Public defense work

Growing up in Sheboygan, I got the idea from cop shows and the news, and the way people talked, that the prosecutors are the good guys and the defense attorneys are a necessary evil in the system — why do we really spend money giving bad people a defense? Once I started doing it, that thought went away very quickly. You realize there is this entire system in place to process huge numbers of people through a system that really only has jail time as a possible penalty for all kinds of problems. It’s this machine and it really grinds up pretty much anyone who gets caught up in it, but it tends to catch up most often with people who are on the margins in some way.