SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Beat the Prosecution, presented by Northern Virginia criminal defense and DUI lawyer Jonathan Katz, where we are here to regularly present you information and ideas for beating your prosecution as best as possible. Nothing on any of our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or for individuals who have paid for a consultation. And now for your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_03 0:31

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz at Beat the Prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense law in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. I tell it to you repeatedly, and I'm really telling it to you now. I'm having a lot of trouble controlling my excitement over today's uh guest, Sujata Balliga. Well, how long have I been trying to have her on as a guest? Probably for over a year. She's that popular. This is the first day we've ever talked with each other. We've emailed with each other. I think I first heard about her probably about through the Lore's Mindfulness movement. And then I uh, you know, there are various derivations of that, the contempt with the lore's movement. And she is a leader in restorative justice. And you know what? A lot of prosecutors think they know what restorative justice is, but they try shoehorning things. But we're gonna deal with a lot more than that. And let me tell you something. I don't tear up too easily, but in preparation for today's talk, I uh listened to Sujata speaking a few years ago at the Kroc Institute. She was amazing. And then I'm about to tear up right now uh again. Linked on her website, sujahatabaligaliga.com, is a five-minute talk where she's talking about this man who, I guess, stole someone's car, vandalized someone's car, and the woman wasn't gonna put up with it at all. $4,000 damage to her car. And what solved it? She said she let him paint Tinkerbell for her when she found out he was an artist. I don't like going talking, talking, talking. I want the story to tell itself. Sue Jatha, please introduce yourself, and of course, we're gonna include your website, your program, and we're gonna do that quiet sit at some point, at any point you decide.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Thank you so much for having me on the show, and thank you for your patience in my being able to do this. Um, you know, a part of what delayed it, as you know, was that I had an injury in June, and uh, and so that is why I wear these groovy glasses. I am now visually impaired, but I am managing. Uh, I like to say I'm trying to rock rock bottom as I'm finding my way out of this new way of living in the world. Um, but just a little bit about me. I am uh in Berkeley, California, also known as Alone Land. Um, and I am and I am really uh just more than anything else, I try to be a good person in the world. I am a parent of a 19-year-old uh spouse of 26 years uh partly. I'm gonna interrupt.

SPEAKER_03 3:06

My son's 19.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

Oh, really? Same, one child.

SPEAKER_03 3:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Twinsies. Um, so um, and yeah, I'm um worked for decades in the field of restorative justice. I feel really grateful to have learned uh from people all over the world, Mennonites uh who really coined the term restorative justice, like Howard Zare. Um and also Maori um family group conferencing, I've learned uh from so many wonderful people, uh, both spending some time in Aotearoa, New Zealand, also here in the States, uh, iterations that have arrived here. Uh, and uh Navajo Peacemaking from uh Robert Yazi, former Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation. I mean, I've just been so like everything I do is an amalgam, is a synthesis of what has been taught to me by so many teachers, and so for that I feel incredibly grateful. Um and uh yeah, so my work is both in the field of restorative justice primarily these days, in the context of intimate partner and sexual violence, thinking about how can we bring restorative justice to the communities and families who need it, particularly those folks who are not interested in engaging with the criminal legal system at all, or if they are already engaged in it, working with it in a way as a survivor myself of sexual harm as a child by my father. Uh, I really wish that there had been something different for me. And so um, and so that I really everything I do and try to build in the world is really about uh be who you needed when you were younger, right? Like how do we make things on offer that we know in our in our bones and our guts and our own life stories that we needed. And so that's a part of of what I do. Mostly I'm a mindfulness instructor these days, too, and doing various workshops to help us keep on keeping on in these impossible times. Um, so those are that's that's the high-level overview.

SPEAKER_03 4:59

Well, my my challenge is growing up pale in comparison to what you uh uh endured, suffered, or we call it. Uh, what I wanted to mention to you is, you know, some potential clients and clients ask me, why do you do criminal defense? I say it goes back to Ms. Smith at the at the very least. She had a different name, but she probably passed away, so she can't defend herself. So in fourth grade, Ms. Smith prevented me from being in the holiday concert. I had just started uh playing trumpet three month three months before, and I did so well that Mr. Fink, hardly the pushover to put someone on the ensemble, put me on the ensemble to play Greensleeves, and I was positive that someone forgot to call me up to practice with the ensemble. So when Ms. Smith said you can't go down until you got called, of course, I went down myself anyway. The auditorium was pitch black. When I came back up, Ms. Smith said, Go to the principal's office. You are not going to be in the concert. Uh, that wasn't restorative justice. I would have offered just uh, can I just like sweep the hallways or whatever, tell some jokes to kids in the hospital? So that alone was enough. And if and if that was enough, so I got in trouble there for something I did, but then the next year, Ms. Smith stops me in the hallway when I'm in fifth grade, and she says, What were you doing playing at the condos uh or the garden apartments across the street last week where I'd never been before? And I said, So, you know, the venom was there forever. Ms. Smith, what makes you say I was doing that? And she said, Well, there was a report of a boy in brown hair, which I had at the time, and a blue blue jacket doing that. I said, You just described half the boys in the school. That was my first time advocating for myself, and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

Well, well, I'm glad you stuck with it. Yeah, and my heart aches for baby John being accused of things that he did not do, or even being mishandled when he, you know, I don't know, if violated a minor rule. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:58

If she was still alive, I would thank her for sending me out the criminal defense path.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Right, right. And that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful view. It's harder to do with some of the heavier things, but ultimately I think it's we're we're capable of saying thank you even to some of the worst things that have happened to us. So, because they send us where we are. I am uh strangely, I mean, I wish it weren't so that I'm living with this visual situation, but um, it's changed my life in ways that maybe I'm living more the way I always should have been. I'm just sitting with that, sitting with those thoughts.

SPEAKER_03 7:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 7:31

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:33

Is this the time for some silence or later?

