In My Dark Dreams Read Free

demographics have changed. Los Angeles is more and more Latino. A little over a decade ago, Tom Bradley, a black ex-cop, was the mayor, and he ruled with an iron fist. Now our mayor is Mexican American, and the power has shifted from black to brown. There are more Latinos in the state prisons and jails than blacks, and the wars between the black and brown gangs, both in and out of jail, get worse every year.
    “Gotta get some brothers on the jury,” Reggie instructs me. He actually raises a finger to make his point, as if I don’t know what he means. “Not sisters. They be church women, too likely. A jury of my peers. Is that too much to ask for?” he asks rhetorically.
    “I’ll do my best,” I tell him again. Which will be to persuade him to take the plea before the trial starts. I don’t have much time left to change his mind.
    I’m ready to leave—I have a ton of other cases to deal with today. “Think about that offer,” I throw at him as my parting shot. “You could do a lot worse.”
    “I’ll think about it,” he says by rote. “You gonna dress up nice?”
    “What?”
    “What you gonna be wearing in the courtroom,” he says patiently, as if he has to explain the basic facts of life to me. “Nice skirt and blouse. Stockings, quality shoes. Not this bag-lady shit you see some of them lesbian female lawyers wearing.” He tosses his head as if he has lice, which he might. I’ll remind him to take a shower and shampoo the night before we go to court. Whether his keepers will let him is anyone’s guess, it’s always chaotic in this place, and screwing prisoners over is considered great sport.
    “I might not have no money,” he says defensively, “but I want the jury to see that my lawyer has class. So they know I have class,” he declares, sitting up straight in his plastic chair.
    If we weren’t separated by the thick Plexiglas wall, I’d slap this moron upside his head. The last thing a lawyer wants, especially a woman lawyer, is to present a less-than-dignified image to a jury.
    “I won’t embarrass you,” I tell him coolly. I jam his file into my bag—this session is over, mercifully. “Think about that offer,” I warn him again. “Pride goeth before a fall.”
    Reggie stares at me, slack-jawed and uncomprehending, as I stand up. The deputy who escorted him down here immediately hoists him out of his chair and begins shuffling him back to his cell before I’ve taken two steps toward the door on my side. I don’t look back, but I can feel Reggie staring at me as I retreat.
    The rest of my morning is spent jumping from one courtroom, lobby, and cubicle to another: conferences with prosecutors and judges, setting future trial dates, pretrial hearings with other clients (unlike Reggie, they can read the writing on the wall and will plead out), general court-calendar stuff. There are dozens of courthouses scattered all over Los Angeles County. I work in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, on Temple Street in downtown L.A., which was named after the first woman admitted to the bar in California and a founder of the modern public defender system, back in the nineteenth century; she is a role model for all those women, like me, who have followed in her footsteps. It is the central office, and the largest. The courtrooms, officially known as departments, are spread out among several floors of the twenty-one-story building, which is also where our main offices—those of the public defenders as well as the main offices of the district attorneys—are located. Just as the central jail houses more prisoners than any other in the country, this building has one of the largest collections of courthouses. We’re Los Angeles—everything we do is supersized.
    The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s office is the oldest and largest public defender’s office in the world. We have over 1,000 employees: 650 lawyers, 80 investigators, 50 paralegals, 20 psychiatric social workers, a