SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Beat the Prosecution, presented by Northern Virginia criminal defense and DUI lawyer Jonathan Katz, where we present you with regular 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 arranged a consultation. And now your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. This is Beat the Prosecution. I am absolutely delighted to have on here for the second time Joe Margoulis, M-A-R-G-U-L-I-E-S. You can find his last uh interview with me from about a year ago or in 2025, sometime on YouTube by Googling his name and going on to my podcast. And I'm going to only talk briefly about his dad, just like I did last time, but I can't talk about him without talking about his dad, because without his dad, I don't think I would have known about him. So Irv Margulis was this great law partner at my first law firm. This was 1988 to 91. And uh, you know, talk about uh, you know, this goes right into Joe's book. You know, Joe asked me to come on the show a second time, which I think is cool. Joe's book, which is coming out of September 15th from Beacon Press, cast out a call for a forgiving society in an age of incarceration. This is great for all you criminal defense lawyers out there for doing your sentencing arguments and sentencing memorandums. And this is good for all you prosecutors to learn that uh our clients are humans. Hey, judges and everyone who works at the courthouse, they're all humans, and everyone else, they're all humans. So with Irv, I it was underlined there is nothing that is monolithic. There is no other. Uh, that's what Joe talks about. There's only us. Because I could tell early on that uh I probably didn't overlap a lot with Irv's politics. I didn't say much about politics at that law firm. I uh I don't censor myself about politics now that I'm my own boss. But when I went into his office to tell him that I had gotten a public defender job, one of the first things he said, he just smiled and said, That's what my son does. Uh I may have mentioned to Joe that he went to law school with one of my classmates, uh, Tony Dennis, over in Northwestern. And uh I looked up Joe to find out uh how Irv was doing many years later to find Irv, and he and he told me how sharp uh Irv's mind was, and it all goes from there. Irv passed away a few years ago. I talked to him about a year or two before he passed away, and we just had a great talk. And I said to Irv, you know, Irv, one of my martial arts teachers says, don't let your teachers forget how much you appreciate them. And I just want to let you know how much I appreciate you. And I told him how much his uh sharpness and his good wit uh helped me as a lawyer, and he said, This is a great conversation. Oh, I'm gonna tie that one. Who was that martial arts teacher? Joe starts off his book by talking about January 6, 2021. That martial arts teacher is one of the uh convicted defendants in that case. So all I did was that was pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

That was pretty good the way you tied those together. That was well done.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

Well, yeah, there you go. I'm about to get to you, but so I'll just tell you this one, Joe and everybody. I didn't tell you about that one before.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

I didn't tell you.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

After I sent him a short Ditty just saying, hey, look, you know, uh I regret that you were involved with that. I said, I'll put that aside. He is just as great a martial arts teacher as as ever. We we pushed hands together. We sparred only about six weeks ago. With that, Joe, uh why don't you just tell everyone a little bit about yourself and about your new book? And let's just go right into it.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Thanks. John, I'm really happy to be back here, and I always love hearing you reminisce about my dad. And I want to tell you, I'm sure if you chatted with him late in his life and told him how uh much his mentorship meant to you, I'm sure that meant a lot to him. And I'm grateful to you for having that conversation with you. Because you're right, those kind of conversations mean a lot. That's that's a really kind thing that you did. I'm glad. Um, so my book is born of the frustration that a lot of criminal defense lawyers feel. Um for 40 years now. I have represented um uh the folks that that people want to cast out, right? That they have done horrible things and therefore folks believe that they know all they they need to know about a person merely from what he did, right? As though there is no other, as though the act explained itself, and there's nothing else one needs to learn in order to judge a person morally and legally uh and to condemn them based simply on what they did. And I have learned in my work um for a long time that the really the the the the question that a that a uh a humane society, a compassionate society, a forgiving society needs to ask instead is not what did they do, but what happened? What happened, what brought this human being to this place, to the worst day of their life? And peer into the furthest reaches of causation, right? To really understand as best we are able as humans to grasp what brought a person to this horror. Um and so the book uh is a distillation of these insights over the years, and it tells the story of six different people, all of whom did horrible things. There, this is not a case, not a book about innocence cases. Um and who, on first impulse, you would think that we need to cast that person out as an as who has done an incomprehensible, an incomprehensibly severe crime. But when you understand this history, um you judge them in a different light. You still uh hold them accountable for what they did. And it's very important to understand that to understand is not to excuse. There's a difference between an excuse and an explanation, um, but you judge them in what I call a forgiving spirit, because you recognize yourself in them and them in us, right? And so we're seeing that, for instance, play out in the Lindsay Clancy trial, right? If you ask simply what she did, if you ask narrowly what did she do, well, she committed a horrible crime. Nobody, nobody denies that. It was a horrible, horrible crime. She she killed her three children. But if you if you ask what happened, if you widen the lens and ask what happened, that brings in a story that sheds light on the frailty of humanity, the reality of complexity. And when we judge her in that light, we judge her in what I call a forgiving spirit. And a much more nuanced and humane and real spirit, right? Because whenever we take this perspective, what did they do? That's all I want to know. I don't want to know anything else, I don't need to know anything else. We are judging something less than the whole human being. And so that's what the book is about. The book is about it it is an extended meditation on seeing us in them and them in us. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

And uh wow, you know, you write you write about two people you never got to meet because they were executed first. There was that one woman who uh murdered a murdered woman and uh ripped the the child out of her body. And and uh what was the other the other guy was the one who uh he he he uh was found to have had sex with the corpse, uh one of the two corpses that he had murdered, wasn't that the one? Or was I mixing up which was which?