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Let's do that. Let's do it right now. Let's take a little moment to get ourselves grounded. Um, if you're sitting in a chair as you're listening to this, uh and you want to, you know, have your feet on the floor, just notice that your feet are connected to the floor, which is in some way or another, even if you're many stories above the earth right now, ultimately connected to the earth. Allow yourself to feel grounded in that way. If you're sitting cross-legged, you might want to notice your bottom is in contact with your cushion or your chair. Just notice points of contact. Allow your shoulders to roll back a little bit, your spine to straighten up just gently. Not in any way that's causing any physical difficulty for you. And the last tiny adjustment before we do this very brief meditation, and even with the brief meditations, it's nice to add a moment of motivation to your intention for your brief moment of being with your breath. And in the present moment, it's nice to think I'm doing this to be calmer, more in peace. Less encumbered. Not just for myself. You might notice your belly rising and falling. Thank you. What a perfect way to start a conversation. Thanks for suggesting it.

SPEAKER_03 10:43

I have been trying to I intellectually I understand it. From a human level, I'm still trying to figure it out. You say that you love everybody, including that person. At first, I was thinking maybe you were talking about Donald Trump. No, you were talking about that one person that a person didn't think that they could love. How can you do that? How could I love Hitler, for instance? And how could you love your abuser? And how did you become a survivor? And how do you call it being a survivor rather than a victim?

SPEAKER_02 11:18

Hmm, that was a lot of questions there, John. Let's let's break them down. Maybe we should go in a different order. How did I, how did I come to, yeah, how did I come to it? I mean, the high, the again, the high-level overview, because I know we have a lot of juicy stuff we want to talk about today, is that I was a victim advocate and I'd applied to law school with the thought of becoming a prosecutor, because in my three years of victim advocacy between college and law school, and then I did a lot of victim advocacy stuff during during college as well. Um, I felt I didn't have any power. And I thought, I'm gonna be a lawyer, and then I'll have all the power to fix everything. And uh, you know how that goes. But um uh the year before I started law school, I was living in India and I was trying to help my then boyfriend with some work he was doing to uh protect uh young children from trafficking um into you know sexual slavery in Mumbai. And I had a complete breakdown, and it was very clear to me that I had done an insufficient amount of work on my own um uh childhood uh traumas, uh, both what I was experiencing in the home and also uh the injustices I felt in in school. Um and uh growing up in you know a rural part of Pennsylvania, Appalachia, adjacent, uh, only kid of color in my school, uh, you know, for much of my schooling. And it was just really um uh I I was I was carrying a lot that I hadn't sorted, and it came out uh in in really self-damaging ways. And so I went off backpacking to try to sort myself or maybe not sort myself and just wander away and never be found. Uh and in the process of that, through a crazy course of events, I got um advice from a Tibetan family that had sort of taken me in in Dharamshtala, which is where I landed in my journeys, um, to write a note to the Dalai Lama. And I was too ashamed really to talk about what I had lived through. So I just wrote the sentence, I wrote a few sentences, but one was, anger is killing me, but it motivates my work. How do you work on a on behalf of abused and oppressed people without anger as the motivating force, especially when it's personal, right? I think was in the letter too, or or at least was in my heart. Like, I'm sorry, you lost your nation, a sixth of your population was murdered, all your monasteries were razed, your nunneries, everything gone, and you've been exiled. And uh, hello, how are you not in a constant seething ball of rage? Help me. And I was pretty sick at the time, migraines, stomach problems, all kinds of mess. Um and so anyway, through the kindness of his holiness's private secretary back in the day, Tensenki Chi Tetong, uh read my note. Uh I I got invited into his office for a meeting. Uh, and he said, We're really moved by your letter. Would you like to meet the Dalai Lama next week? I was like, What? What are you what are the words? What are you saying? Crazy. That's crazy talk. I'm like a everyday marijuana-smoking disaster girl, like wrecked, occasionally contemplating suicide, like getting law school acceptance letters. I want to lock everybody on the planet up, and at the same time, I don't believe in locking people up. I'm a mess. Like, well, I don't know that the Dalama needs to give me an hour of his time. But I got an hour of Dalama's time. It was the most amazing hour of my life. Um, I have had a couple uh other opportunities to spend time with him since then. It continues to be, you know, um, true is my moral compass, uh, reminds me what my North Star is every time. It's pretty amazing. And um anyway, in that first audience, his holiness uh really uh more than anything was just incredibly generous with my rage. I was raging at him, I was raging at everything. And his holiness was incredibly compassionate and understanding about the source of my rage and um the sources of my rage and actually honored it and was and and at one point asked me, Do you feel you've been angry long enough? You're asking me for a forgiveness formula, but do you do has this thing run its course really? Like, how's this working out for you? Like, you need to actually answer that honestly. And it was through my time with him that I did realize that anger had diminishing returns on my life. I was destroying all my relationships, I was in constant misery. Um, and I was not as effective in the work I wanted to be doing in the world. So through his kind guidance, um he he gave me some advice um after I pressed and pressed him. And um, yeah, the first advice was he said, your your rage is your um is your mind out of your own control. And so the first thing you want to do is to learn how to reign in your mind.

SPEAKER_03 15:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 15:59

And the answer to that is meditation. Pretty simple. Yes, just meditate. It's pretty clear. Meditate. So um he didn't tell me what kind of meditation, he didn't, right? Um, the second piece of advice he gave me was he said, um, open your heart to your enemies without excusing their behavior, consider their humanity, their position, and their needs. And I laughed at him. I laughed in the bottle on his face. I was like, I'm a law school to be a prosecutor. Like, I'm not aligning myself with nobody you're talking about. He leans over and he pats my knee. He's like, okay, okay, you just meditate. Then you just crazy girl. You just roll the meditation part. So I proceeded to go off and sit at 10-day silent retreat, Vapashna, Goenka G style, the dhamma.org. Um, I, at the end of which, after nine days of watching your breath and doing the body scanning and learning to get closer and closer to a more subtle and subtle understanding of the nature of change within the framework of your own body, I started to see, I really not just saw, but felt that every single cell in my body was not the cells that existed back when these traumas happened to me, right? And I also then started to just see that everything was in the nature of change. And uh I didn't need to be this fixed person, fixed, fixed, fixed person, clinging to my rage, identifying with this rage as the source of anything good I want to do in the world. And then last day they taught methabhavana practice, which is loving-kindness, and spontaneously in the middle of that practice, I had a flashback of my father abusing me, and I was able to stay in the state of metha bhavana. And as he approached me to abuse me, the flea free flow of just a deeper understanding of the nature of change sort of left my body and went into his hands, and he sort of dissolved into light.

