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- So there I was standing at the podium with my client.
I was the public defender and I was representing him
when he had been charged with burglary.
They claimed he had broken into a store
and taken some money out of the register.
Now the video they had wasn't really clear.
And they had his fingerprints
but he used to work at that store.
So there was a good reason
that his fingerprints were on the scene.
And so I really thought I had a winnable case.
I could probably come out good on this one
but I was practicing in front of judge Johns at the time.
And judge Johns had this long list
of rules that you had to follow in her courtroom.
And if you didn't follow, if you miss one single rule,
that could be the difference between freedom and jail.
And so I had sat with my client, Mr. Coleman
and we had gone over these rules.
I mean, I literally gave him a copy of the rules
and I read 'em out to him.
You must use the title of anybody you're referring to.
Mr. Jones, Ms. Smith, you must wear professional clothes.
You must have a job each time you come to court
and you must always answer questions,
yes ma'am or yes your honor.
These were the rules you had to follow.
So when I first saw Mr. Coleman come into court that day
and he had on a polo shirt and khaki pants,
Ooh, I got a little nervous
but I said we're going to be all right.
Not what I told him but not too shabby.
But then when the judge asked him where he was working,
he said, "Well, I don't have a job."
I felt the ground open up just a little. (sighs)
And then she went on to ask him,
"Well, why don't you have a job?"
And then he said, "Well, Sheila,"
referring to me, "told me I should get a job
but I thought I should just wait until the case was done."
There it was.
The ground completely opened up and sure enough,
he was carted off to jail.
He was revoked on his bond
because he didn't follow those arbitrary rules.
And that was what they called justice.
He ended up spending about six months in jail,
ended up pleading guilty
to get out for two years on probation.
I started feeling really bad
about what the justice system was.
Was this really justice?
I mean, it seemed like if you didn't follow the rules,
arbitrary rules, then you could lose your freedom.
And that just doesn't seem like justice.
And so I got a little disappointed in our justice system.
But then my supervisor, my boss came to me one day and said,
"We're going to switch you.
We're put you in judge Thomas Shriver's courtroom."
And I had heard about judge Shriver.
And, you know, he seemed pretty fair.
But when I went into the courtroom, it just felt different.
There was never this long list of rules
that you had to follow.
There was absolutely no dress code.
It felt calm and relaxing.
People felt okay in that courtroom.
And I started to think,
well, maybe,
maybe there might be some justice in this courtroom.
So I had a client, Mr. Blacksmith.
And he wasn't charged of very much.
He was a older gentleman
and it was minor charges and he had never been to court.
And he just was nervous about being in that courtroom.
And when he showed up, mm, he smelled like a distillery.
I mean, I thought he had bathed in a bath full of beer.
It was just terrible.
And I didn't know what to do.
I was hiding him. I felt dread.
I just didn't know how to handle it.
I was giving him every mint I could find,
I was spraying him with perfume, whatever I could do
'cause he was going to jail.
'Cause he smelled like a distillery.
So finally they called him into the courtroom.
And immediately the prosecutor stood up and said,
"Your honor, I want his bond revoked.
He's been drinking."
And judge Shriver looked at us.
He must have sensed that fear and that dread.
And he said to my,
asked my client if he had been drinking.
And my client was very honest with him.
He said, "Yeah, yeah I've been drinking a little."
And he said,
"Well, what you been drinking?"
And he said, "Well, I had a beer."
"Well, how much beer did you have?"
"Well, I only had one beer, but it was a 40 ounce."
I knew it.
The floor started opening up.
We were done, we were done.
But then I heard judge Shriver snickering.
What, actually he was really laughing.
The judge was actually laughing.
And he said to Mr. Blacksmith.
"Now Mr. Blacksmith, next time you come,
don't drink before you get here, you can go."
Now judge Shriver wasn't being lenient on him,
he was being fair.
He recognized that this gentleman made a mistake
and he recognized that he deserved a second chance.
And we were able to resolve his case.
Mr. Blacksmiths was ever to do good,
get back on the right track and never come back again.
And that was justice.
And so I started getting that hope back of justice
and started now learning so much from judge Shriver.
I had the opportunity to work in his courtroom
for over three years and just learning.
And only was he a good mentor,
he was like a father figure to me.
He was someone that always treated everybody with respect
and with fairness while holding them accountable
for the actions that they did, true justice.
But one Saturday morning I was at home,
sitting there watching TV and my supervisor calls me
and she says, "Are you sitting down?"
And I was like, "Well, I can sit down.
What's going on?"
And then she told me that the night before
judge Shriver had died
in his office.
At first I was dumb.
I just didn't know what she was saying.
It didn't make sense to me.
And she made sure I was still on the phone
and she repeated what she had said.
And it just broke my heart.
I heard what she said.
And judge Shriver's death was like me losing a piece of me.
It was one of the hardest things I had to deal with.
His courtroom was closed for several weeks.