SPEAKER_00 8:04

No, no, that's right. At least that was the allegation. There was no there were there was never proof presented of that, but yes, that's what the um that's what the uh state alleged. Um and they should remember we should we should remember who these people were just as we should remember who their victims were.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

Uh this was Lisa Montgomery, who was executed in the waning days of the Trump administration by the U.S. government, the first Trump administration. Um, and a guy named Brian Dorsey, who was executed by the uh state of Missouri.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

And then the remaining people you write about, you have met all of them in person?

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Oh, many, many times, many, many times.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

And uh I I lost a little count. I think most or all of them had actually ultimately been released from incarceration, either because they were juveniles when they were convicted or got parole or and then there was one who won post-conviction.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Um they have all now been released. When I started working on the book, one of them uh was in custody and looked as though he was going to stay in custody at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola. He had been there nearly uh 28, 27 years when I started working on the case. Not working on the case because I didn't represent them, but um interviewing him about his history uh and learning about the world that he came from. His name is Eric Matthews. And wonderfully, late in my um reporting on the case, he won post-conviction relief and was released. He's now doing wonderfully and living in New Orleans after 30 years. He spent 30 years in the Louisiana State prison.

SPEAKER_02 9:43

So when you talk, Joe, about there are no monsters, only people doing monstrous things, there's no them, there's us. I mean, that's just so important for us criminal defense lords because we have to humanize people. And every time I've gone into uh jails and prisons, when the uh uh uh one of the guards points out to the red button, you know, in case you have an emergency and push that, or over in the uh Loudoun County jail, they won't let me have a contact visit with my client without giving me this uh this handheld box to push the red button. I always just smile and I come close to laughing. In fact, ironically, the only time that I came anywhere close to a client making any threat against me, it was a short-lived court-appointed case. It just didn't work out. And so I went uh when I went to visit the uh the client and he signed off uh agreeing to uh for the judge to sign a proposed order to release me, he started complaining about what I had been uh uh what I hadn't been doing for him. And and this was, he was asking me to do some work for him that had nothing to do with the court-appointed case. So I said to him, It's a different thing. And and he was about to be released in a month, actually. And and I said to him, I don't even know why we're talking about this. You released me from your case. And he said to me, if I wasn't here in jail, I said, Look, we don't have to talk about this. And this happened 20 years ago. That's the close I ever came to it. I would I just get along great with uh with my clients in and out of jail. I mean, the only times I don't get out of get along great is if they, you know, is if we we just mix like oil and water. Uh that happens sometimes. That happens, that happens, but this is part of this that no other, you know. Yeah, sure. Engaging with their humanity.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

It's really it's more than that. You know, uh what people don't understand, what what what folks like you and me understand then and folks who do our work, um you know, I get asked this a lot because I I you know I I represent folks who are on death row and that's the work I've done forever, or folks who were, you know, at Guantanamo. I've I've had three cases in the Supreme Court uh involving um post-9-11 prisoners. Um uh and so people say to me, you know, God, it must be so hard spending time with these folks, and the cases are serious, and the crimes are so serious, etc. And I and I I have trouble communicating, but I that's not how I feel at all. When I'm with my client, I feel like I'm being given a gift.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

I think the most precious thing that one human being can give to another is their story, right? They're here to say, to say, you want to know who I am, you want to know how I got here? All right, sit down and listen, because I will tell you. And if you truly are are curious and you truly are listen with an open mind and an open heart, he is she is giving you a gift of inestimable value. It is it is that person's story, it is who they are, it's as great as their name. And I love hearing it. I I when I go to talk to my my clients, or in these cases with folks that I was uh writing about, I just, you know, I don't take notes, I just want to listen. Just tell me your story. I love it. It's not, you know, this is not a hard job. It's a wonderful job. It's the best part of the job.

SPEAKER_02 13:10

Well, maybe you've dealt with a lot more felony uh clients percentage-wise than me, because I do a lot of misdemeanors. But one of my favorite felony clients to visit, I was helping him on a post-conviction case. He was in a supermax facility. And I said to him on my second visit with him, I said, You have a striking resemblance to Ahmad Jamal, you know, the great jazz pianist, and it just lit up. And I said to myself, Well, this is really cool to have a client who even knows who Ahmad Jamal Jamal is, because that's when he was alive. And then there was a time it was, it was actually a very serious, reckless driving case because it involved a fatality. And I won the bench trial before we started. I was with my client and his family members in this conference room, and they all held hands and did a some sort of Christian prayer. I didn't know what it was, I'm not Christian, but I was just so uplifted by it. Like you say, just the welcoming me into the fold, welcoming into knowing who they are.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Yeah, it's a great gift. It's a great gift. And then the challenge for me as a writer is can I communicate that story, right? Can I communicate that story with nuance and grace and complexity, right? So you really communicate the life that people come from, which is a life that invariably mixes for most people who are convicted of very serious crimes in this country, uh, deep searing poverty, right? And so can you really give meaning to what it is, right? But aside from just saying the words, he grew up really poor, right? Can you really bring out what it meant, right? To like like Richard Rivera, one of the folks I write about, he's so extraordinary when he talks about growing up so poor and walking, holding his mother's hand, and walking down the hallway, and she's holding their little his little sister in her arms, and they pass by the door in their apartment building of a of a of a home of an apartment where you can smell chicken soup, right? Right, and the child, infant twists her twists her head to try to smell the soup because the child and Richard are starving, right? And that image, 60 years later, is still seared in his mind, right? Can you communicate that with compassion and complexity to bring out the picture of who this person really is? Richard raised himself on the streets of New York from about the age of six or seven. Um uh and at age 16, he was arrested, uh, illiterate and addicted to cocaine for the murder of a police officer, a New York City police officer.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