SPEAKER_03 17:53

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 17:54

Yeah. So then after that, I don't want to like I I don't I don't talk about that a lot sometimes because I feel like it like sets Vipassana up to be like this like miracle thing where the truth is is that I had been working on my compassion in other ways for years, right? When I was 20, I lived in Kolkata for a summer and I worked at you know missionaries of charity, like helping people with leprosy die of dignity, like with dignity, right? Like I just, I just I I've been building that muscle. It wasn't like this, you know, but when it was time to let it go, I was able to see that my father, I often prayed as a child that I would, that he would stop doing what he was doing to both of us. I knew that he was miserable as well. Right? And so it was easier, I think, in some regards. So people say, how can you forgive your father as your father? And I was like, well, in some ways, you know, I could see his humanity as well. And I mean, I spent a lot of time with a whole lot of child sexual abuse survivors, and everybody's and incest survivors and not everyone's abuser um had redeeming qualities, and my father had many, um, which really now today in my mind overshadow uh, you know, the number of times that he caused me harm. So, um, and the and the impact is not lasting in that regard. So, I mean, that kind of bleeds into how do you call yourself a survivor? I don't even really call myself that anymore. I've been really moved uh by what I've learned a lot about indigenous languages that are entirely noun-based, based in nouns. So uh uh Justice Yazi talks about how in Navajo the word for offender is acting as if you have no relations. So when you speak without nouns, then nothing is fixed in time, right? Like Robin Walkimmerer writes about this in Breeding Sweetgrass. Wikwegama is a verb that means to be a bay. Because that water will be a stream and a river and mist. And so we're not objectifying things and leaving them fixed in time when we see things as verbs, right? So um Eduardo Duran talks about how instead of saying, here's a woman right sitting here, womaning is happening. So then, like, I mean, so then if I realize that I'm actually a man, like there's not all of these questions about leaving people in fixed categories. And so even saying the word survivor in a sense identifies me with the worst things that ever happened to me. For a while I was saying I was a transcender, but then people kept thinking I was saying I was transgender, and then I would have to correct that, you know. Um and so, but I have a friend who was in a wheelchair. Uh, I had a friend who was in a wheelchair because her boyfriend had run over her. And I was asking her about all these words one day. Um, and she said, I said, Do you want to be called like if I write about you someday or I talk about you someday, like, how do you want me to call you that survivor victim? And she said to me, she was holding a cup of tea, and she was looking at me and she was like, Sujata. I just think of myself as an experiencer. Yes, I experienced him running me over with that car. And I am experiencing this cup of tea with you right now.

SPEAKER_03 21:15

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 21:17

Woo lordy.

SPEAKER_03 21:20

Yes. And so not for anyone to think that I think that in my lifetime I could ever love Hitler unless you have a different definition of it.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

But I may, and that might help.

SPEAKER_03 21:30

Calligraphy behind me, that's by uh my teacher Jun Yasuda, who lives three miles from Leah Pennemann, who you know, as I understand, over in the Grafton Peace pagoda. So I said to Jun-son, I said, Jun son, what would you do if you lived in the 1940s and met Hitler? I'm sure it would have been different than what I would have done, which would have been to shoot him dead and ask questions later. And she said, You know, Johnson, everyone has uh more than one part of their personality. For instance, he was an artist, he said, I would have. Said to him, she said, What makes you say so angry? Maybe he needed a massage. And I I I I didn't say to her, you know, since you're not white, you know, maybe Hitler would have just thought of murdering you at the time. But really, so how how do you define love to be able to say that you love everybody? I I can't imagine loving Hitler.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

Understood. And thank you so much for your honesty. Really, like I don't mean that as like a thing you say when people say hard stuff. But I really it's beautiful when people are honest, you know, to me. I love that. And um my definition of happiness is is is very both this definition. May you be happy. I mean, my definition of love, rather, is may you be happy. May you be happy. May you be happy. And so when I think about Hitler, the dude was not happy. Had he been happy, he would have done none of the things he did. I am very, very clear about that. You can't be happy and kill people. You you can feel some sort of dissatisfaction, you can feel things that you might be misunderstanding as happiness. But happiness, really the freedom from any kind of suffering. You can't be killing people if you're happy. So if Hitler were happy, if Hitler had been happy, if anyone had loved Trump properly when he was a child, I'm sorry. I don't even want to think about what kind of childhood that man had. Clearly worse than mine. In whatever way it was worse for him. And I do not say this to make excuses, right? I mean, as a defense attorney, you understand mitigation, right? Why is it impossible for us to apply mitigation across the board? For me, the worse my client was, the clearer it was going to be to find mitigation on this thing.

SPEAKER_03 24:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

The crazier the shit you do. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast?

SPEAKER_03 24:10

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 24:12

The crazier the shit you do, the more obvious either your history of trauma or your head injury, or something else ain't right since you're born. Right? It's so clear. It's the easiest for defense attorneys. So I would encourage you for all the people that it's hard for you to love to be a little bit of a mitigation specialist for a minute for them and see what you would do if you had to defend him. I mean, we're really blessed as defense attorneys in this way.

SPEAKER_03 24:47

I can do that. And with you having the mate the prayer of loving kindness, I understand that. Then you and I are just defining love differently, and I'll uh I'll accept that.

SPEAKER_02 24:57

Yeah, I mean, I don't mean it as like uh for me, the question is always at what distance do I need to keep you in order to love you unconditionally?

SPEAKER_03 25:06

Well, like with Bodhisattva never despised, who would often stand far away from people and bowing them at them and saying, I bow at your Buddha nature, but I see that uh dagger in your hand, I'm not gonna let that dagger get near me.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

I would like to point out that the Dalai Lama is not living in Tibet.

