District Attorneys

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There are County Attorneys and District Attorneys. County Attorneys handle misdemeanor cases and civil cases brought on behalf of the county.

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CAREER COUNSELOR’S CORNER

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District Attorneys
[Erica Winter] If, like many of us, your interest in the law started with shows like Law & Order, being a District Attorney is the best way to fulfill your childhood dreams of playing a role in courtroom intrigue and drama. Of course, not everything is as it appears on television.

Like to wear white hats? Not the wedding-Easter-garden party-lacy white hats. The white cowboy hats that show that you’re the good guy, the one with the biggest horse, the one who knows the truth and will reveal it to your fellow citizens. If that’s the kind of white hat you like, then being a prosecutor might be the specialty for you. Of course, there are the death threats. And the lower-than-high salary. And having to get elected, if you want the top job in most states. Yes, there are downsides. But not a single one of the prosecutors or former prosecutors we talked with said that any of that matters more to them than doing this highly-rewarding job. True calling. There are many paths to becoming a prosecutor. No matter which route they took, however, those we spoke with absolutely love these jobs.

who asked him if he wanted to be a deputy DA. Foote applied to the DA’s office and was hired in 1980. Clackamas County includes part of the city of Portland, and some suburban and rural areas. There is “a real mixture of people,” says Foote, with a total county population of about 360,000. The county sees the “usual mix” of crime, says Foote, topped off by drug crime and property crime. Foote’s office is split into prosecutions of misdemeanors, crimes against people, and crimes involving property.

Why go through all this? Why not just stay with the assistant DA job, stick with the legal side of the job and not bother with the politics? For Foote, after five years away, he wanted to prosecute again. “I really like this work,” he says. Also, the DA who won the 1996 election turned out to have acted inappropriately regarding an order to expunge the legal records of a juvenile, then committed perjury regarding the situation. Foote says he wanted to restore honesty to the DA’s office. “It takes real commitment, effort and

How a DA office is divided depends on the state and region. For example, in Texas, there are County Attorneys and District Attorneys. County Attorneys handle misdemeanor cases and civil cases brought on behalf of the county. District Attorneys handle criminal cases for the county. Many other states combine the misdemeanor and felony cases into different sections of the DA office, as in Oregon.

passion” to be a DA, says Foote; “the job deserves that.” Prosecutors are trying to find the truth of what happened, and find it before the trial. The trial, of course, is not where you look for information - the trial is where you present it, and try to convince a jury that this is the truth. It’s rather like journalism.

Foote was a prosecutor for ten years, then John Foote, DA of Clackamas County, Oregon, became a prosecutor through “a series of circumstances rather than a plan,” he says. Foote was a counselor at a private school outside Philadelphia when he realized that the law was what he really wanted to do. Out west. So he headed to Oregon and went to Lewis & Clark Law School, getting his degree in 1979. Foote applied for a public defender job but did not get hired. He clerked for a judge In 1996, Foote lost the election for his job. At that time, he knew how to do prosecution, but not how to run for office, Foote says. He then went into private practice, ran for the office again in 2000, and beat out four other candidates to win. became the Inspector General of the state’s department of corrections for five years, and was then appointed by the governor to the DA post in 1995 when the sitting DA retired. Joe Quinlan, Assistant District Attorney for the Northwestern District of Massachusetts, was a reporter for the Associated Press (AP) for four years before deciding to go to law school. While at law school at Western New England College School of Law in Springfield, MA, Quinlan started working in the Springfield DA’s office, which helped him feel more comfortable in the courtroom when he was starting out, Quinlan says. He has now been a prosecutor for 17 years. Quinlan never wanted to run for DA, enjoying