Is that uh the person you covered who ended up um uh doing that harv, sorry, that Cornell remote program, or am I mixing up with one of the others?

SPEAKER_00 16:08

No, that's a different guy. Richard did study, um, he studied with Bard in the New York um prison system. Bard has a very good um college education program for folks inside, uh, and did a ton of um college work even before there were teachers, right? His teachers were other guys inside, other folks inside who also were. This also often happens. Folks inside have mentors of other folks inside, and his mentors were other lifers who were older, um, who were veterans of Attica, the Attica Uprising. I mean, Richard went in in the early 80s uh and served 39 years. The person you're thinking of is Lucas Whaley, who has also become a friend. Um, and Lucas um, you know, became a white supremacist in the world.

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

Yeah. Um, and uh, you know, describing his seduction into white supremacy was something I I tried really hard to capture, right? How it made sense for him at the time, and he eventually turned his back on it, and concluding after a lot of research and reading that it was, in his words, it was all bullshit.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

I think a lot of uh what you're doing with your book is uh had his has its predecessors, perhaps with Publius Terence, for instance, who said along the lines of I'm human, anything a human does is not alien uh to me, for instance.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Exactly, exactly. So so what I believe, what I've come to believe, and and and what I just know in my soul is that all of us are capable of monstrous things, right? And if all of us are capable of monstrous things, that means that monstrosity is not alien to the human form, it's not alien to the human character. We just have to recognize people people ref people resist that, but that's just arrogance on stilts, brother. That's just arrogance on stilts. And um once you recognize that monstrous behavior is essential to, integral to, the human, the human form, then engaging in monstrous behavior means you're a human who engaged in monstrous behavior, not a monster, right? If all of us can do monstrous things, then none of us are monsters.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

And then at least some strains of Buddhism, major strains, there's about not judging. I mean, not even judging yourself while you're meditating if if you're getting a bunch of distraction.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Yeah, and I I have never reached that stage. I that is a that is a difficult thing for me. And I don't, you know, I try not to use the word judgment, but I I, to the extent that we come to judgment, I think that people need to be held accountable for wrongdoing, right? The people that I write about did horrible things, and they need to be held accountable. But that accountability is in the light of this more complex understanding of what happened. It's not, you know, we we will excuse you, we're not gonna hold you responsible for anything. No, no, no, no. It's that we don't judge you as an alien monster who behaved in some incomprehensible way. We judge you as one of us, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:16

I am gonna want to talk a little more about some of the chapters in your book. Before I get there, I would want to do a broader brush. So uh you do have a chapter, that's your chapter eight about the whatabouts. It's kind of a short one where you talk about everyone might say, a lot of people might say, okay, we can understand what you're saying. There's no them, there's us, but there's the whatabouts. And you said, for instance, what about Alex Jones? But if you could get into his head, maybe you could understand a little more about his motivation, for instance, to deny that that uh massacre happened in Connecticut, which is only about 15 minutes from where I grew up. Um, really, well. But I but I was about to ask about Hitler, but then today, as I was thinking about that, I remembered well Paul Potts, for instance, he was a murderous bastard, and uh he had all these uh all these advantages. And I remember when I asked my peace teacher Jun Asuda, whose uh calligraphy is always back there. She's over at her uh Peace Pagoda in uh Grafton, New York. I said, Well, what would you have done if you were back in uh the 1930s and met Hitler? Uh I I know it wouldn't be what I would have done, which would have been to have shot him dead and asked questions later. She said, John's son, she said, everyone has uh various aspects of their personality. She said, for instance, Hitler was an artist. I understand his art wasn't very good, but nonetheless, she said, Well, I might have said to him, Why are you so angry? Maybe you would have wanted a massage. And I didn't follow up with her and said, Well, you know, seeing that you're not white, June's son, I don't know if he would have given you any chance there, except that out of convenience he was uh allies with the with the non-white hero Hito. Uh, but how do you uh, as as you're, I don't know if you consider yourself Jewish, but having been born Jewish, you are, how do you uh say that Hitler's not a what-about?