But then when they opened it back up,
they had to get an interim judge
until they could find someone to take his place permanently.
And when you know it, that interim judge
just happened to be the retired judge Johns.
I said, "Oh, not again."
So we were going back to that system of arbitrary rules
and just unfairness, which was not justice.
And as I kept practicing there and the struggle kept going,
I just kept getting frustrated with the system.
And one time I had a young kid.
He was about 19 years old at the time.
And he had made a really serious mistake.
He was at the ATM machine, he found a card.
He's like, ooh.
And he took the card with him and he started using it.
He went and bought some gas.
He bought some pizza.
He went and got a DVD player.
He was starting on some other stuff
and got some little stuff to go with it.
And then all of a sudden it clicked to him,
"Oh, this is not right.
I shouldn't be doing this."
And so he backtracked.
He actually backtracked,
went back to the stores where he had been selling stuff,
turned everything that he turned in,
except for of course the pizza and the gas.
He couldn't turn those in anymore.
But he recognized the wrong that he did
and he was trying to make it right.
And so in that type of case,
I was asking the district attorney in the courtroom,
if he would consider giving him what we call
expungable probation.
It's like, if you do everything you're supposed to do,
you admit you're guilty, you know you're wrong,
you do the conditions that you're supposed to do
and by the end, this is a felony charge,
this felony charge gets erased from your record.
And in this case it was so important
for this felony charge to be erased from this kid's record
because if he had a felony, he couldn't get a good job.
If he had a felony, he couldn't go to college.
If he had a felony, he couldn't get good housing.
And these were all things that he wanted to do.
He admitted it.
He knew that he made a mistake.
All he wanted was a second chance.
And so if a DA doesn't agree to expungable probation,
every once in a while
you get an opportunity to ask the judge
if they would consider overruling the DA's decision.
And if judge Shriver had been here in this case,
there was absolutely no doubt, he would have overruled it.
He would've said,
"Oh yeah, this is a kid that's made a mistake,
recognizes a mistake that he's made
and he's ready to make it right.
He can have expungable probation."
But judge Shriver was dead.
And I had a different judge.
And I knew in my heart of hearts
that this judge would never,
would never give this kid expungable probation.
And the frustration just grew in me.
And the more I talked to the DA about it,
the more smug he seemed to be and just would answer me,
"Well, he did the crime. He's got to do the time."
And kept saying that over and over and over to me.
And it just built inside of me.
The anger was so deep.
Then all of a sudden I snapped.
And I immediately put down my files
and I pointed my finger in his face and I said,
"You don't know what justice is,
you are blah, blah, blah, blah."
(audience cheers)
Now mind you, this was a courtroom full of people.
There were attorneys, my supervisor, my poor clients.
All watching this.
But at that moment, I didn't care who was watching.
All I cared about was,
if judge Shriver had have been here,
this would've been fair.
This is not right.
This is not fair.
And so my supervisor came quickly over
to try and calm me down.
She got in front of me
so that I couldn't see what was going on behind me.
And she said, "You got to calm down, you got to calm down.
You can't act like this in court.
You got to calm down."
And so me and my ultimate upsetness,
having my out of body experience,
I kind of looked around to her side
and I saw the DAs talking together
about what I had just said.
And I saw that they were trying to be a little smug
about it.
And it looked like they were trying to make fun
of what I had just done.
And so I say,
"I'm sorry, I need to go handle some more business."
And so I proceeded to go around
and then I started telling now,
"If you got any questions about what I just told him,
I tell you the same thing."
(audience cheers)
And boy, did I feel good?
Now my client didn't get the expungable probation.
And at that moment I knew
that it was time for me to do something different.
I could not, could not practice law in a place
that I didn't feel was fair or just.
In a place that was just controlled
by someone's random arbitrary rules.
I had to do something different.
And so I struggled little in that court
for a little while longer for about two months.
And then all of a sudden, one of the attorneys,
one of the public defenders
that worked in the juvenile division was leaving
and they needed someone to take his place.
And so I quickly volunteered.
And the first day I went to juvenile court,
it felt like judge Shriver's home all over again.
It felt like people really trying to work with our youth
and trying to make a difference in their lives.
It felt like people who knew
that our youth were going to make mistakes
and they just needed a second chance.
And I felt like we had some justice all over again.
And so 20 years later, almost 20 years later,
I stand before you as the juvenile court judge.
(audience cheers)
And every day (chuckles),
and every day, every day as that juvenile court judge,
I think about that lessons that I had learned
from judge Shriver.
That people may make mistakes,
that people are unique,
that people are going to make some errors,
but it's up to us to build them up
and to give them a second chance.
I had an opportunity one time,
one of the attorneys that used to practice
in front of judge Shriver had a case in front of me.
And after she finished her case,
she came to me and she said,
"Practicing in front of you
made me feel like practicing in front of my favorite judge
all over again.
It was the biggest compliment I've ever had
and something that I will always, always try to live up to.
Thank you.
(audience cheers)