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the legal side of the job more than any political aspirations. “Why run if you have a good boss?” says Quinlan. Even though he wanted a career shift, there are many parallels between prosecuting and reporting, he says - interviewing people, finding out what really happened, putting a case or a story together, and presenting the case to the public, either a jury or a reader. Scott Brumley, an assistant County Attorney in Potter County, Texas, in the northern part of the state, also started off as a reporter. He worked at a newspaper in Lubbock, and then decided that the law would be a better career for him. Brumley is an alumnus of Texas Tech Law School, and will become the next County Attorney. There is a misconception sometimes that prosecutors are the victims’ attorneys, says Brumley. And, while there is a Victims Assistance Coordinator in his office, helping to connect victims to services and resources, the prosecutors themselves are actually the lawyers for the county, not the victim. Brumley works to bring criminals to justice - but the victim may not see some outcomes as real justice, he says, when they want the punishments to be harsher than they are. But for prosecutors, it is important to base your work on what is fair, says Brumley. And it’s not just victims and perpetrators who get involved in cases. The Northwestern District of Massachusetts covers several small valley towns and even more rural areas in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains. The DA’s office has about 20 attorneys, says Quinlan, and usually tries cases involving robberies, homicides, and house break-ins. However, the majority of prosecutions in this college-rich region are motor vehicle deaths caused by criminal behavior, such as drunk driving. Some lawyers say their lives are not their own

because of the long hours they put in at their firms. For prosecutors, especially in rural areas, it’s for a different reason. When you are a prosecutor in a small community, you are very much out in the open, says Quinlan. Since everyone knows who you are, you need to set an example in your behavior - not just at work, but as you do your grocery shopping or go to the park on the weekends. You never know when the cashier you meet at the store over the weekend is going to be on a jury you see on Monday. “We hold ourselves to a higher standard,” says Quinlan. Being a prosecutor is “the best job you could ever have as a lawyer,” says Kelly Clifford, who served for four years as an assistant DA in Manhattan. Clifford went into the DA’s office right after graduating from St. John’s Law School, starting out trying misdemeanor cases for two years, then moving on to felonies. “You learn fast,” she says. Hats off. No one pretends that this job is easy. The death penalty looms large. And there are also times when a prosecutor’s personal demons hinder objectivity - either making them shy, or too gung-ho in pursuing a case. As usual, one of the hardest things to do is the best thing to do in these situations - be honest with yourself, and, once you have done that, be honest about yourself with your boss and co-workers. The laws may change. In 1980 there was no death penalty in Oregon, says John Foote. Now there is. While you certainly would not be trying capital cases right off the bat, you need to be honest with your employer when you are hired if you think that you could not do justice to a capital case because you have moral trouble with the death penalty, says Foote. Also, over the course of your prosecution career, your mind may change - more than once, even - on what you think about the laws and punishments in the system.

All of the DAs we talked with said that, if an assistant prosecutor had a moral problem with the death penalty, then those cases would not be assigned to him. At the assistant level, this is possible (and not a kill-your-career move) because there are not that many capital cases to start with, and there is usually enough attention paid to hiring a variety of people in one office so that one person’s beliefs do not throw the schedule for a loop. At higher levels, disagreement with punishment methods would be more of a problem, says John Bradley, the DA for Williamson County, Texas, the county bordering Austin’s Travis County to the north. Many DAs in Texas support the death penalty, says Bradley. He would be “troubled” to hear of an elected DA in the state who did not. Mainly, he says, this is because DAs take an oath to uphold and enforce the laws of the state, including the penalties for crimes. And, while assistant DAs also take this oath, they are not holding themselves up to voters as a top law enforcement official, he says. In the Houston DA’s office, where he worked before coming to Williamson County, there were more prosecutors who opposed the death penalty than in the staunchly conservative county he serves now, Bradley says. But there were also 300 prosecutors in Houston, so if one of them needed to pass on a case, that was not a logistical problem. He says most DAs who assign the cases within their offices would allow assistants to express opposition. In his office, the death penalty issue is raised in the job interview. Opposition is not disqualification for employment, Bradley says. Strangely, it may be easier for an office to deal with a prosecutor who has a personal problem with a case than if he has a moral problem with it. Conflicts do arise.