SPEAKER_00 21:03

So, I mean, everybody asks me that. Um, and I think that the biggest mistake that we can make is that when we come across, all right, this is this is Hannah Arendt, right, and the banality of uh of evil. Um, this is Timothy Snyder's work in the uh in recognizing that the the every man who becomes uh the member of the Nazi Party, the biggest mistake we can make is imagining that the capacity for an evil of the sort we have seen in this world does not lurk within a lot of us. Um I don't have any problem uh condemning someone like Pol Pot, condemning someone like Hitler, and saying they have to be accountable at the time and in the lesson of history. But if we im if we pretend we commit a much more dangerous sin, if we pretend that there is nothing to understand. That there is nothing in German culture that helps us understand. This is not an excuse, it is definitely not an excuse. Help us understand how a Western modern democracy can create from the wreckage of World War I and the wreckage of the Versailles Treaty the unrest and resentment and anger and economic decline that gave rise to a population that wanted to hear a Hitler and gave space for a Hitler, right? Doesn't excuse what he did, but we need to understand that as something other than a monster beamed down from another planet with an inexplicable set of beliefs, right? I mean, Hitler was distinctly, distinctly German. And especially now, and I am not saying that anybody in our current orbit, US or otherwise, is Hitler, but you need to understand this is as a homegrown phenomenon that has an explanation. And we do it, it does not, I am not saying let us forgive. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you have to recognize him as one of us, not one of them. It is more dangerous to imagine that he's an inexplicable monster, right? That's more dangerous, right? No, no. Unfortunately, that's not the case. It would be easier if that were the case, but that's not the case. That's not the case. And the capacity to create another Hitler exists again today. And we see it, right? We see it. We see it in the Putins in the world.

SPEAKER_02 23:41

So you have uh defended a slew of criminal defendants, including those charged really awful uh crimes, and many of uh who have done them. Would do you draw the line at uh any kinds of uh defendants you would not uh defend.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

Um you know, as you know, we have professional a professional obligation as um lawyers that you're not supposed to take a case if you can't be a zealous advocate for the person, right? Um so the question for me is always am I so repulsed personally that I can't get past the whatabout? I can't get over it. And that means for me, I can't come to the understanding of who this person is, and so I can't do them justice, right? Um that doesn't mean that it does emphatically does not mean that um the story is not there to be gathered, it just means that I'm not the right uh storyteller for that person, right? I I don't have that, and I think about what those cases are. Um you know, I remember when um Harvey Weinstein was prosecuted, uh, and there was some hubbub about, you know, um this criminal defense lawyer from Harvard who who agreed to represent him, and people said, How can how can you represent that guy? How can you represent that? Well, what are you doing? I didn't have any problem with Harvey Weinstein hiring whoever he wants, but he couldn't have hired me. I wouldn't I would not have represented him, right? He can have whatever lawyer, he can buy whatever lawyer he wants, but I would not have represented him. Um other kinds of cases, you know, child sex cases, I think would be very difficult for me. That doesn't mean there isn't a story to be told. I know there is a story to be told, and I do not think of that person as a monster. Um, but I may not be the storyteller for that person.

unknown 25:53

Right?

SPEAKER_00 25:53

You understand what James?

SPEAKER_02 25:54

I I understand that. You know, for for me, if someone said to me, would I have defended Eichmann when he was being prosecuted in Israel if I was a lawyer already, I'd say, yeah, I would have defended at least because I'm against the death penalty. And that would have been overarching for me.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Right, right. There's that too. Um, you know, and of course, a lot of uh I mean, I used to say when I was a younger lawyer, I used to say that I used to be a very different lawyer than I am now, and that what I wanted to do as a lawyer was fight against the government, particularly when I was doing death penalty cases early in my career, right? Um, and I just wanted to, I viewed my client, this is so embarrassing to talk about. I viewed my client as a means to an end, right? My client was just a mechanism by which I could go in and fight with the state. Um and that means that my client's story, my client's humanity, my client's life is secondary to my personal desire to go in there and duke it out with the man, the system. That's a terrible way to be a lawyer. Terrible, terrible way to be a lawyer. I am no longer that way. Now I think when I represent somebody who's on death row or at Guantanamo, my principal goal is simply to learn this person's story and communicate it faithfully with richness and depth and et cetera. That's my goal.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

I'm going to go on a tangent, having spoken about Germany, back to Irv, your dad. And uh I thought it was amazing. Uh two amazing things were taking place during the oral history he was given, uh, giving as uh one of the uh World War II veterans that was uh interviewed in that series, and I'll plan on putting that on my liner notes. Uh, one was that he was willing to talk about his war experience at all, because I understand that so many uh uh soldiers who were in war just don't want to talk about it. So I'm interested in you talking about what made him willing to do that. And the second one was he said right out he just uh that was one of the greatest experiences in his life uh was being there in wartime. Uh and you know, what was going on? I mean, he was he was killing, he was having his companions being killed. Uh, you know, how much of that that had all at all to do with that that at least he knew he was fighting German soldiers and therefore indirectly fighting Hitler?

SPEAKER_00 28:19

Yeah, I would tell you, I was surprised by that oral history. I mean, I I I saw the clip, and I was and you know, that was very late in his life, and I was glad the oral history was conducted. I'll tell you, growing up, he never, ever, ever talked about it. He never talked about it. Um and, you know, I know that he and my older brother would talk about it some, but almost more in a kind of clinical sense, right? Like what division was here and what platoon was there, and you know, what did he think of Eisenhower's plan and so on, right? Not in the in the reality of what he did. And I know that um, you know, till very, very late in his life, he had a um, like a lot of vets do, a really um intense startle reaction, right? Like he might be napping on the couch, and he would wake up out of some kind of nightmare or or something, and be just have this wild look in his eye, like a really terrified look in his eye. Um, and he never talked about it. He was of that generation where he just didn't talk about it. But I've I'm glad that late in his life he described it in such positive terms. I'm not sure that earlier in his life, when he first got home, he would have described it that way. And he never described it that way to us.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

Um Do you think that the uh American military uh was thinking ahead at all about what would happen to uh the Jewish P uh POWs, the the Jewish American soldiers who were caught by Hitler's army and the extent to which they would be treated uh much worse than the non-Jewish POWs?

