The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor: Chapters 18–22

If the immediate threat to public safety had lifted after the lights and air conditioning came back on, New Yorkers still had reason to live in a state of diffuse chronic fear.

The city’s fiscal troubles summed a decade of economic doldrums nationwide, and severe budget cuts were preventing the DA’s Office, as well as the police department, from adding enough staff to cope with an avalanche of criminal cases.

We would cut our teeth on misdemeanors: petty thefts, minor assaults, prostitution, shoplifting, trespass, disorderly conduct, graffiti….Later we would be promoted to felonies, and we might move to one of the bureaus that investigate fraud, racketeering, public corruption, sex crimes, or other specialized crimes.

If a defendant is arraigned on an unsworn complaint, how many days do you have to fix it?

Eventually, turnover would deposit me in slightly more commodious shared space, though my desk still blocked the entrance, behind which door was wedged an old couch, horsehair poking out of cracked leather.

What I did see, in the small corner of my awareness not cluttered with cases, procedures, and the minutiae of criminal law, was Kevin finally doing work that excited him and earning recognition for it.

Somehow by pure instinct I realized that a witness had implied vaguely that she had seen something, though she avoided stating it outright. On cross-examination, I asked an apparently tangential question that led her to describe the precise conditions that would have made a direct line of sight impossible for her.

Public awareness of voir dire is much greater these days thanks to media coverage of high-profile trials, to say nothing of television court dramas, and the science of juror selection that has spawned an industry of consultants. But when I joined the DA’s Office, it was all rather arcane stuff, especially since New York State is one of the few jurisdictions where lawyers can get involved in the process, which in many states, as in the federal system, is handled by judges.

I subpoenaed the defendant’s wife.

But any pleasure I might have derived from my first conviction vanished when we reconvened for sentencing.

“I think Ms. Cardi is right,” I heard myself saying, without premeditation, and feigning a self-assurance I wasn’t feeling inside.

She was stunned by my concession, which seemed especially strange for a beginner, given that a prosecutor’s career is built on a reputation for toughness and winning stiff sentences.

Despite the unofficial rule against fraternization between prosecutors and defense attorneys, we became friends, and as we did, our conversations often edged into bigger themes.

Without life skills, unable to find a job, he survived by selling copper pipes that he stripped from a derelict building, not fully aware that this was theft.

With each prosecutor handling around a hundred cases at a time, expediency and rough justice were the order of the day.

We fudged, we made do with the tools at hand, we performed triage in the trenches, but we still made an effort to do it with integrity.

Maybe my prosecuting misdemeanors with a ferocity usually reserved for felonies looked to some like real fire in the belly. In reality, it was still more like butterflies and the unremitting fear of leaving anything to chance that made me prepare and argue so intensively.

“It’s weak. But we have the indictment, and it’s our job to prosecute. Let the jury do theirs; they’ll acquit him.”

“And now, obviously,” he shouted, “you’re going to tell me that you’re new and need a month to prepare!” I promised him that if he gave me fifteen minutes to confirm the availability of the witness, I’d be ready for trial the following week. That endeared me to him permanently.

With plenty of misdemeanor trials under my belt, I had enough confidence—or the bravado of ignorance—to trust my performance under pressure.

He was painfully exacting and infamously unforgiving of lawyers who wasted his time, on one occasion sending defense counsel to jail for ten days for preventing the start of a trial.

He was known as the Prince of Darkness, Dr. Doom, and Yahweh, among other epithets, particularly for striking terror in the heart of defendants whenever one with a weak case would decline his offer of a plea.

Behind the infernal humor, a formidable clarity of mind and a keen legal acumen kept the docket moving with astonishing efficiency.

Behind the infernal humor, a formidable clarity of mind and a keen legal acumen kept the docket moving with astonishing efficiency.

Even the most perfectly logical argument, absent passion, would make the choice seem like one of personal discretion rather than solemn duty.

Granting myself permission to use my innate skills of the heart, accepting that emotion was perfectly valid in the art of persuasion, amounted to nothing less than a breakthrough.

It changed my entire approach to jurors, from the voir dire to the structure of my summations, and the results spoke for themselves: I never lost a case again. I had hung juries a couple of times, and once or twice a conviction on fewer than all counts of the indictment, but never an acquittal.

Such attentiveness also figures in upholding one of a litigator’s paramount responsibilities: not to bore the jury.

If you are palpably present in the moment, continuously mindful of and responsive to your listeners, they will follow where you lead.

But to me that made sense only if you saw all people of color as potential perpetrators and believed, even more implausibly, that they all saw one another that way too.

At PRLDEF I worked on the litigation committee, which hired the staff lawyers and set strategy for the types of cases we would take on.

The need for oversight in the financing of the electoral process was dramatic, not only to guard against graft, but to ensure access for candidates who would be excluded if money alone determined the race.

What appealed to me was the possibility of devising a structural solution to a long-entrenched problem simply by creating an appropriate set of rules. That’s as elegant as ethics gets.

It would matter crucially that I was familiar to people of influence who, though recognizing that I did not involve myself in partisan efforts, could see that I was at least an honest broker.

Kevin and I talked through the details without rancor. We agreed that I would assume our credit card debt, since I was the one bothered by it. In return I got custody of the Honda Civic.

In the end, I sold my wedding ring to pay the lawyer who handled our divorce. Saddened though I was at seeing Kevin leave, I was no more sentimental about the formal trappings of marriage than I had been on our wedding day.

Still, in Abuelita’s family, blood ultimately came first, and she strongly favored her own. My mother, being more or less an orphan, poor in kinfolk, approached the matter less dogmatically.

I adore kids and have a special affinity with them, an ability to see the world through their eyes that most adults seem to lose. I can match any kid’s stubbornness, hour for hour. I don’t baby anyone; when we play games, I play to win. I treat kids as real people.

Most women of my generation who entered professional life did not forgo motherhood, and many did succeed at both. But they paid a price, one still paid by most women who work outside the home (and men too, I believe, if they parent wholeheartedly): a life of perpetual internal compromise that leaves you always feeling torn.

But we would do well to abandon the myth of “having it all,” career and family, with no sacrifice to either, together with the pernicious notion that a woman who chooses one or the other is somehow deficient.