Emotional Trials: The Moral Dilemmas of Women Criminal Defense Attorneys

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2001 I interviewed male district attorneys who self-identify as men of color. Once again I utilized a snowball sample. By way of contacts in trial courts, again in central and northern California, I was introduced to and interviewed eight men. Again, I was searching for patterns in the interviews based on the logic of grounded theory.8 The men I interviewed ranged in age from thirty-one to fifty-three years (their mean age was forty-six). All identified as heterosexual, all but one was married, and four had children. As it turned out, they had been deputy district attorneys on average fourteen years (ranging from five to twenty-six years)—about the same as the women defense attorneys I interviewed. Their self-reported number of felony trials averaged about thirty—roughly three-quarters of the women defenders’. (The implication here might be that the women were overworked.) All of these men were deputy district attorneys at one point or another. Only two have since left the career, both to become judges—one in municipal court, the other in superior court. Once more I divided the men into three groups, according to their number of work years, strictly as a heuristic device to further understand their moral work: Carter Vernon and Darryl Franks fell into the early-career category (one to ten years); Louis Marks, Martin Tong, and Ned Williams into midcareer (eleven to fifteen years); and Ray Bryant, Stan Clifford, and Turner Anderson into the seasoned category (sixteen-plus years). While Martin Tong is Asian American, all of the rest are African Americans. While I will discuss all eight of these men in what follows, I will focus on the stories of four men—Carter, Louis, Stan, and Ray—to exemplify the different stages in the prosecutor’s career and the general experiences of the men I interviewed. Again, my approach was inductive. However, based on experience with the women defense attorneys, I had expected to find that these men’s stories would also reflect distinct strategies of emotion work that corresponded to their years in practice, shifting identities, and their ideological frameworks for judging themselves and others. This is not entirely what I found. At first I thought the difference was tied to gender and how much these men would open up. But these were not men who were reluctant to be interviewed, nor did they try to be overly macho with me. Louis Marks actually cried in front of me when he described the politics of his office. Ned Williams, who has been a judge for six years now, told me that when he was a trial attorney, he became severely emotionally upset before court:


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