SPEAKER_00 30:18

That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. I'm sure that there is documentary evidence on what they were thinking, but I don't I don't know it. I don't I don't that's a good question.

SPEAKER_02 30:30

Before we get back to your book and you, I don't think I asked enough in my last uh uh interview. Where did your dad get his great intellect from? And um what do you think made him well? I don't know if you heard him say this. One day we had a firm lunch and he said it was Jimmy Carter who was a catalyst or the catalyst for him to turn Republican. And I'm a fan of Jimmy in general.

SPEAKER_00 30:59

Yeah, I mean, you know, like a lot of um uh Jews of that generation, he grew up um he grew up what we would call a liberal, um, you know, a Democrat, a good um urban Jewish Democrat, and went to work after law school um at the Department of Housing, right? And and really believed in the idea of housing for everyone, right? Housing as a basic fundamental right, right? Um and I think the experience of seeing how um difficult that proved to be in practice and how bad the government was at providing public housing, and how a lot of public housing that the government provided turned out to be, you know, god-awful, um, led him to be much more critical about uh the role of the government, which brought him more to uh the kind of libertarian strain of um the Republican Party. And that was his gradual break away from uh uh the Democrats. Um he Carter was very interventionist. I too am a fan of Carter, um, but he was very interventionist in the economy, and um my dad just thought that was crazy. Uh and when um uh when Reagan was elected, he and he was given the opportunity to become part of the Reagan administration at the Department of Commerce, he switched his party affiliation and became a Republican and uh remained a Republican the rest of his life and became gradually more and more conservative in his attachment to uh not just libertarian views but cultural conservatism as well.

SPEAKER_02 32:54

So, what gave him his razor sharp mind?

SPEAKER_00 32:57

Who knows where that comes from? Who knows, right? As my as my mother would say, very vase, right? Who knows?

SPEAKER_02 33:06

Um, then I wish I did, but I don't know. Okay, so Lucas was the one that was the one who was the white supremacist, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:18

Lucas Raleigh. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

To what extent is there any parallel between him and I forget the name of that uh that Christian minister who is uh in involved in all this white racism, and he said that there was this uh this black minister who would just keep on leaving him voicemails, call him up and say Jimmy or whatever his name was. Uh, you know, I love you so much. And uh, do you know about that minister? There may have maybe more than that.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

No, I don't know the story.

SPEAKER_02 33:47

Well, I guess that's a little different because that minister, he was never in prison. Uh, but uh what made you seek out Lucas? And um I take it that uh you're you're convinced that he did have a meta he he was metamorphosized against uh racism, and how did that happen?

SPEAKER_00 34:09

Um so Lucas is a Lucas is a fascinating character. Um so I tell six different stories in the book, and all the stories are different. They're chosen really very deliberately because they all illustrate something different about the unforgiving society. They all follow a different path to the worst day of their life, and they and so they illustrate different ways that society can contrive to imagine that this person is a monster based solely on what they did, right? Um and Lucas committed a very, very bad, um, he and his codependents, a very, very bad murder uh when he was 17. And Lucas's story is really about um growing up seduced by the drug of rage and self-loathing. Um Lucas, this the most striking thing about him when I was listening to him and telling his story, what came out is um his story of how he tried to take his own life, how to try to kill himself when he was six, right? I mean, imagine the pain that a child is in at age six. My grandson is five, he's gonna be six in December, right? And so I think about that age and how much pain this child must be in to wrap um yarn around his neck, right? Because he's six, he doesn't go to the store and buy a rope, right? And stand up on a chair and loop it over a hook in the wall, um, which is a hook to hold the curtains. Because when you're six, you think that hook is gonna hold you, right? And and and then step off the chair, right, at age six. And he's and he said, and I was starting to see tunnel vision. I it started to, I if but the hook bends and he falls, right? And imagine the pain that you have to be under and the environment you're in to not tell anybody about this until many, many years later when he's serving a life sentence in prison, right? That was Lucas. And the thing that drove him to that was uh the ridicule, the horrific ridicule, the mockery, the shaming of this deadbeat stepfather, who used to beat the shit out of him. But it was obvious in listening to Lucas that it wasn't just getting the shit beat out of him, it was the it was the torment of being told over and over again that he was just a pussy. Right? Because when Lucas was a little kid, he was a geek. He was a he loved to read and he read science fiction, and all he wanted to do was play with his Legos and build things and read his science fiction. He was one of those kids that would take the flashlight into bed and under the covers when he was supposed to be sleeping, he'd read his comic books, right? That's all he wanted to do. And along comes this guy who just mocks him and tells him what a what a pussy he is, and because he's a little guy. But when you do that to a child, right, when the people who are who are supposed to love you and care for you treat you like this, a child doesn't have it in them to say that person's bad. What they do is they'll blame themselves. If I am unloved, it's because I am undeserving of love. So Lucas developed this incredible, incredibly thick strain of um anger. He just wanted to break shit. He just wanted to go out and be the monster that he imagined himself to be. But it was all on top of this little kid who was really just a geek who loved to learn. When he went into prison, the first part of him, the monster, came out. And he was seduced into white supremacy because he said, you know, white supremacy, it's a great thing, man. You don't have to blame anybody. You can blame somebody else for all your problems. You don't have any problems, you're perfect. It's somebody else's problem on everything, right? And it didn't tell me that rage was a problem, it told me rage was a solution. All my violence, everybody was trying to tell me all my life that my violence was a problem. No, white supremacy said, brother, we need your violence. We need it in a big way. So he loved it. But he was still that little geek who loved to read. He loves to read history. He is the most well-read guy I know. Hands down. And he finally, while he was in the box, which is what in New York they call administrative sex solitary confinement, he just started reading, reading, reading. And he finally came to the conclusion, this is bullshit. This is bullshit. And the and the intellectual in him couldn't couldn't get past the lies that he was being told. Now I'm condensing what was in fact a course of years, right? Lucas served 25 years in prison. But by the time he came out, he was a completely different human being from when he went in. And he still, you know, to this day, he still struggles with his anger. It's an he says, you know, it's a thing. I got to deal with it all the time. But he's so much more equipped to recognize what it is, to recognize that the damage that his stepfather did to him. And, you know, he's the first to say. None of it excuses what he did, but it explains it. It helps understand it.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