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Prosecutors can be victims of crimes, just like other people. If a prosecutor was mugged, for example, and feels he would have a hard time trying a case against a mugger, that case can be reassigned, agreed those we talked with. Ideally, the DA assigning the cases would know in advance about the situation, and not assign the case to that assistant in the first place, but that is not always possible. Personal experience can end up strengthening a prosecutor’s work. There was one domestic violence prosecutor in Texas who had been a victim of abuse herself, says Scott Brumley. The prosecutor was able to put her own experiences aside and had “no baggage” working with cases in court, says Brumley. If it does start to look as though a prosecutor has baggage, and has already been assigned a case, then there needs to be “damage control,” says Brumley. While prosecutors do need to tell their bosses if they have personal issues with a case, part of the job is putting your own feelings aside and trying to be consistent and steady in your work, says John Foote. Assistant DAs “can’t dump the hard cases,” says Foote, “You have to carry your own weight.”

witness leapt off the stand and attacked the prosecutor - breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious. “It was appropriate for that prosecutor not to finish that trial,” says Bradley. Bradley himself was trying a case in which the jury found the defendant guilty of shooting her landlord and killing him. The woman who was convicted was unquestionably mentally unstable; throughout the trial she maintained that her landlord had been a terrorist. Still, she knew her actions were wrong, and she was sentenced to 60 years in prison, and 30 years before the possibility of parole. Which makes Bradley feel a bit relieved, he says, since the convicted woman threatened to kill him while she was testifying. She also threatened to kill her defense attorney, says Bradley. “I’m always a little nervous about one week after a trial,” he says. “We do anger half the courtroom.” He does get threatening letters from people in prison, but the letters don’t worry him much, he says. Often, as with the woman who shot her landlord, those who are convicted are angrier with their own lawyers than with the DAs. Politics. (or, Speaking of the U.S. Senate...)

munity.” Getting the top job as a prosecutor (either a county or district attorney) involves running for office in most states. This can be challenging for career prosecutors, who are usually in this field to try cases, and not to move on to higher political office. Most elected DAs or CAs either end up as career prosecutors or as judges, says John Foote. There are, of course, famous exceptions from both parties. While Flanagan was a young assistant DA, the brother of the President of the United States came in as another assistant DA. Edward Kennedy was a prosecutor in the Suffolk County DA’s office for eight months before he ran for the Senate and won his first term in office, says Flanagan. About a decade later, John Kerry was also an assistant DA in Massachusetts, eventually became a Senator, and is now, of course you know, running for President. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Arlen Specter was a DA. He then moved on to a Senate seat as well. Another Philadelphia DA, Edward Rendell, went on to become the city’s mayor, and then Pennsylvania governor. Some prosecutors have higher political aspirations than others. Some use the office as a springboard. Some end up running for DA only to make the next logical move up in their careers. And some are satisfied to spend their careers as assistant DAs, doing the legal work without getting distracted by politics. Just how partisan this political process is depends on what state and region you are in. For example, in Oregon, candidates for DA do not have to declare a party affiliation. There is a primary election, in which all the candidates compete. If the top vote-getter in the primary does not win over fifty percent of the votes, then there is a runoff election between the top two candidates, and the winner of that race

If you truly cannot carry your part and get some emotional distance from your past experiences, says Foote, then you might need to reconsider whether this is the right job for you. Campaigning for office is the “worst things Still, with death penalty cases, or child abuse cases, or assault cases, sometimes you can just say to your boss that you can’t do a certain type of case, and they just won’t be assigned to you. Most importantly, be honest with your employer, says Foote. Sometime, law enforcement can be a dangerous job, even if your main work is done in offices and courtrooms. Recently, a Texas prosecutor was questioning a witness in a robbery trial, and the Still, he stayed in the profession for a reason. There is “tremendous personal satisfaction” to being a prosecutor, says Flanagan. You become, in a way, “the conscience of a comyou have to do” in the DA job says Newman Flanagan, who was DA for Suffolk County, Mass., which includes Boston, for four terms from 1978 to 1992. Flanagan had been an assistant DA in that office, starting in 1961, soon after graduating from the New England School of Law, Boston. The phrase “office politics” takes on new meaning when you are competing for your boss’s job in an election.

