Dear President-Elect Trump:
In my letter, Tug of War, I talked about the tension in politics that keeps us politically free. The same principle exists in our criminal justice system. Without prosecutors and police, our society would be much less safe than it is. But without criminal defense attorneys, our society would not be free.
I’ll use the story of how Jon Goodman and I met to illustrate this principle.
The setting was 1997, rural America. I was the youngest county prosecutor in the state at that time. I’m was sitting in Court with a stack of cases piled on my desk. From the perch, in the courtroom, the judge called out: “The Court next calls State v. Jon Wayne Goodman.” I had charged him with a crime, but I had never met him.
6’ 1,” 260 lbs. of a man stood up and came before the judge. A course, straight beard reached the middle of his chest. It was the shortest area of hair on his head. We stood just a few feet away from each other–he, in all his long-hairedness, baggy jeans, and worn out T-shirt; me in short hair and a navy blue suit.
“The charges, Mr. Leavitt?”
“Your honor, the State alleges that Mr. Goodman destroyed a functioning excavator by taking a torch and cutting all the iron off of it and selling the iron for scrap.”
“Mr. Goodman?”
“Not Guilty, sir,” he said boldly but respectfully.
The sheriff’s deputy had given me a verbal report of Jon Goodman, who had confessed to taking a cutting torch to the machine to sell it for scrap metal. I was a little incensed at Jon’s audacity, and I charged him with the crime.
Jon hired a lawyer. The lawyer came to my office with a different perspective. Mr. Goodman had indeed taken the iron, but the excavator was inoperable and abandoned, having sat in the same desert location for fifteen years.
I promised to look into it further.“Is the excavator a working piece of machinery?” I asked the officer.“It’s sat there a while, but I’ll bet it works,” the officer hedged.“Please get me some photos of the machine,” I asked.
A few days later, the photos lay on my desk. Rust and bullet holes dominated the cab, and the windows were gone. The real clincher came when I realized that the machine was missing its track. It hadn’t moved in years.
I called the lawyer. “Thank you,” I said. “You kept me in line and prevented a terrible thing from happening to a decent guy. I’m dismissing the case against Jon Goodman.”
He commented that Jon didn’t have money to pay him but that he’d promised to paint his office in exchange for the defense.
“He did a great job on my office! You ought to use him sometime!”
A few months later I needed a handyman. Jon Goodman came to mind. After some hesitation, I called him. The next day he showed up at my house. After a brief conversation to patch up our past, he went to work.
That was twenty-one years ago. Jon is still my handyman. I trust him to be in my home and with my family. My children love him. My wife trusts him.
Jon grew up sleeping in a car—the child of itinerate parents. Until he was married, Jon never lived in one place longer than three months. His father was his dominant influence. He taught by example and by word. “Work hard. Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t steal. Don’t sleep around. Support your wife and children. Pay your bills. Don’t mooch off the government. Help old ladies. Never throw a family photo away and always be loyal to family and friends. Fear God, your wife, and your mother.”
And that’s what Jon has done.
Jon met and fell in love with DeAnn when he was 16, and she was 17. They married—and have been together for 40 years. They’ve had good years; they’ve had bad. But they had them together.
But it would have been so different for Jon, had a criminal defense attorney not been willing to work for a paint job on his office. I was a young prosecutor, too inexperienced to know that I should have checked the police officer’s facts before I accused a fellow citizen with a crime. I was all too anxious to believe whatever I was told.
I am grateful for Jon. But I’m also thankful to his lawyer who kept me from putting an innocent man in jail.
It’s important to remember that the police keep us safe but that criminal defense attorneys keep us free.
As President, I hope you will foster a greater understanding of that for all of America.
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
