Liberty and Justice for All: The Public Defender

This semester I have the opportunity of working for the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office. The office, situated on the second floor of the Justice Center at 201 Poplar, is almost exclusively where I spend my time working. My duties typically fall under the heading of clerical work, and I have spent most of the time filling in data. Recently, however, my supervisor has begun to give me work analyzing and compiling new case law as well as editing documents.

The Shelby County Public Defender is of course a governmental body at the local level. Its legal nature might make it seem to fall into the judicial branch of government, but it is fact better characterized as part of the executive. The office is a more or less bureaucratic body, and it works closely with the Mayor’s office. Its main purpose is to provide professional legal representation to residents of Shelby County who are indigent, but it also strives to accomplish other, unstated missions. The most important of these involves making the county a safer and healthier place in a way that is humane and respects individuals’ rights and lives.

This mission is readily apparent in one of the office’s newer initiatives, the Jericho Project. The Jericho Project is a collaborative effort between local charities and a team of public defenders which is devoted to taking people who have mental illnesses out of prison and putting them in treatment centers where they can obtain the care and medications they need to function as productive members of the Memphis community. I have been fortunate enough to work with the Jericho team and hear about some of their success stories. One of the project’s clients had an extensive history of criminal behavior before he entered the program; he was in and out of prison so often that he had never been able to hold down a job long enough to buy an actual bed for his residence. Since he has completed the program, he has not been arrested, he has found a job, and he has been able to buy a bed as well as other basic living items that will allow him to live a stable life. Due to his mental illness, he would never have been able to accomplish any of this without the help of the Jericho Project.

I know for a fact that not all of the program’s clients end up being success stories, because I have compiled statistics and success rates for the project using its aggregate data. Nevertheless, the Jericho Project is emblematic of the culture of civic service that, for the most part, really does animate this office. As someone who is generally critical of taxpayer-funded, bureaucratic organizations as a result of having studied how monstrously ineffectual they can be, I have been surprised by how much the Public Defender staff genuinely cares about providing the best legal service they can and about making the community a better and safer place. There are, without a doubt, people there who seem to do the bare minimum in order to collect a paycheck, but that is not at all the norm. I have talked to a few lawyers who, without me having asked them how much they liked their job, have commented on how great it is to work there, specifically on how “real” the job is. Although I am not yet exactly sure what they mean by “real,” I have interpreted it to mean that the office’s atmosphere is one of genuine cooperation for the good of the county, rather than one of internal competition for each employee’s own interests. It could also mean that the public defenders deal with people who are completely unpretentious and who act “real” by saying what is on their minds.