Transcriber: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Amanda Chu
I heard this great quote once:
"The life we live is the lessons we teach."
The life I live today is that of a criminal defense lawyer.
That means, I defend so-called criminals for a living.
And because I don't do anything in moderation,
most of my clients are charged with murder,
drug trafficking, or firearms offenses.
I spend years getting to know my clients.
Generally, their cases take two to three years from start to finish,
and during the time that I get to know my clients,
I get to learn about them,
their likes and their dislikes, their history and their goals.
What I found is
that most of my clients become my clients,
not because they're intrinsically bad or evil,
they become my clients because of environmental factors
that pave the way for bad decisions or greed.
But greed isn't considered evil.
I mean, the pharmaceutical industry
is making billions of dollars off of the fentanyl epidemic,
and people are dying every day.
No one's criminalizing them.
So, why is big pharma laughing all the way to the bank
while my illegal fentanyl dealers are facing double digits,
to be branded as criminals, unemployable for the rest of their life?
Because this system is working.
I think that the criminal justice system is an economic system,
designed to keep people stuck.
That's why we have probation.
That's why we have parole.
We keep people branded as criminals and unemployable.
And when someone's unemployable and hungry,
they have no choice but to resort to further criminal activity,
so the label "criminal" actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I have no images to flash on the screen with statistics to provide.
I have no scientific research to support what I'm saying.
What I have is experience,
as a criminal lawyer today
but as just a criminal twenty years ago.
I left home the day after I turned 14 and was sent to live in a group home.
I spent 18 months there
before coming home with the same baggage I left with,
plus a carry-on.
A year of turbulence at home
meant a year of couch-surfing at friends' homes.
I started selling marijuana
just to pay for a place to sleep at night
till I got caught.
I was 16 years old with no one to bail me out,
and so I ended up at the Vanier Correction Center
where I spent four days in solitary confinement.
Three times a day, I was fed through a slot in a door,
when a hatch would open, and meals were served.
I would take my meal and look around a concrete cell
with a metal toilet attached to a metal sink,
and I would sit,
and I would listen to the other girls from the other cells talk to each other.
They would ask each other what they were doing,
what had brought them into jail this time.
This was not new to them, this was their lifestyle.
I looked around my cell and said,
"No, no, I'm not going to let this be the life I live."
It was there that I realized jail was a revolving door of lives lost.
Four days later, I came home,
and found that I had been expelled from the York Region Board of Education.
I was told that I would never be able to go to school there again.
Luckily, I'm incorrigible.
And because I'm incorrigible,
I refuse to allow anyone to tell me I can't go somewhere or do something
even if I don't want to be there.
And so, I appealed the school board's decision to expel me
successfully, self-represented -
(Applause) (Cheering)
thank you -
(Applause)
but I, I really - I didn't want to be in school,
and so six months later, I dropped out,
(Laughter)
and I left home, all in the same week.
And I spent the next two years
bearing the official title of homeless high school dropout.
Junkie, thief, and street kid, were equally applicable.
And it was there that I started to meet people
with titles like lawyer and doctor and stockbroker,
people with titles that garner respect in society.
But these people did not deserve that respect.
They were drug addicts and cheaters and mean and, some of them, violent.
And I started to question a society that judges people by their title,
instead of by their character.
At 19 years old, I decided that life was not going to be for me anymore.
I moved back home.
I sobered up.
At 21 years old, I graduated from high school.
At 24 years old, I graduated from university -
(Whooping)
thank you -
with an honors degree in philosophy,
and at 28 years old, I graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School.
(Whooping) (Applause)
I've been a practicing lawyer for 10 years now.
My first two years in civil litigation,
where I earned a living writing angry letters.
If I had to sign off once more with "govern yourself accordingly,"
I was going to go back to hustling!
And so ... and so, I made the switch to criminal law,
and there I realized
that the unique life skills I had developed while on the street,
I could actually use to my advantage.
In law school, I thought they were always going to be a detriment,
that I was always at a disadvantage
to the ultra-elite,
private-school-educated kids around me.
But that wasn't the case
because I understood not just the system but the people in it
far better than those around me.
And so, I started taking time getting to know my clients,
my clients who were charged with the same thing that I did
just to get by.
And that's when I started listening
to what the other lawyers were doing with their clients.
Selling them out,
selling out a client's case for a better case.
Telling people that it was cheaper to plead guilty,
quicker to plead guilty,
easier to plead guilty,
or the worst ultimatum there could be:
plead guilty today and get out of jail,
or wait six months for a trial you might lose.
After listening to all of this,
these lawyers who were not even considering the criminal record
that they were condemning people to,
criminal records that you, law-abiding society,
use to judge the people that come before you looking for jobs.
All I could think is, "Who judges the judge?"
And I don't mean on a case-by-case basis;
I mean as a person.
You know, we think of "criminal" as a characteristic, but it's not:
criminals just commit crimes, it's an action.
And judges judge cases,
that's what they do,
but none of those titles define the character of the person,
and yet we use those titles to judge the person.
And I think that's wrong.
You're probably wondering by now why you should care,
why any of this matters,
you're not criminals and you probably don't spend your time with criminals,
but for anyone who doesn't, here's why you should care.
Gun violence, the fentanyl epidemic, armed robberies, home invasions,
all of these are social issues.
They're events that are being perpetrated
by people that society has written off as criminals,
people who cannot find work otherwise.
We label teenagers as criminals,
drug addicts as criminals,
people with serious mental health issues.
These are people who, if we intervened earlier
and gave them better opportunities,
wouldn't feel the need to carry guns and sell drugs.
And so, I question who judges the judge
not to demean the rule of judges in the system.
I'm not trying to suggest
that they don't have an important and difficult job;
what I am suggesting is that we start questioning the system as a whole,
and the hierarchy,
the basis upon which we judge certain individuals
and dismiss the most vulnerable within our society.
What the criminal justice system does
is judge people for the worst decisions they made
at the worst point of their life.
Just take a minute and think about what that would mean to you.
What if, for the rest of your life,
you were going to be judged for the worst decision you ever made.
I can't imagine it.
I certainly wouldn't be standing on this stage right now.
And so I ask you, please, just to take a moment.
Next time you meet someone,
and you think they have a title
that garnered them a little bit of respect,
consider their story, learn about them as a person,
and decide whether or not
you should be writing off that so-called criminal
or giving credit to that judge
just because of their title.
I suggest you all just take a minute with an open mind
and consider who judges the judge.
Thank you.
(Applause)