My Beloved World (31 page)

Such attentiveness also figures in upholding one of a litigator’s paramount responsibilities: not to bore the jury. Again, the key is not rhetorical pyrotechnics. What holds a jury’s attention, essentially, is the quality of one’s own attention. If you are palpably present in the moment, continuously mindful of and responsive to your listeners, they will follow where you lead. If, however, you are reading from a script, droning on as though they weren’t there, soon enough they won’t be, irrespective of how unassailable your argument.

Often the difference is a matter of remembering what makes sense to a human being as opposed to another lawyer. For example, a prosecutor usually has no need to prove motive under the law, and yet the human mind naturally constructs its reality in terms of causes and effects, weighing any theory against the plausibility of these links and how they might operate in someone else’s mind. “Why would she have done that?” is something we instinctively ask before we allow ourselves to conclude “she did it.” The state’s case is a narrative: the story of a
crime. The defense has only to cast doubts on the coherence of that story. The “why” elements of the story must make sense—what would have motivated this person to hurt that person—before you can engage the jurors’ empathy, put them in the shoes of the accused or the victim, as needed: make them feel the cold blade held against their necks, or the pang of unappreciated devotion that might drive someone to steal from a former employer. It is the particulars that make a story real. In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells, that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.

Of course, narratives can be slippery. A story might change midway through the telling or the retelling. It wasn’t enough to prepare meticulously, to anticipate every contingency, every conceivable counterargument. Katie was the one who taught me what to do when, through no fault of your own, the story unfolding suddenly changes, throwing your case into unexpected chaos. In that eventuality, everything depends on the power to improvise, the dexterity to change tack as if doing so were part of your strategy all along. If a witness alters his testimony without warning, the savvy prosecutor simply de-emphasizes the testimony and stresses the cumulative weight of circumstantial evidence. Devising the case is always a two-step process: build the strategy out of reason and logic; then throw yourself into it, heart and soul. But if you have to revise the plan, suspend feeling and revert to logic until you can think of something you can sell with passion.

Other lessons I would figure out for myself, often contrary to conventional wisdom. Some prosecutors, for instance, would look for legitimate reasons to eliminate black and Hispanic juror candidates in the voir dire, the assumption being that minorities are biased in favor of defendants. 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. It was obvious to me that any black or Latino who held a job, or went to school, or stayed home to care for an elderly parent was likely as law-abiding as anyone in my own family and, if anything, far likelier to be the victim of a crime than to commit one. The notion that such a person would, on the basis of
racial or ethnic solidarity, let anyone walk who might pose a danger to the community would have seemed laughable where I came from. And so I packed my juries with the kinds of people I’d grown up among; the results, again, spoke for themselves.

Few aspects of my work in the DA’s Office were more rewarding than to see what I had learned in childhood among the Latinos of the Bronx prove to be as relevant to my success as Ivy League schooling was. It was in effect to see that mastery of the law’s cold abstractions, which had taken such effort, was actually incomplete without an understanding of how they affected individual lives. Laws in this country, after all, are not handed down from on high but created by society for its own good. The nearer one was, in fact, to the realities that had inspired those laws, the more persuasively one could argue for the justice of upholding them. To be able to relate to jurors as their own sister or daughter might, with real appreciation of their concerns and the constraints upon their lives, often put me at an advantage facing an adversary from a more privileged background—a refreshing change after years of feeling the opposite. But even more important, that connection fed my sense of purpose. Each day I stood before a jury, I felt myself a part of the society I served.

It was, as I’ve said, not the job that most Yale Law School graduates dreamed of, but it did furnish me with the basis for an eventual judicial temperament in ways that Yale could not. It also gave me the confidence that came of recognizing my personal background as something better than a disadvantage to be overcome.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1980, seven months into my first year at the DA’s Office, Bob Morgenthau encouraged me to join the board of an organization he had helped to found and had served for the better part of a decade. “They’re on a campaign to recruit young talent, and I have given them your name,” he said. In those days, few ADAs gave much time to pro bono work, or had much time to give. I already felt the combination of the daily commute and my caseload was testing my limits, which should have activated my natural tendency to avoid taking on too much too soon. But it’s always hard to refuse the boss’s invitations, and this was especially true of the Boss, who would become such a patron of my career. Besides, I was no stranger to the organization in question: the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (now Latino Justice). I had applied for a summer internship there while I was at Yale. During the interview, they asked about my career goals. I allowed that I hadn’t settled on a short-term plan, but I did know that in twenty years I wanted to be a federal district court judge. The interviewer raised an eyebrow, causing me to conclude that in the future it would be better to keep my fantasies to myself. I didn’t get the job, but I remained interested in the group’s mission.

The Fund, otherwise known by the acronym PRLDEF (“Pearl-def”), was founded in 1972 by a group of young Puerto Rican lawyers who drew inspiration from the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund and wanted to use their legal skills to challenge systemic discrimination
against the Hispanic community. By the time I joined, PRLDEF was solidly established and had won significant reforms, its landmark
ASPIRA
suit against New York City’s Board of Education proving as vital to Hispanics as
Brown v. Board of Education
had been to blacks. Until the
ASPIRA
case, Puerto Rican kids coming from the island, where Spanish was used in public schools, or from families like mine that spoke little English entered the New York City public school system with no help at all making the language transition. These kids routinely floundered and, though otherwise perfectly capable, would often find themselves in classes for the intellectually disabled. They naturally dropped out in staggering numbers, turning an imagined handicap into a real one, a temporary need for remedial help into a lifetime of minimal employment and poverty. The
ASPIRA
consent decree won by PRLDEF in 1974 established the right of students with limited English to receive bilingual education in New York City’s public schools. The very next year, my cousin Miriam would enter college, eventually to graduate as one among the first wave of young teachers to earn a degree in bilingual education.

