Reflections
DEFENDING THE GUILTY: CHRIST’S ADVOCATE
By Georgia Beaverson
Is sure isn’t anything like "L.A. Law." When Richard Martin goes to work, he’s not defending Hollywood stars going through their "nth" divorce. And his clients don’t usually dress in Italian shirts and hand-tailored suits. Switch channels to "Hill Street Blues" reruns and you’ll see a truer picture of Martin’s clients in his work as a Wisconsin appellate public defender.
From early on in life, Martin knew he wanted to go into law. Fired by his deep interest in politics (he hails from the Washington DC area), the legal path seemed logical to him. And after you meet Martin, you’re not surprised he chose that career field either. A big man with a quick wit and an even quicker tongue, he has both the presence of mind and the intelligence to face off with a prosecutor.
He’s needed that quickness in the classroom as well as the courtroom. After earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Martin felt led by God to continue his commitment to his Madison church. As part of a New Testament-style "covenant community," he decided to place fellowship relationships above law school considerations. So he applied only to the UW law school.
"Going to a secular law school is a real struggle for a Christian," Martin reveals. The assumptions and world-view are so radically different from what we believe in our personal lives. Christian students have to study and master the material, and figure out what Scripture says about it. It’s a doubly difficult task."
Martin believes that part of what makes that undertaking so hard is the intellectual framework on which today’s legal theories are largely built. He points out that legal theory has departed from a biblical basis, natural law, and even traditional morality. Instead, today’s source of law seems to be "what 51% of the people think is a good idea."
For a Christian lawyer, that presents obvious ethical dilemmas. And for Martin, those critical struggles are heaped atop a myriad of other problems in the Wisconsin courts. For example, his clients have already been convicted of one or more crimes. His job is to try to overturn their conviction, or at least lessen their sentence.
Since the cases in Milwaukee consist largely of "big city crime," that task could be difficult or even repellent. "The daily exposure to man’s inhumanity to man can wear one down," Martin admits. "My faith in this context helps me fight the natural cynicism that I know is rampant, even among my colleagues who love their work.
"My faith reminds me that the people I deal with are made in the image of God even though that image is substantially marred by their own actions or the things they have suffered. My supervisors have told me that I seem to do a pretty good job of dealing with difficult clients. My faith has made a difference."
On a practical level, that means being honest with clients. The first step is getting them to overcome their initial suspicion. After all, Martin is paid from the same pot that provides salaries for the prison guards, the judge, and even the prosecutor. His clients don’t choose him; he is assigned to their cases. And, for the most part, he comes from a different economic, racial and educational background.
"One of the things I have tried hard to do is to tell my clients that I will make every reasonable effort to explain their cases," Martin says. "I ask them to treat me as an individual, the same way that they want to be treated. And then I try to treat them as an individual— not based on the khaki prison outfit they are wearing, or their economic background."
This honest, human approach has allowed Martin to establish good relationships with the vast majority of his clients. And his willingness to go the extra mile seals that good will.
"I tend to have a fair amount of contact with the families," he points out. For most appellate public defenders, this type of contact varies according to working style and case load. "The (courthouse) hallways are lined with moms and kids coming to see their uncle’s case or their dad’s case or their grandpa’s case or their brothers’s case. I make an effort when the girlfriends and the wives and the moms and the siblings call to take a little bit of time to explain what I am doing for their loved one and how the system works." If rapport with a client is difficult, Martin sometimes turns to a family member to act as an intermediary in explaining what the client needs to know.
Martin finds that many of his clients don’t understand the state’s case against them, so he makes a concerted effort to break the case down into its component parts. And he lets them know that he will fight for them toe-to-toe with the prosecutor or by standing up to the judge.
"More than one client has told me that no one ever fought for them the way I did," he notes. "Even when I have lost, I’ve had clients shake my hand and thank me for trying. I like to think it makes some difference to the clients when they are doing their time to know that everything was tried."
Many Christians might have qualms about defending people who are often truly guilty of the crime of which they were accused. How does Martin feel?
"That’s the question I get asked at every party I go to," he sighs. His voice hardens. "My job is about making sure that if the state wants to incarcerate somebody, they play by the rules. If you want to win, you follow those rules. Even though justice isn’t a game, the only way to insure justice is to play by the rules. I am the guy who makes sure the state did it fair and square.
"From my perspective, the question isn’t really ‘How can you represent a guilty person?’ Rather, it’s ‘What can you reasonably, legitimately do for a guilty person?’ Scripture says we have an advocate in Jesus Christ and he, obviously, is charged with the job of representing all the guilty people in the world who want to avail themselves of his services. There are things he can reasonably do, things he cannot do.
"He can’t simply tell the Father we didn’t do it when we did. He can’t reasonably say we are not guilty when we are. But there are things he can do as our advocate based on who he is. By analogy, I think it is reasonable for me to serve as an advocate for my client."
Martin represents clients convicted of a wide variety of crimes: drunk driving, retail theft, sexual assault, robberies, first-degree murder. He is also assigned mental health cases, termination of parental rights and juvenile delinquency cases. He finds any case involving a child difficult, but the termination of parental rights cases have, in his mind, a special place.