What made you seek him out as one of the people you would cover in the book?

SPEAKER_00 39:59

Well, you know, I uh in fact, Lucas was one of my students. I I um teach in prisons um as just as a the Cornell has a prison education program, and I was teaching in prison, and Lucas is one of my students, and I was struck by him because when he comes into a room, you know, I mean, when I met him in prison, like a lot of guys in prison, me, he's all fit, you know, he's ripped, and he's got these, you know, he's all tatted up, right? He's got the tats everywhere. Um, and then you hear his backstory, so yeah, you know, that guy was a white supremacist, blah, blah. And so you think, oh, wow. And then you read a little bit about the crime, crime was bad, crime was really bad. And then you listen to him, and you know, this is a really, really smart guy. And it's just a really interesting story. So he eventually got parole, and I reached out, and I'd been in touch with him, and I reached out to him, and I said, Hey man, do you just chat a little bit about your history? Just I just want to listen. I just want to listen. And I realized, you know, I didn't know the story about how he grew up. I didn't know the story about his suicide. A lot of people who or attempted suicide, a lot of people who have read the chapter, they've known Lucas for a long time, they didn't know that story. Um, and again, just sitting and listening to him, I thought I was being given a gift every single day, every single day with him on the phone or in person. Uh, I am being given a gift. This is a great gift.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

I loved it. When you were speaking with him, was that with the intention of talking about him in the book? Had you already conceived of the book?

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Um, I I can't remember whether I had I had obviously, of course, known him before the book came to mind, but there's a sense in which I have been writing this book for decades, right? Um, I think I literally didn't start writing until 2022, 2023. Um, and I think I started talking to Lucas after the book was the idea for the book was in my head.

SPEAKER_02 41:52

You know, um I read these emails on the criminal defense laws list serve in Virginia because uh here the uh the county bar associations have a lot of influence on who gets uh chosen as judges. And too often I just see it as overly simplistic about people saying, oh, well, these this guy, he'll be great as a judge. He's really uh, you know, he he really gives to the community, cares about the community. And so many of these people they become who I start by calling the monsters. Well, or they're doing monsters.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

That's your whatabout, man. That's what you got. Whatabouts?

SPEAKER_02 42:29

And but what I'm getting to there is, okay, so what ideas do you have for us, criminal defense lawyers and criminal defendants, to deal with these judges who are acting with ice in their veins? They've got a heart somewhere. Uh, what can we do more than uh humanizing our clients and showing the judges that no, I'm not gonna give you just uh uh a day to just uh chase your docket and uh and treat these people as just protoplasm and not uh people with beating hearts?

SPEAKER_00 43:02

So look, I don't I don't mean to underestimate or minimize the challenge of being a criminal defense lawyer with a with a you know a god-awful caseload. And you I recognize that the kind of time I spend on my capital cases and the time I the kind of time I spent with the folks I write about in this book is more than as a practical matter, folks can spend in the great majority of cases, right? Um so without that time, it's very, very difficult to develop this history, this story, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

And and I recognize that. And I'm not I I'm not saying that everybody needs to do the kind of deep dive that I did with each chapter of this of this book. I mean, you were very gracious at the beginning of this of this chat when you said, look, all criminal defense laws. Should read this so they learn how to write a sentencing memorandum. Um, because not anybody can write a sentencing memorandum in every case because you'd end up writing, right? You'd write a book each e for each one of your cases, but I know that. Um but um I have found that even in the look, I mean, I cut my teeth as a as a capital lawyer in Texas, where as I mean the judges just didn't want to hear any of this stuff. And um I became I don't want to sound immodest. I'm not I I really don't mean this. If I have one skill in life, it is the ability to tell the story of another human being, right? With complexity and and uh care. Um and I have found that even, and and that's not an easy task, it's it's actually a skill that a lot of lawyers can't do. You know, the the most important thing here's my public service announcement to young lawyers who are out there. Okay, Mazletov, you went to law school, you learned to think like a lawyer. Your challenge now that you're a lawyer is to stop thinking like a lawyer, right? Think like a human being, right? Um, and when you can communicate this this complexity and this nuance and this beauty and this frailty and this tragedy to another human being, they get it. They get it. Um and if and if you can do it in Texas, if you can do it in you know places I've practiced, you can do it in Fairfax, Virginia.