If PRLDEF seemed a natural follow-up to my work at Acción Puertorriqueña, this was no ragtag band of student activists but a committed group of highly skilled professionals with far more experience and savvy than I had, their sights set far beyond trying to get one Ivy League college to hire one Hispanic administrator. Some of the victories won by PRLDEF—for voting rights, or against discriminatory hiring practices—would open doors for hundreds or thousands of individuals. These efforts would shift the boundaries of opportunity and civic engagement for people across the nation, far beyond Puerto Rican New York. At the same time, the group was decidedly of my community, and that moved me deeply. It was the same pride I’d felt observing José Cabranes, so committed to his people and yet maneuvering so effortlessly in the wider world. On our board sat the Brahmins of Nuyorican society—as well as Puerto Ricans from the island and across the mainland—but there were also figures prominent in mainstream media or businessmen wealthy beyond what I had imagined possible in our corner of society. I was awakening to how much broader the Latino community was than I had known growing up in the Bronx.

As the youngest member of the board—even the others recruited as “young blood” were older and more established professionally—I felt honored just to be included and given the chance to learn from individuals already so accomplished and destined to achieve even more. If I could have looked into the future, I would have seen friends I made there going on to become federal judges, ambassadors, a U.S. attorney, college presidents, professors of law, partners at major law firms—every one of them upholding a lifelong dedication to public service. The women were especially inspiring, and not only for offering one another constant camaraderie and moral support, rare in any organization. At the DA’s Office, I had seen very few women in positions of genuine power; the bureau chiefs were all men. But here were women—competent, authoritative, professional Hispanic women—who were leaders in their own fields as well as determined to give of themselves for the sake of others.

I worked on the litigation committee, which hired the staff lawyers and set strategy for the types of cases we would take on. I also served on the education committee, which arranged internships and found mentors for minorities, as well as developing LSAT preparation materials to help more Latinos become law students. Beyond what I was learning from all the potential role models around me, these activities gave me a grounding in the nature of organizations and how competing interests within them had to be balanced: in a word, politics. The staffing work in particular threw me square into the problem of allocating limited resources. There were those with visions of taking on ever bigger cases and more areas of advocacy, my own preference as always being for smaller, more careful steps. Sometimes personalities clashed, especially given the presence of so many lawyers who had succeeded as aggressive litigators in large corporate settings and who were now maneuvering in the close quarters of a small nonprofit where everyone involved had a deep emotional investment. Occasionally, such conflicts can tear the very fabric of an institution if they aren’t handled wisely, and indeed that almost happened.

Problems at PRLDEF came to a head in a labor strike that split the organization and proved traumatic for every single member of the board and staff. The points of contention were the familiar stuff of labor-management disputes, not salaries so much—because no one
signing up to work there could have expected much of one—as benefits, the formulas for calculating hours, and the compensation for extra work. My natural sympathies were with the staff lawyers, being myself employed as one in the DA’s Office and never having been a manager anywhere. But as a board member I had a fiduciary obligation to the institution, a ponderous word but a real responsibility that I took seriously, appreciating as I did PRLDEF’s value to the larger community.

Learning how to balance the needs of individuals with the no-less-real needs of an institution was an important lesson. It’s fine to be on the side of the little guy, but he too will ultimately suffer if the health and concerns of the greater body he belongs to are neglected. That point would be driven home a year later, when my mother phoned in tears to tell me that she had lost her job. She, along with the entire staff of Prospect Hospital, had been locked out when it closed without warning. The sudden bankruptcy eliminated dozens of jobs, shattered a close-knit family that had shared their workdays for decades, put homes at risk, and destroyed an institution that had revitalized an entire neighborhood. Once again, my heart inclined to those who were locked out of their livelihood, but my head was calculating: What concessions, what better choices, might have preserved the institution and avoided this sad loss for all sides? Seeing Prospect Hospital disappear, I appreciated all the more the fine balance, the hard reckoning, and the personal sacrifices that ultimately kept PRLDEF intact through difficult times.

PRLDEF WAS
my first real experience of pro bono work and the honorable role of a “citizen lawyer.” I would continue serving there for twelve years, long after I’d left the DA’s Office and right up to becoming a judge. To use my education to help others was so gratifying that despite having no time to call my own, I would get involved with other groups as well over those years. There was, for instance, my work with SONYMA, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, which was establishing a program to make mortgages available to working-class families. We prided ourselves then on the strict criteria for qualification and the fact that most
of the loans were repaid. Still, it gave me pause to realize that someone with my own mother’s earning power, for all her years of hard work and spotless financial history, could not have qualified even in the category designed to capture the lowest-income applicants. It seemed wrong that there was no way to reconcile the standards of secure underwriting, and the imperative of protecting the institution, with the good of helping the most marginal but still deserving, including those like my mother who had never defaulted on any obligation and never would.

I particularly welcomed any chance to work on issues such as economic development and education that were crucial to the community in which I was raised. I not only cared deeply about those people but also understood their needs from firsthand experience. As I made my way in the world, however, I was seeing more and more that no group is an island. Even the most cohesive (or the most marginalized) consists of overlapping circles of belonging, just as every individual’s identity is constituted of many elements. To do good ultimately meant seeing any particular interests in a larger civic context, a broader sense of community. The specific needs of people like those I grew up with would always tug at my heart, but increasingly the call to serve was beckoning me beyond the confines of where I’d come from.