"The finality of the state terminating someone’s rights to their children is so overwhelming," Martin asserts. "Their rights are severed forever. I have had a handful of termination of parental rights cases and, without boasting, I have won them all. This is one situation where you must hold the state to the highest burden of proof."
One victory involved a man in prison for armed robbery. This client’s girlfriend had his child out of wedlock, but both planned to marry and raise the child together once he had served his sentence. The man did everything possible to maintain his father-child relationship. He had the child brought for visits. He wrote letters and cards.
When she met another man, the girlfriend found raising the child inconvenient. She sought to give up her rights and place the child for adoption. But to do that, she also had to terminate her ex-boyfriend’s parental rights. The case went to court, and a jury upheld this man’s right to parent his child. But the girlfriend’s attorney brought a motion for the judge to reverse the jury’s decision, and the judge did just that.
This is where Martin stepped in. "The judge changed the jury’s answers. I appealed, saying that, although a judge does have the power to change the jury’s answers in a civil case, the standard he must meet to do that is very high. He must find there is no reasonable basis for what the jury decided. He couldn’t. The Court of Appeals agreed with me and reversed the judge’s decision."
Since Milwaukee has been targeted by abortion rescuers over the last four years, Martin’s caseload of appeals for right-to-life protesters has steadily increased. He estimates that approximately 10% of his current caseload involves anti-abortion activists. In all other areas, these clients are strictly law-abiding. In fact, most of Martin’s pro-life activist clients have never had a conviction for anything other than protesting. They are, he points out, simply trying to save the lives of unborn babies, and the methods they use have brought them into conflict with Wisconsin law.
"We have a statute in Wisconsin that gives special protection to an abortion clinic," Martin explains. "It makes it a crime to enter an abortion clinic under certain circumstances to cause a disturbance."
His clients have been arrested for trespassing in a medical facility under this statute. Other charges include disorderly conduct, bail jumping and violation of a harassment injunction. All of these reflect non-violent activity that poses no physical threat to anyone. That’s why Martin is amazed at some of the sentences handed down by Wisconsin judges.
"Most judges in most criminal cases do a reasonably decent job and generally avoid vituperation," he stresses. "I have been shocked at how otherwise sensible, reasonable, intelligent and even kind-hearted people have railed against these pro-life protesters.
"I had a case with a judge I would have called a friend. In the face of a state recommendation for a $100 cash fine, this judge imposed 40 days in jail. Well, that speaks to me of what was apparently an agenda to ‘teach these people a lesson.’"
Martin believes that judges like this one see protesting at an abortion clinic as very threatening. It hits "an emotional nerve" that retail theft, a bar fight, or the garden-variety trespass doesn’t. And it reflects the view of the people in the general public, who tend to resent how much time and money pro-life protesters are costing taxpayers.
"I have heard people say, ‘Don’t they have anything better to do with their time?’" Martin states bleakly. "As if it would be more practical to go to a football game than try to save unborn babies.
"I have come to believe that my pro-life clients are being treated much like civil rights protesters were probably treated in the deep South in the sixties. There is a sense that the community is saying, ‘We don’t want you doing this and we are going to teach you a lesson and you are not going to do this in our community.’"
This inequity doesn’t just play a role in the ultimate sentencing. Martin has seen and heard of judges allowing pro-abortion activists to sit on the jury of a pro-life protester’s trial simply because they claimed the ability to "be fair." "To me," Martin says disgustedly, "that is analogous to saying that a member of a notorious white racist group in the South could be fair to a civil rights protester.
"My experience has been, by and large, that many—if not all judges who have a strong pro-life conviction feel compelled to excuse themselves (from such a case). On the other hand, I can’t think of any cases where I have heard a pro-choice judge say, ‘I am radically committed to the pro-choice position and I think it would be unfair for me to be on this case.’"
While cases like these challenge Martin as a lawyer, his deeper challenge is to live his life as a Christian within the system. "The most challenging things are really the simplest basic teachings of the Christian church," he muses. "Like others, I struggle with priorities, to be correct in both theory and practice, to really live out that old cliché about putting God first, your family second and your work third. To do that on a daily basis is very difficult.
"I am struck by how the struggle with sin is really much more at the level of everyday sins and does not so much involve the big, glaring sins. The devil doesn’t need to use big sins when little sins will do. The daily struggles of not compromising in the small things, of attempting to live with dependence on God. There is nothing terribly profound about it."
Profound or not, thoughts like these have led Martin to get involved in justice issues through the Rutherford Institute, a national religious rights organization for lawyers. He and a friend started the Wisconsin chapter, and Martin plans to continue his gratis work defending religious liberties and sanctity of life cases through Rutherford in the future.
In the meantime, he believes his work as an appeals attorney strikes a blow for justice. "I have an interest in seeing that people are treated justly and equitably and without regard to their background, their race or economic condition," he explains.
And what about a possible career move to politics? "I’ve gone back and forth about that for a long time," Martin grins. While his role as a defense attorney is enjoyable, he could become a prosecutor or a judge. "But I haven’t sorted out for myself where I’ll come down."
So, for now, Martin continues his work defending the convicted. And for him, that doesn’t mean glitz or prestige or "L.A. Law." It means following in the footsteps of the Great Defender, Jesus Christ."
Reprinted from Métier, Spring, 1993
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