SPEAKER_02 45:39

Well, it's it's true. I mean, I'm I don't know, I told you about this one, and once again, it was just a misdemeanor, but I had a guy who was risking a few days in jail for going wicked fast on the George Washington Parkway, and I avoided that. And in my talking to the judges came to me in the moment, I said, Well, my client was driving his new BMW uh for just the second or third day. He didn't realize how much power it had. I said, Maybe he should have bought a Ford. And uh my client said the judge was covering his mouth because he didn't want everyone to see that he was laughing at that. And and talk about a judge who would seem so humorless all the times that I appeared before uh in front of him beforehand, right? We we can reach that humanity in them.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

Yeah, you can I I'm convinced you can reach it in in just about everybody.

SPEAKER_02 46:25

Okay, what was the name of um your uh uh the person in the book you wrote about who who shot the cop dead in the bar or wherever it was? Yeah, that was that was Richard?

SPEAKER_00 46:37

That was Richard Rivera, yeah. Very, very good friend.

SPEAKER_02 46:41

Is that the one who he he gives you such a bear hug you can almost hear your bones cracking? Is that the one?

SPEAKER_00 46:46

I swear it's true. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 46:48

All right. How has he come to terms uh, you know, that that he did kill this cop? I mean, does it haunt him every day, or is he does he just rationalize that he was a juvenile? What is it?

SPEAKER_00 46:59

Oh no, boy, he does not rationalize it. So what what what you see with a lot of folks inside is they is they reach a point where there's no longer any rationalization at all. And Richard describes it with with just great um emotion. He the the point at which he was finally able to immerse himself. That's the verb he uses, immerse himself in his guilt, right? He describes it as an immersive experience to ask himself, okay, what am I? Am I a murderer? Is that is that all that I am? Is that and he um by this time he had become uh uh a student of religion, and and he sought wisdom in the religions of the major religions of the world, right? So so what do I do with the with the rippling uh circles of pain that I have caused, right? The destruction that I have caused, that I did by this hand, right? By my hand. I took this man's life. And he said, you know, in in the in the Christian tradition, you you uh you seek forgiveness from God, and God forgives you, right? And he said, that just didn't seem right. Uh uh that's not sufficient atonement. He said, in the Jewish tradition, you go to the person you have wronged, right? And you seek forgiveness from them. And I I couldn't because the person I wronged, I killed. So he described himself as existentially stuck. He said, I can't atone, I can't atone, but I I I need to move on. I need to somehow be someone other than a person who is literally drowning. He's drowning in this guilt he feels, this remorse he feels. So he uh he developed in his mind the idea that his victim, about whom he knows nothing, right? He's not allowed under New York law to reach out to the victim's family, can't do that, doesn't know that, right? He imagines that person as the greatest human being who ever lived, right? I mean, this is Mother Teresa with a with an NYPD badge, right? He has no idea whether it's true, but he invests that person with the greatest characteristics that a human being could possess. And he said, I want to live my life in a way that honors that person, that imagined person, that that person will feel you're doing good, Richard. This is the way you ought to live your life. And that is how he, that is the lesson he took from 39 years in prison, more than 39 years in prison. And that's how he lives his life now.

SPEAKER_02 49:53

Does he do any um mental health or religious counseling uh for himself to receive it?

SPEAKER_00 50:01

Oh uh I don't believe so. I don't, I don't think so. He's he's I the answer is I don't know. He has never that's a good question. He has never described that to me. He's never described how uh being in therapy or anything like that. His his mentors were guys in prison, guys who had done, you know, were serving life terms and who took him under their wing uh and brought him along. Um and he still feels very strongly about about those folks.

SPEAKER_02 50:34

My next question may be unfair because it would probably take hours and hours to answer. What is our ideal criminal justice system in the U.S.? As for instance, is Captain Paul Watson, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, talked about how when he was uh locked up for a few months in Greenland, when Denmark decided whether to extradite him to Japan and they wouldn't, he said, wow, that was a great place to be. It was like a college dorm uh where he was housed there. And uh then there's my uh teacher, June Sonigan, who says, there were no prisons in America before the Europeans came over. So who do we really lock up at all? And what and what should we do about reforming the system, including maybe doing more restorative justice? And of course, doing restorative justice in the right way, for instance, the way the Sujata Baliga does, not the way that some of these uh prosecutors' uh uh offices pervert it.

