tobacco.
After my run-in with the police (yesterday’s post), I realized I needed to seek out a criminal defense lawyer to help my client. By that stage, I’d actually gotten to know one—Bob, whose office was in my building. He fit my idea of a criminal defense lawyer only in that he practiced solo. In all other regards Bob was nothing like the cowboy. Bob’s suits were conservative and well-tailored; he wore white shirts and quiet neckties. Articulate, intellectual, well-informed, genuinely interested in what you had to say, Bob exuded humility and sense of humor. He was a guy whose take you could trust.
We’d never “talked law” until I called on him to represent my client in the pending embezzlement investigation. Now, that’s all I wanted to talk—and criminal law, no less. This was before Ferguson, before the shooting of Philando Castile and, of course, long before George Floyd, Jr. Like the vast majority of my fellow business lawyers, I had no idea what went on inside Minneapolis police headquarters located in City Hall, the architectural landmark directly across the street from our building. I saw City Hall as just that—an architectural wonder built out of gigantic blocks of granite, dwarfing the squad cars parked outside.
As Bob gave me a primer on local criminal “injustices,” I realized how naive, how uninformed, how utterly oblivious I was to such matters. Among his many anecdotes was a particularly memorable one: Minneapolis cops patrolling the north side—populated mostly by African Americans—and for amusement on summer Friday evenings, arresting young black men without any cause whatsoever and hauling them down to the jail. There the “suspects” would spend 36 hours—the legal limit for holding without charge—before release.
Bob wasn’t the least bit surprised by my negative encounter with the police. He rolled up his sleeves to represent my client. After multiple duels, Bob saved the day.
I now have special respect for criminal defense lawyers. Usually solo, they’re the ones standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