SPEAKER_03 25:23

Well, we know. We know.

SPEAKER_02 25:24

He left. He left. Why? In part for his own safety, right? Like it doesn't mean he has to hate anybody to be like, I need to be safe from that. And so for me, and that doesn't even mean, and while I am an abolitionist, generally speaking, not generally speaking, there are some folks that are not like they there needs to be some level of community containment of certain people's behaviors. And that too can come from a place of love.

SPEAKER_03 25:54

And now I know at some point you're taking a break at 12:30. I don't know if we reach that point. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

Just a 30 second, I have to just take this silly little pill. Thank you for reminding me. I have to take my little all my drugs one second.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Great.

SPEAKER_03 26:17

Okay, so another way in which I think my difficulty pales in comparison to you. So I grew up in a town where I guess maybe about uh uh 20% of the students were Jewish, as am I, you know, Jewish into Buddhism. Wow, so much in so much overlap between Judaism and Buddhism, and a lot of a lot of the Buddhist leaders grew up Jewish, but nonetheless, uh and and you know, a lot different from you being the only person of color. Not only that, but growing up in a rural town, at least I grew up within about a 70-minute train ride of Manhattan. Where was this you grew up in in Pennsylvania? And what made your parents decide to settle somewhere where where you would be isolated like that as a person of color?

SPEAKER_02 27:04

That's a really that's a really um interesting uh journey that my father was on. I think so. He came in the 50s, actually, during the Chinese Exclusion Act. And I think that he they they didn't really know what to do with Indians at that time. Like, what were we racially? Like one of the most regular questions asked of him was, what are you? And he would say, human, and you. And so, but um, so he was doing his PhD in in Illinois and uh in southern Illinois and was really beloved by the community there. And so he got this notion that like it's like some sort of Gandhian idea of like the agrarian peaceful life. And he had been in New York for some time um working on a project with the UN, and there was an incredible spate of anti-Indian violence. And he had just had an arranged marriage, and his wife and his and you baby, my sister, were in India, and he talked a lot in later years about this thing that was called the Dotbusters. They were like this like little neo-Nazi group that was running around shooting Indian women. And um it was uh he was like, I'm not taking my wife anywhere near that city. And so he had some notion that a rural place would be the safer place for us. And so he got a job at a small teachers' college, uh, then called Shippensburg Teachers College uh in rural Pennsylvania. It was a tiny, it was a tiny little thing and um, you know, pretty close to the Mason Dixon line. Um, and he um he thought it would be, you know, I think he thought that he would have the same kind of experience he had in southern Illinois. I think he just sort of locked up with a bunch of really lovely families uh when he came for his PhD and a lot of curiosity and open-mindedness that he'd experienced there that was not as forthcoming in the town that we moved to. There were a handful of people, I think, who uh were very kind to us. And um there was one particularly like Republican family that really like we would go to there. We spent every Thursday night with them, and there was a lot of heated debate from a place of love that was really good. But um socially for me, I was very, very isolated through elementary school. I was the only kid of color in my school. I got beat up a lot. Uh, I I kind of got tortured a bit, and I was very susceptible to bullying. I was a very sensitive kid, um, in part, I think, because of the abuse going on in my home. Um, and also because um, I don't know. I don't I I've been rejecting the word sensitive lately and using the word attuned. I was very attuned to what is kind and good versus what doesn't feel right. And so that is that was not great. That was really not great.

SPEAKER_03 29:44

Well, now this isn't perfectly akin to what I'm gonna say. So you dealt with all these struggles, uh none of which I dealt with. And then I'm reminded of Chiang Man Chang, who developed my form of Tai Chi Chuan. He brought it over to the uh West in the 1960s. And you know, there's this talk about some that uh Chiang Man Chang grew up a very cultivated man, he was a master of the five excellent Chinese excellences, uh, Chinese medicine, uh, learned Tai Chi from a man named Yuan Chang Fu, I think if I'm pronouncing it, you know, Yang Chang Fu if I'm pronouncing it correctly, uh, and uh uh Chinese uh painting, calligraphy, poetry. So he was very cultured, but the man from whom he learned Tai Chi, Yang Chiang Fu, he was more of uh uh just really a street guy or whatever. But what Chiang Man Chang or one of his students said with Tai Chi Chuan, which I practice every day, you are in the place you are. So am I not correct that, of course, it's not a prerequisite to uh uh uh to reach enlightenment or whatever we call it, to have had to have a uh a miserable childhood and it's uh nor required to be the other. You you start from the place you're at. Am I correct about this?

SPEAKER_02 31:00

I don't know that we have any choice. I mean, if I could start from some other place, I surely would. Would I have opted for a different place to start? Sure. What option? What option have we?

SPEAKER_03 31:15

Yeah, you know, uh there's there's this Laura, I won't name her name, uh, so now we've uh narrowed it down to it's a woman who's had so many struggles, and I said to her, Wow, you've had all these struggles, and at least on a professional basis, you're doing so great. So with you, academically you did great. You went to was it UPenn undergrad and Harvard Law School, or was it?

SPEAKER_02 31:34

The other way. Yeah, the reverse. Harvard Undergrad UPenn Law.

SPEAKER_03 31:37

You could have written your own ticket in so many ways. You did write the ticket you wanted. So, what made you decide on this path with restorative just and all this other stuff rather than uh, you know, doing stuff that would make you seven figures now and and all that other stuff?

SPEAKER_04 31:52

Hmm.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

Maybe you are making seven figures from the I'm not I'm not gonna ask that.

SPEAKER_02 31:57

No, I have that is the one area in my life in which I have not done as well as I might. Um but yeah, it was always um I don't do well fitting in where I don't fit in. It's never been, it's never been my strength. You know, in high school, uh I was always wearing some some Indian clothes, but also like shaving half my head and dyeing the other half blue. I mean, I just was never, I don't, I don't, I don't rein it in in a way that allows me to be a part of institutions that um uh would be better remunerated. I can say that. You know, I I bombed, I I did do a couple, like recruiting at law school. There was this moment where they were trying to figure out how to give people like a half public interest, half law firm kind of job. And I was like, let me do that and just get rid of my student debt.