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becomes the DA. On the other hand, in Texas, there is partisan declaration in DA elections, and Republicans often win. If you decide that politics is not your dream, and you do not want to be a prosecutor for life, you can use this experience to get another job in the private sector. You will get more trial experience in this job than any other law job. “That’s all we do,” says Joe Quinlan. Especially if you live in a large urban area, you would have no trouble moving laterally from the DA’s office into a mid-level firm, he says. In more rural areas, like Western Mass., lawyers from the DA’s office go into solo practice or join small firms, he says. The only challenge you might face is one that Kelly Clifford saw: most litigation done by private firms is civil, and prosecutors work the criminal side of the courtroom. Clifford says the lateral move to civil litigation could be difficult. Still, Clifford did find a job trying cases for a small litigation firm in DC after she moved there from New York so her husband, LawCrossing’s COO Peter Wilkniss, could go to Georgetown Law Center.

sources agree. Possibly, the closest thing to courtroom reality on television was the sitcom “Night Court,” jokes Joe Quinlan. One of our sources has had his brush with fame: John Bradley’s case of the woman in Texas who shot her landlord was broadcast on Court TV. Getting this job. Still want the job? Here is the skinny on what it takes to get it. John Foote just hired two new lawyers to work in his DA office. He looked for people who, like Aristotle, wisely knew that they knew nothing. He won’t hire people who walk in thinking they know the ropes completely from the start. It’s a “real red flag,” he says. Personality types that work well in prosecution jobs are, in Foote’s opinion, people who are not necessarily combative, but who are confrontational and love a good competition. Foote looks for “natural hard workers,” who will put in long, focused hours for the office. Good candidates have a strong sense of right and wrong, and fairness. You also have to have some toughness. “This

make a lot of money. All our sources mentioned this, and none of them said it made them want to leave the job. The money for public sector legal work is actually better than it used to be. There are some programs run by law schools to give loan forgiveness to those who go into public defender or prosecution work. There is also a bill in the U.S. Senate (S. 1091) calling for an increase to federal loan relief given to public service attorneys. Currently, the bill has 20 cosponsors and is in committee. More advice. If you want to make a difference in people’s lives, then this could be a good job for you, says Scott Brumley. If you just want to send people to jail, you should find another gig. Prosecution work is “trial intense,” to put it mildly, says Scott Brumley. You will get trial experience once you start the job. However, if you can, first try theater. Brumley was a Theater minor in college, and it turned out that those skills were “absolutely invaluable” for his courtroom work. Theater teaches you stage presence, blocking, body position language use, and also a certain amount of bravery in front of crowds. If you can take a theater class, or join a community theater and get in a play at some point, either will aid your career. It helps to start this job young, says Kelly Clifford. Only two of the 100+ attorneys coming in to the Manhattan DA’s office with her had children. Sometimes assistant DAs had to work overnight shifts from midnight to 9:00 a.m., since the courts in New York City run 24hours a day. If you are in law school, intern as much as you can, take advocacy classes, and do any kind of trial practice you can find, she recommends.

After returning to New York, Clifford found a happy medium between law enforcement and private firm work. Currently, she is doing defense work for municipal police departments with Michael T. Clifford & Associates, a firm led by her father. Don’t believe everything you see on TV. “Our offices were not that nice,” says Kelly Clifford of the Manhattan DA offices portrayed on the TV show “Law and Order.” Plus, the television prosecutors always seem to get the bail they ask for, which never happened in reality, says Clifford. Lawyers coming out of real courts never look as coiffed as those on television, all our

work can be shocking, some of the things we see,” says Foote. But don’t go in there like Superman or Wonder Woman, ready to save the world. “True believers are a little dangerous in any profession,” says Foote. You need to have a balanced view to make good decisions. “Any trial lawyer has to have a little conceit,” says Newman Flanagan. A prosecutor must have the confidence to put his or her side forward to the judge and jury. Prosecutors need to be dependable and able to think quickly on their feet, says Flanagan. There are a lot of lawyers out there, says Flanagan, but just a small number are truly good trial lawyers. “There’s an art to it,” he says. And, like many artists, prosecutors do not

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