SPEAKER_00 51:30

Yeah. So you're right. I mean, you know, we have seven more minutes of this conversation. Um so I'll preface it just by saying that, right? Um don't judge this answer too harshly if it tries to distill uh uh six or seven days of conversation into seven minutes. Um, but I truly believe that if we approach people who have done great wrongs um with the question, what happened to this person, right? What brought them to this place, right? Instead of simply asking, okay, what did you do? Oh, you did I've got a grid here, right? You did this offense, you've got this criminal history, right? That's what a sentencing guidelines box does, right? Here you are, you're a number, you're 476 months. Okay, thanks, go ahead. Um, if we approach it with the idea that our goal as a society is to try to understand, right? As I said, to peer into the furthest reaches of causation and to judge a person in the light of that inquiry, right? We struggle to comprehend and we love and we and we judge in light of what we have learned, right? That's a forgiving society. The criminal legal system that emerges from that perspective will be completely different. Everything about it will be different. Who we arrest, how we describe them once they're arrested, what we do with them, what we what we do with things like addiction and and overlapping um uh uh mental health problems, housing will be different. Um, because once we are attuned to the what happened, we look to things like community violence, uh, community opportunity, community disinvestment, right? Because we understand that those things matter, right? Um the way will be radically different. But it all begins with the idea that I am him, he is me. Right? It is it is it is a it is foolish to think that if I had grown up in the world that Eric Matthews grew up in, in the St. Thomas homes in New Orleans, the time he grew up there, it was almost literally the bloodiest neighborhood in the country. Sister Helen Pragine, in her book Dead Man Walking, at the time she wrote that, she lived in St. Thomas homes. And in the opening sentences of her book, she describes St. Thomas as not quite death row, but death was everywhere. Death was all around us. That's where Eric grew up, right?

SPEAKER_02 54:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 54:16

Right? He will run out of time before he runs out of stories about shootouts that he was, that he was that he was that was happening all around him as he was a child growing up, right? And it's just foolish to think that that, well, you know, that didn't happen in the white suburb that I grew up in, right? If I had grown up where Eric, man, he had loving parents, et cetera. If I had grown up where he grew up, it's silly to think that I wouldn't be 30 years on in uh in Angola and he wouldn't be sitting here and talking to you now, right? It's just ludicrous.

SPEAKER_02 54:50

I want to address your energy. You have great energy. It's very interesting. My wife talks about vibrating high, vibrating low. You vibrate high. And even when you swear, you vibrate high. And when I hear a lot of people swear, they vibrate low. So, two things. Where do you get this vibration from? And you really speak so lovingly about your wife. Near the end of the book, you say words aren't there. Where do you get that love for your wife? And how does that inspire you as a human?

SPEAKER_00 55:23

Oh wow. Look, man, I you know, I just think I I won the wife lottery, man. I mean, I'm the I'm the luckiest even to be alive, man. I I just I'm it's a I'm I'm very happily married. I as far as my energy goes, um, you know, God, I'm so lucky. I write about the human condition. I I mean, my challenge in life is to try to describe the the truth about what it means to be human with its ugliness and its beauty. That's a great wow, what a gift, right? What a gift. And I try to bring that to my work. I you know, I try to bring that to the briefs I write. I just filed a case on behalf of a guy serving a life sentence. I'm trying to get his sentence reduced. I loved spending time with him uh to just learn a story and then communicate that that truth, a very complex truth, um to the court. I don't have to I don't have to say, oh, woe is me. No, man. This is great. This is great. How can you not have great energy about this? My job is to communicate the the the truth, the beauty, the complexity, the richness, the the the the the the the horror, but also the beauty that is within all of us, which is just a golly, that's a great job.

SPEAKER_02 56:59

Excellent. Excellent. And of course, I find myself where I am with so many guests two minutes before I could go on and on with you, and I'm sure in the future we'll have more chance to talk. But I would like I would like you to talk about everyone to everyone about anything further you want to say, and certainly certainly toot your horn as much further as you want about the book, whether there's a URL about it, you're gonna be doing a book uh speaking tour and anything else uh about the book or anything else.

SPEAKER_00 57:27

I am I'll I'll I'll I'll send you the date. I am coming to uh Washington. I'm gonna speak, be speaking at Bus Boys and Poets. Um uh I think it's October 22nd. I don't know. I'll have to double check. I'd love to see folks there. Um look, of course, I'd love it if if you know 10 zillion people buy the book, yeah, right, you know. Um but you know, if you go to a public library and take it out, that's fine too. I uh I just want people to grapple with the hard message, which is that people can do horrible things and you can still see yourself in them, and you can still see them in you. That's a hard message for a lot of people. They don't want to believe that, but that's the message. They can do horrible things, and you can, when you know that story, you can think, I see myself in him, I see him in me.

SPEAKER_02 58:21

Everybody, if you're a criminal defense lawyer and if you're going to be doing criminal defense, not only is Joe's classed out book essential reading, uh, but I don't want to hear from you when I say, how's it going? I don't want to hear from you, uh, saying uh uh ironically, live in the dream. Uh either totally serve your client or go into another area of the law or just get out of the law. Uh, Joe, thank you so much for you being my guest for the second time. This is delightful. This is John Katz. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. Read that book, Cast Out. This is Beat the Prosecution, because there is no other way. Stand by, Joe, if I can figure out how to turn this recorder off.

SPEAKER_01 59:06

Sure. Thank you for listening to this latest episode from Beat the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast giving people a leg up for their criminal defense. 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 arranged a consultation. We welcome you to contact us via email at info at beatheprosecution.com or by calling our office at 703 383 1100. Or texting us at 571 406 7268.