SPEAKER_04 32:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:50

And uh I bombed all of those interviews. I mean, they'd ask me questions and I'd answer honestly, and they'd be like, Well, the most meaningful thing I've done is, you know, backpacking by myself and losing myself and finding myself. And they'd be like, um, you know, or what do you like? To be like, What kind of travel do you like? Because everybody wants to talk about their like fancy big like, and I would be like, Yeah. So the summer I spent living in a slum in Kolkata, you know, and like the you know, and it's on my resume. Like Missionaries of Charity is on my was on my resume back then, and they'd ask me, like, what was that? And I was like, Yeah. And I just I I I never got any of those jobs if and they weren't for me, you know. And so, um, might it have been wise to go to a firm for a couple of years and not have carried my law school debt until I was 48? Yes, that would have been people asked me what I I I received an award a a few years, five years ago, six years ago, and and it was, you know, no strings attached, and people always ask me, what'd you do with it? And I said, I paid off my student debt. It's not very glamorous. I, you know, started earnestly putting money in retirement for reels when I was 48. Oh my god, ridiculous. But um, we'll see how it goes. And the universe has been very kind to me, it has provided exactly what's been needed, and so so we'll see. We'll see. Um, but uh yeah, I think for me, I don't, I've just I can't not be me, and that has not fit very well in certain professional settings.

SPEAKER_03 34:23

So uh to what extent was it that meeting with the Dalai Lama that turned you around to not be a prosecutor, to become a public defender, Laura? And I'm interested in knowing about your public defender work.

SPEAKER_02 34:34

My public defender work was pretty basic, right? I was at the New Mexico Public Defender Department where I was mostly in the appellate division, but I did a few trials. Um I sat second chair on a on trials where things were messy, particularly in sexual harm and intimate partner violence and child sexual abuse. I mean, I was a very out survivor and I was on the board of the rape crisis center in Santa Fe at the same time that I was a public defender. And so I felt like I had a set of skills that would make me really good at crafting a thoughtful cross-examination, particularly of child witnesses, that would not, you know, I just saw too many defense attorneys walk into court and like just berate children and and and torture children. And and it made juries hate them, right? Like, yeah, that's not the way to go. And so I would, I just I felt like I could bring some wisdom to how we might do this in a way that would would not make juries want to convict our clients because the lawyers are being assholes. So um, and you know, we we hadn't put a lot of thought into how to do that well when I was a baby lawyer and I was starting this work. Um, but so I did that for a while. And then um I when I applied to law school, I mean when I applied for clerkships, I also looked to see at that time there were very, very few, and there still aren't enough, people on the federal bench who were public defenders. And so I only applied to judges who had been public defenders.

SPEAKER_03 35:57

And so now we have a Supreme Court justice who's a former public defender lawyer.

SPEAKER_02 36:01

Pretty amazing. So um, but also, yeah, so that so that was a part of it. And then and then I moved to New York and I worked for the Office of the Appellate Defender. Um, OAD is a great place to really learn how to really do excellent appellate advocacy. Um, and so less trial work, more, more appellate work, but um you know, I think that I got some really wonderful exposure, particularly through law school. I worked for Larry Krasner uh when he was just uh uh a civil rights criminal defense lawyer. I worked uh for David Rudowski. Um and um yeah, those experiences were amazing. I spent a summer at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and so I got to really see what good mitigation work looked like getting ready for a capital trial. Steve Bright? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:49

Steve's great.

SPEAKER_02 36:50

Steve's amazing. Yeah. So I I had incredible defense uh related experiences. Um and I feel really grateful for every minute I spent doing that work. I'm glad I did it with you.

SPEAKER_03 37:03

Let me not lose out about then what you said about uh the the wrong approach and the right approach to dealing with uh uh child witnesses, alleged child victims. Uh what was was the approach you took, and to what extent did you teach this approach to other lawyers?

SPEAKER_02 37:20

You know, I was I was again a baby lawyer and just starting to think this stuff through, but it was really about like the way in which people try to trap folks into admitting that they don't remember properly, or they it just there's gotta be a gentler way to do it, right? Well, could it have been a different way, or what if this had happened and you sure you remembered it properly? It more was a matter of tone and track.

SPEAKER_03 37:47

Okay. Don't freeze up on me. Okay, I know you're gonna come back. Uh you're back. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

Oh, I'm sorry. We lost me for a second. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, sorry about that.

SPEAKER_03 38:01

Okay, internet, someone's internet connection is unstable. Okay, we're good now. Uh I heard you say something like the the the Laura's, I guess, berating the children about not remembering things. And your approach is or would be what?

SPEAKER_02 38:13

No, to treat the child like a child. Like how do you talk to a kid? You know, you come down to their level and you kind of match their tone, and you, you know, naturally people's voices go up a little and they talk in a gentler way when you're talking to a baby, right? And so it really was less of a question of whether or not you still wanted to undermine um, you know, or get at a hole in a child's memory, or uh try to show that there might have been something else that happened. All of that is still your job as a defense attorney, right? But how do you approach this child?

SPEAKER_03 38:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 38:49

Was really the bigger question. Um in my experience, I think sometimes I think a lot of defense attorneys, I think a lot of everybody carries a lot of their own childhood trauma.

SPEAKER_04 39:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 39:03

And I think that sometimes we don't want to remember our own traumas and that we we it can't be true what happened to us. And so we come at other people when we're cross-examining them, um, sort of with anger at our own victimhood.

SPEAKER_04 39:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

And I and I I worry about that. Um, and I just think it's a fundamental flaw with the entire system, you know, that we have this dualistic binary view. I don't know anyone who's caused harm um that um wasn't severely harmed themselves. And I don't know, I know like three people uh who have never caused harm.

SPEAKER_03 39:43

You know, three people in your whole life who've never caused anyone harm?

SPEAKER_02 39:46

Yeah, I mean all the rest of us are harming people all the time.

