"A year later, driving on the parkway to another trial, I nearly
skidded off the road when WAMU-FM blared breaking news:
A man named Louis Drame just stormed through the
courthouse where his wife worked as a clerk. He argued
with her briefly, drew a thirty-eight revolver, shot her dead.
I gripped the steering wheel to control my shock, repeated
lawyer mantras, vainly tried to pilot through a tsunami
of guilt.
Like E.R. doctors, court-appointed lawyers can't choose
who gets their services. I was duty-bound to do all that
I could for anyone entrusted to my care.
The adversary system only works when freedom lawyers
tug with vigor on their end of litigation's rope.
I wasn't tossed a crystal ball when I was yoked to
Louis' case.
It took years for me to own more than professional
responsibility for the part I played in Louis' life, to accept
the truth that sometimes I—as all of us—forge crucial links
in others' karmic chains.
But did Louis ever ponder from his prison cell an irony my
mind can't shake? Had his case been handed to a Fifth
Streeter that day before Thanksgiving, no doubt he'd have
served some prison time, but not decades in a cage. And at
least one person's life would not have been destroyed.
An excerpt from THE THANKSGIVING ADDICT,
one of Arthur W. Campbell's fascinating prose poems on
his development as a "freedom lawyer" from his new
volume of prose poems:
TRIAL & ERROR The Education of a Freedom Lawyerprose poems byArthur W. CampbellAvailable from
Poetic Matrix Press