I D E N T I T Y F O R M AT I O N
|
51
more of what I was finding. She appreciated the time we spent talking and said that few people understand the emotional stress of her work. She told me about a fantasy that she tells only her woman colleagues because no one else would understand. She gets in a car wreck on her way to court when she has a particularly nasty case to try. She wants to be in a wreck that will totally get her out of the trial; she’ll be in the hospital for maybe a month. I told Becky about midcareer defender Jesse Madrigal’s fantasy about being punched out in court by her client. Becky comments, ‘‘Yeah, but that will only get you out of that particular case. It won’t get you out of all of your cases. You need an injury that’s significant enough to land you in the hospital.’’
DARLA WILSON
Like Becky, Darla Wilson is also young, white, and less experienced than the Abogadas in their office. As I walked into Darla Wilson’s office, I was struck by the fact that she was visibly pregnant. I have two children, so we immediately hit it off by talking about what it is like to be pregnant and to work, what childbirth is like, and about being a new mother. She was beaming. A huge prenatal calendar covered the wall behind her desk, a calendar made by one of her colleagues when he heard that Darla and her girlfriend were becoming parents. Large red Xs marked out the first six months, the stages of her gestation. The legal files on her desk represented anything but the celebration of life. Inside were stories of lives, and even loves, in a state of disarray—the victims usually women or children. Darla has been a public defender for seven years. By the very nature of her current calendar assignment she fit the profile of the woman defense attorney I had been hoping to interview, and this came out when I asked, ‘‘Have you ever struggled defending a particular client because you are a woman?’’ DW: Well, twice I’ve been on domestic violence calendars, both in municipal court and now in superior court . . . I’m on an early resolution assignment where I do sexual-assault cases, domesticviolence cases, and then, like, failure-to-pay-child-support cases. And sometimes I feel like it’s difficult dealing with the guys who continually beat up on their wives, but I really can’t—I mean for me to do my job—I really can’t get too lost in that, so I go back to the ‘‘well they’re entitled to representation too, there’s another