Eric Dinnocenzo - The Tenant Lawyer Read Free

stacked against her.
    Although I took most of the eviction cases that came my way, I had over time tightened my standards for drug cases and now only took a slim percentage of them. After losing a few battles in court, I came to realize that it made little sense to put time and effort into a case that would have little chance of success—time that I could spend helping other tenants with better cases. Besides, there was often more to these cases than clients initially related to me, which made me even more wary about taking them on. More than once I had listened to a mother fervently profess her son’s innocence at our first meeting only to discover, once the case was underway, that the housing authority had convincing evidence of his extracurricular activities. To make matters worse, the guys who got arrested for the drug activity usually weren’t of much help. They rarely showed up at my office to prepare for trial, and when they testified in court they frequently made poor witnesses. Furthermore, if they had prior criminal records, as they often did, they were vulnerable to impeachment on cross-examination.
    So far Anna’s case looked like one I would reject. I figured I would probably help her fill out an Answer and Demand for Discovery, which would set up her defense to the case with the court and postpone her trial date for two weeks. Then I would give her some advice on how to represent herself in mediation and trial, and that would be it.
    When Anna and I said goodbye to one another in the lobby, she smiled, giving off a warm vibe, and all of a sudden I felt rather sorry for her. She hadn’t done anything wrong but was about to lose her affordable housing anyway.
     
    My clients were mainly single women with children who lived in the projects, for the most part Puerto Rican and Dominican. Through representing them I learned about the lifestyles of the men who were their sons and boyfriends and the fathers of their children. Many of the guys lived fast-paced lives, partying for days on end, driving around in unregistered vehicles, and fathering children with different women. Domestic violence was not uncommon. One case from about two years ago, shortly after I started working at legal services, always stuck with me. I was defending a Latino couple in their early-twenties who were accused of fighting with each other late at night and causing a lot of noise and disturbance at their apartment building. They both denied the allegations and maintained that the complaints were manufactured by neighbors who disliked them due to a disagreement over a parking spot. On one occasion, I met alone with the girl, who confided in me tearfully that the boyfriend would beat her when he got drunk at night. I was shocked by what she told me, but nodded with understanding, and then advised her to report him to the police and seek domestic violence counseling.
    Right after she left my office, it dawned on me that I had made a mistake from a professional standpoint. I had given her advice that was harmful to another one of my clients—her boyfriend—creating a clear conflict of interest. Even if I hadn’t done that, I still had a conflict between one client, the girl, who had basically admitted that the allegations in the case were true, and another client, the guy, who had previously denied them to me. I quickly came to the conclusion that I had no choice but to withdraw from the case.
    Some days later, I stood in front of Judge McCarthy and asked for permission to withdraw, fully aware that without representation the girl would probably get evicted and end up homeless. After the judge granted my request, I started to walk out of the courtroom and noticed the girl looking at me with utter helplessness in her eyes. I absorbed her look for a few seconds, then turned away and kept walking. Her look haunted me for days afterward.
    Many of my female clients didn’t know where their boyfriends were at any given time. They were like