SPEAKER_03 39:49

And people who aren't even harm and these three people don't even harm them haven't even harmed themselves.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

I have a hard time believing that TikNot Han fully Nasdalai Lama. Okay, right, like, yeah, and there's a couple nuns that I've met who nobody knows who are like I literally think that they're like secret Buddhas wandering around the earth. I've literally never seen them say or do anything.

SPEAKER_03 40:14

Okay, so I've I've been in the presence of Tiknat Han in 2011. He seemed like one of the most holiest beings I've ever ever been in the presence of. Around the same year, uh the Dalai Lama was talking uh at American University. And in fact, my my singing ball I've got I bought out on the street after I heard him uh over there. And uh I want to know who these nuns are, but if you're willing to name them.

SPEAKER_02 40:36

Oh, sure. Well, you know, there's so many. There are ani choang, ani tenzin, there's so many. Uh the anis. They're the anis. Soon to be Gishima's. They are studying for their Gishi degrees. Now women are able to go all the way in their educational process as far as men do in Tibetan Buddhism. So yeah, they're just beautiful, beautiful human beings who um spent extensive time with them and they just don't. I've yet to see I mean, stepping on somebody's toes and then like gently apologizing, but not making it a big deal, not making it about themselves. Like literally, I've just never seen them do anything, but it's hurtful. I I but they're they're training since they're like six, right? Eight, nine, ten years old. And in the same way that we see trauma begets trauma begets trauma, I mean, I am a Buddhist and I do believe in past lives and all of that, and so I I do believe that the Dalai Lama is an incarnation. But I also think that if any human from the age of two is taken and given every perfect circumstance, the best tutors, the best food, the best medicine, the best everything, the best moral education, not made to think you're more special than anyone else.

SPEAKER_03 41:56

Right?

SPEAKER_02 41:57

Who wouldn't turn out like the Dalai Lama?

SPEAKER_03 41:59

Oh, there you go. Now, what turn you to the restorative uh justice path? And I think what you were just saying uh in the last few moments uh helps tell that.

SPEAKER_02 42:11

Yeah, I mean, I think that for me this this line uh between good person and bad person, you know, just never made any sense to me. I would have to draw that line down the center of my own body. Right? I make mistakes, I hurt people. I've got a lot of work to do on myself still. And um I think we I think that I never really understood the Miranda warnings too. I'm like, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. And I'm like, well, who the fuck? I mean, all our clients do unfortunately still confess, but like, but it's like, why is that gonna be the truth serum, right? Versus what we do um uh in a properly done, to my mind, restorative justice process is you have an agreement with the district attorney that nothing that is said in restorative processes can be used in a court of law. So you get that in writing from the DA that you're gonna go and you basically got attorney-client privilege or like a mediation privilege for everybody involved, so that nothing that's said in that process can be used in court. And then all the truth comes out. And the truth is that most survivors, most people who've been harmed, really just want the honest to goodness truth about what happened.

SPEAKER_03 43:22

What is restorative justice in your definition? And to what extent, you're probably too modest there. To what extent are you a pioneer in restorative justice? And to what extent, you know, you talk about this continuum, is so much of so-called restorative justice is called by prosecutors, has really become a take or to leave it orthodoxy that's not of much help. I'll give you an example. You know, I love talking about my wins, so I'll be brief about that. Let's just say that I won a three hour trial about a month or two ago after I sit to the prosecutor. Let's this is the perfect thing for restorative. Justice. I don't have my clients' permission to say what the case was about. We'll just say it was a misdemeanor. This is one where it, you know, no physical harm or whatever, just uh an alleged some alleged outbursts. Just let them sit down. And the prosecutor said, Well, here's how you do it. We're going to go through such such an organization. We'll delay the trial date. Uh, we'll see if your client qualifies. If they say she qualifies, fine. Otherwise, come back to trial. I said, I didn't tell you that I would do any orthodoxy with you. We'll do a sit-down now, or my client and the other party can agree who the restorative justice leader is going to be, and that's it. And we didn't do it, and they did me a favor by winning the case. But so there is, to me, there's this continuum of what works and what's orthodoxy. So there you go, including what's the definition of restorative justice, and where how do we get out of this orthodoxy, and what is available here in Virginia for me to get away from that orthodoxy.

SPEAKER_02 44:55

Hmm. Um, so Arlington has a really wonderful program. Um, and you should check out those folks.

SPEAKER_03 45:04

Um, I think that I'll the next county to me.

SPEAKER_02 45:08

Yeah, go, I'll I'll connect you afterwards with the Arlington folks who are freaking awesome. Uh Kimmiko is amazing. I think Roman um is now heading that place up. But okay, so um happy to connect you to those folks. But um what's restorative justice? So Howard Zare, who's known as the grandfather of restorative justice, says restorative justice is an approach to justice which involves, to the extent possible, all those who have a stake in a specific harm or offense in order to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations in order to put things as right as possible. So it's a lot of words. Um, and he talks about how you know those harms, needs, and obligations is really the critical piece. Instead of asking, it's a paradigm shift that Howard calls us to. Instead of asking what law was broken, who broke it, and how should they be punished, which is the way we think about wrongdoing and harm today, whether in our schools, often in our homes, uh in in the legal system, uh we ask in restorative justice who was harmed and what do they need, and whose obligation is it to meet those needs? Right. So without that third question, whose obligation is to meet those needs, it's not a justice model. It's just a like my friend John uh has a tummy ache uh uh, you know, from some food he ate that wouldn't didn't sit right with him. And what does he need? He needs some, he needs some medicine. Let's let's get him the medicine. It's not like so much of a justice question, but if it was like my friend John has a tummy ache because somebody punched him in the tummy, like what does he need? Right? He may need a couple days off, and he may need the money that he lost for the couple days off, and he might need an apology, and he might need, and those are obligations that are that sit with the person who caused the harm. So, how do you make things right? So I have never believed that putting a human in a cage is meeting their obligations to the person that they harmed. If anything, it's probably hindering their capacity to do what the needful. And also the entire legal system as it's set up doesn't encourage truth telling, right?

SPEAKER_04 47:11

Right.

