November 3, 1989: George Bush Sr. was in the White House, The Cosby Show was still atop the Nielson ratings, Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much" was the #1 song on the Billboard charts, and hardly anyone had heard of this obscure thing used by defense researchers called the internet. And yours truly (with a lot more hair and a very bad suit) was standing in a crowd of other people wearing not much better suits squeezed into the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas being sworn in as a lawyer. I don't remember much more about that day, other than the chicken fried steak at Threadgill's and getting a J.C. Penney briefcase from my beaming, choked up mother.
I don't remember what I was expecting the next 20 years to be like. I just had a vague notion that I wanted to make a living as a criminal trial lawyer, and I wanted to have an interesting time doing it. Now, I have noticed that wealth tends to corrupt people and has a way of wringing the joy and fun out of work, so I am fortunate, like many others who do what I do, to have studiously avoided getting rich.
But two decades, several thousand criminal cases, and approximately 100 jury trials later, I can say that it has been interesting. I have witnessed not only jaw dropping stupidity and cruelty in both people and institutions, but also flickers of humor and humanity even in people who have been accused of doing unspeakable things. I have had the proverbial front-row seat at the circus. If I died tomorrow, I could honestly and proudly say that I had kept a few people out of prison who didn't belong there, saved more than few poor people from being needlessly buried beneath the courthouse, and helped change the way in which criminal law is practiced in my small corner of the world for the better. I'm not supposed to be doing this, of course. I grew up in a small town in the rural South.
I had one grandfather who was a bootlegger during Prohibition and another from the backwoods of Alabama who never graduated from school. I'm supposed to be driving a truck or bottling beer like my dad did. I'm supposed to be working on a farm or in a factory like the friends I went to school with. I'm not supposed to be part of a tradition of protecting liberty that stretches back literally hundreds of years and includes people with last names like Adams and Lincoln and Darrow. Sometimes when I'm in a jury trial, and there's a lull in the action, I'll look around at the courtroom and the people sitting in the jury box and think to myself: "This can't be me. I can't believe I get to do this." I have been very lucky for the last twenty years. Here's hoping my luck keeps running for another twenty.