Chasing Gideon Read Free Page B

in October 2001, she had been working as a Spokane County public defender since 1998 (with earlier stints as a public defender in western Washington and then Idaho). At thirty-three, she was the mother of a one-year-old and the wife of a prominent federal public defender, Roger Peven.
    She never intended to be a public defender—or even a lawyer for that matter. The way she describes it, she was a rolling stone who washed up on the shores of a public defender’s office in western Washington and discovered that “these were her people” and she loved the work. Born and raised in Texas, she went to the University of Texas School of Law because she couldn’t think of anything better to do after college.
    She didn’t love it. And, after interning one summer for Texaco’s legal department, she liked it even less. She decided to continue with law school since she’d already attended for a year. But since she had no intention of ever practicing law, she didn’t bother enrolling in any practical courses. Instead, she took an eclectic assortment of classes on topics that interested her, like Ethics, Women and the Law, and Maritime Law. (Huneke’s experience is fairly typical; a 2008 study by the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Educationreported that only 2 percent of law schools require practical clinical training for students.) 10
    Then, in 1993, a year after she graduated from law school, she found herself unemployed, broke, and struggling after following a love interest to Washington State. “I needed money,” she recalls today, and a slight smile plays around her lips as she describes a newspaper ad that she answered for a public defender. She showed up for her interview and walked into the office’s chaotic reception area. One client snoozed on a chair; the receptionist was AWOL; a basket of condoms sat on the front desk where there might ordinarily be, say, a bowl of mints. Down the hall, a disturbed and disheveled client with his hair in Einstein-like disarray stormed around ranting at the top of his lungs: “Fuck those fucking fucks!”
    Huneke took a seat in the lobby and watched, bemused, as drama unfolded all around her. Eventually, someone called her name and led her into a back office. Behind the desk waiting to interview her was the “disturbed” man—not a client at all, but the director of the agency.
    He grilled Huneke, asking her everything from philosophical questions to hypotheticals about trial decisions, then offered her the job. Afterwards, he took her on a tour of the building, introducing her to her colleagues in the misdemeanors department where he told her she would start out. This was a Thursday and one of the attorneys, shaking her hand, joked that he had three trials all starting on Monday. Might she be persuaded to take one? She blithely agreed.
    He wasn’t joking.
    He came by her cubicle the next day with a folder that he plopped on her desk. He explained that this was a DUI case. But Huneke, fresh out of law school, had never tried a case before. “I had never even watched a trial,” she says, “unless you count TV.” But they seriously expected to send her into court on Monday. So she went. “The first trial I ever watched was myself doing it,” she says.
    Huneke spins a good yarn—a useful trait for a trial lawyer, and one she has clearly honed over the years as she built complex narratives to sell her clients’ perspectives in court. There are the facts, and then there are the facts-woven-into-story, and Huneke clearlyunderstands the superior power of the latter. Her life, too, as she spins it, is a series of cautionary tales and comeuppances with herself as the hapless, accidental hero forced into serious reckoning by the end. Her first trial falls in this tradition.
    â€œAt the time, I thought what you read in a police report was true,” she begins. “I don’t think that