SPEAKER_02 47:12

Like a Miranda rule, which is great and we should have it. But at the same time, it's not telling people that that's up to what they did, right? Oh, tell us what you did and then we'll punish you. Who's gonna talk? Who's gonna talk? Who's gonna tell the full truth under those circumstances? How about tell us what you did and we'll help you make it right?

SPEAKER_03 47:33

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 47:34

That is restorative justice. So um, so Howard says there's a continuum of restorative processes from pseudo-non-restorative, which is all kinds of things that people call restorative justice, like youth courts. Youth courts are like a bad civics lesson on how to get kids to learn how to be punitive. Kids come in, tell the story, and then the the youth jury makes a sentence which isn't it's like not even right, like judges sentence, juries are fact finders, like kids aren't even learning the law, right? So it's not anyway, and we call that suffer sort of justice. There's nothing about Howard's definition identifying harms, needs, and obligations and helping the person make things as right as possible. Like what? That's not really and it's also for me the self-identified needs of the person who experienced the harm. When you are victimized, you lose your agency. And so when we ask crime survivors, what do you need in order to make things right? Then they're getting that agency back. They're getting to determine things for themselves back, right? And so, to my mind, from the non-restorative to the fully restorative, I like to work on the fully. So when you say orthodoxy, people actually accuse me of some orthodoxy stuff. But um, I really believe and try to do things as restoratively as possible. And to my mind, the most restorative end of that continuum of restorative processes is where we have face-to-face dialogue and participatory decision making, in which folks who caused harm are held lovingly accountable by family and community to their crime survivors, self-identified needs. So we what happened? What do you need to see happen now? And who needs to make that happen? You bring everybody together to have that conversation. You come up with a plan to repair the harm, the person who caused the harm is supported to complete that plan when the victim is satisfied, the thing is done. And so I like to do that in the pre-charge context with felonies. If I can get a DA to divert cases pre-charge, felony cases pre-charge, to a community-based organization like Restorative Arlington, which I believe is their name, where they can facilitate the case, get the plan done, report back to the DA. The only thing they need to know is that we finished the case or we didn't finish the case. If you didn't finish the case, you can go back and prosecute the person on the basis of the evidence you had in the first place. You can't use anything that happened in the restorative process because you signed something that said, You guys are privileged and confidential over there. So we ran some studies on two of the programs I helped start, showed a 44% reduction in recidivism, 91% victim satisfaction rate. We can't do a comparative analysis on the victim satisfaction because you know what the criminal legal system doesn't keep track of? Victim satisfaction.

SPEAKER_04 50:27

Right.

SPEAKER_02 50:27

But we're doing it all for the victims. And I'm like, okay, please. The last thing in the entire universe I would have wanted was my father in a cage. So you really weren't doing it for me, right? If you were gonna prosecute my father.

SPEAKER_03 50:43

Well, you know, during these last five minutes or so, yes, I've heard you say that. You speak about so much. I mean, everybody gotta go to Sujatha's website, Sujatha Baliga.com, because she's got some links to great talks. You talk about the racism in the uh in the criminal justice system, if we want to call it justice system. Uh how about this? Okay, so let's say we have uh an alleged crime that doesn't have an identifiable victim, like drug sales, drug possession. How do we work that into the restorative justice process?

SPEAKER_02 51:20

I don't think we do. Oh I don't think we do. I think that we I think that we just need to decriminalize all of that and get people the help they need.

SPEAKER_03 51:28

Oh, well, that works. And my friend Christopher Floor, who's a great criminal defense lawyer in uh Maryland, uh wanted me to ask you, and I think you've answered already, but I'll just tell you what his question was. How do we make this work with uh uh sex offense cases? I think you've answered that.

SPEAKER_02 51:45

Oh, yeah. I mean, I just I just literally in this living room right behind you last week. So a lot of people come to me, quote unquote, off the grid, like community organizers, abolitionists, whatever, and there's sexual assaults that happen within, you know, movement spaces or whatever. And I literally just facilitated in my own living room um a pretty serious sexual violence case uh where nobody wanted to call the cops in the first place. And it was astoundingly beautiful. And I I can't, again, I can't talk too much about the facts because you know, but what I will say is that um both people in family, community, everybody was in the room. And both people, the most powerful part of the conversation came from both people realizing that it was past sexual trauma. I mean, they both knew it in the prep work leading up. So I do extensive preparatory work with both quote-unquote sides before bringing them together, having separate circles with the person who caused harm and his supporters, his or her supporters, um, and especially people who are going to help that person be accountable and want this person to turn their life around and stop doing what they're doing. And on this side, you know, the person who's experienced the harm and their supporters, we do separate preparatory work getting them ready to. And I don't do shuttle mediation. I want them to actually have the conversation themselves, but I prepare them for what they need internally in order to be the have the hard conversation. It could take a few months. Um, sometimes things get re-railed, people get cold feet, and then they're ready later, whatever. This one took a long time. It took 18 months actually to get this case to go. Um, but that happens with trials sometimes, too, right? Does it take too long? Yeah, uh hello. Have you ever had an 18-month uh, you know, delay before you went to trial? Of course you have, right? And so anyway, we brought everybody together. And the person who caused harm and the person who experienced harm both realized that it was their own uh sexual trauma in their younger days that caused them to end up in the situation that made them susceptible to the situation. And the one thing that the victim had said was do not let him ask for a hug or come near. I don't I want to be on the other side of the room. And when they were leaving the room, when they were leaving when the whole thing was over, and I and I orchestrate who's gonna show up first, who's gonna, and it's all driven by the needs of the victim. So, you know, uh Judith Herman says you can't create a more post-traumatic stress-inducing scenario than a court of law, right? Yes. Um, and I try to do the exact opposite. Who do you want to have in the room first? Do you want to be there or do you want do you want him to be sitting there and his supporters and you walk in second? You know, who speaks first? Who speaks everything is designed to empower the person who experienced the harm. And so the one thing they'd asked is no hugs, I don't want to hug. I don't, you know, you know, I just don't want any of that.

SPEAKER_03 54:34

Sounds like they hugged.

SPEAKER_02 54:36

Yeah, it was really, and not just hug, I'm gonna cry talking about it. Like the way they were whole like, and the and the person who experienced the harm obviously initiated it because the person who caused the harm was told, do not ask for a hug, don't get anywhere near this person physically. And the way they came together and held on to each other. Oh my goodness. And two other supporters in the room who I've been working with for months, both realized in the course of the conversation that they also were survivors.

SPEAKER_04 55:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 55:06

It was the most powerful, beautiful thing ever. And they may end up like co-authoring something someday about uh, you know, I don't want to say more about about this whole experience. But you know, it's just can we do that instead of court? Could we maybe do some more of that instead of court?

SPEAKER_03 55:23

Could we maybe well so many more other guests? I'd love to talk for hours and hours more. We'd have about three or four minutes. So during that time, what I'd like to do is please say the extent, tell us the extent to which indigenous uh teachings and praxis have informed you on this path. Tell us about these programs or programs you're doing, yeah. Uh, and anything else.

SPEAKER_02 55:48

So I would just say that, you know, the wisdom of restorative justice goes back to the beginnings of all of our societies and communities, right? I mean, I believe that Howard Zare uh and other Mennonite folks looked deeply within their own faith and um historical traditions as a Mennonite person and thought about the collectivity with which barn raisings happen, et cetera, et cetera. And that wisdom informed the production of the restorative justice approach that he takes. Uh, you know, I'm influenced by Maori folk, I'm influenced by Navajo peacemaking and uh so many different plains Indians and the work that they've done over millennia with utilizing like a talking stick or a talking piece in order to regulate conversation, all of it influences my work. Uh, but um, but I've been going to India a lot lately and talking with folks who are over there interested in restorative justice here, and I'm like, well, just look at your own jirga, panchayat, like where did we historically sit in circles? What might need to be updated in order to be less sexist or more attendant to changes in societal norms, etc. But everybody has this somewhere in their history, you know. I I went to Iceland and saw like the Alting um space where, you know, people decisions got made in circles historically always. And so what can we re-indigenize within ourselves in order to get in touch with our deepest ways of being uh communal and collective? Is just a question that I would ask of everyone, instead of appropriating other people's stuff, like let's let's find our own uh way of being what is fundamentally restorative in all of our societies. And then the thing I'm growing right now is called spiritual fitness. And it was originally called spiritual fitness for justice seekers, but then uh too many people were like, I don't know if I'm a justice speaker and I still need this thing. And so basically it's a four-module program that I am starting. It's got a uh in-person weekend and then four follow-ups on Zoom. And the first one is April 11th and 12th. You can learn more about it on my website, jothabalaga.com, and there's a spiritual fitness tab. And um, and and it's sort of these four modules. The first one is about learning how to grow within ourselves, unconditional love and compassion for ourselves and others, and to really understand our interdependence. You know, there is no out or way we can send people to uh to solve crime or our interfamilial conflicts or our movement conflicts or our criminal defense community conflicts or whatever, right? So my hope is that, you know, we'll do practices for body, speech, and mind. It is a completely secular program, but it does tip its hat to Tibetan Buddhist uh pedagogy and sort of pedagogy that comes from the Nalanda school of Buddhism that comes from India. But um, but it is totally secular. Folks of any religious tradition, no religious interest whatsoever, um can check it out. It's a two-day in-person uh in in a gorgeous Tibetan Buddhist monastery uh at the community room there. And um, yeah, the second module is on um finding our true north and trueing our inner compass to our true north. The third module is on managing difficult emotions, uh which we all have, whether in courtrooms or at Thanksgiving tables or wherever we're having our difficult emotions, turning on the TV every day. Um so uh, and then the fourth one is actually even and maybe especially in times like this, cultivating within ourselves wonder, joy, rejoicing, and gratitude. We gotta fill the cup with that stuff. We gotta remember the images that the Hubble telescope and the now web telescope are sending us so that we can remember our minds are vast and clear and that all of this is just clouds passing through. Uh spending a little bit of our time in that way, not as spiritual bypass, but as a way of having what we need in order to keep on keeping on in the good work we're doing, whether that's environmental justice or criminal defense or whatever it is that we're doing, you know, victim advocacy, any of it. We need we need to be taking good care of ourselves and have that spiritual sustenance to keep on keeping on. So that's what I'm up to. That is what I'm moving more towards in my life, hopefully. And uh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 59:59

Excellent. So we've gone over the hour. I'll get a chance to talk. Well, I don't mind, but for me, but I'll get a chance to talk to you or be with you longer because if if these are silent retreats, uh uh might not get a chance to talk a lot then, but I look forward to. I'm one of them. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:15

Yeah, please.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:16

It's not gonna be this one because of my schedule. I do recommend to all of you to uh attend Sujata's uh retreat or program uh on in addition to that to visiting her website. She's she's writing a book that's apparently gonna be out as early as later this uh year. You're gonna you're gonna flip out about all the more you've learned about it. Those who stayed here, I think, are already flipping out about her. Uh to what extent are you on these Monday, uh the these Monday online uh sits or whatever you call them? They're not online.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:46

They're in person. Yeah, they're in person. Someday I will build an online version, uh, but for the moment I am uh the monks are very particular that we not, you know, sort of do that in the Gompa. And so this is at the at the request of the the monks uh that we do it in person at the Githo Foundation in Richmond. So if anybody's watching this from California, you're so welcome to join on any Monday night. And I'm you know, I'm there three quarters of the time. And then when I'm not in town, other wonderful people lead meditation.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:15

Excellent. Well, this has been tremendous, Sujatha. I really appreciate it so much. Everybody, you've heard from Sujatha Baliga. Such a great teacher in person to know. This is so modest too. This is John, I gotta learn from that. This is John Cass at Beat the Prosecution because there is no other way. I am a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. Thank you so much. Stand by, Sujafa.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:44

Thank you for listening to this week's episode from Beat the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast giving people a leg up against police investigations and prosecutions. Nothing discussed on our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or to individuals who have paid for a consultation. We welcome you contacting us via email at info at beat the prosecution.com by calling our office at 703 383 1100 or texting us at 571 406 7268.