Locked In with Ian Bick - I’ve Defended The Guilty & The Innocent for 30 Years — Here’s What I’ve Learned | Norm Pattis

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Norm Pattis is one of America’s most fearless and outspoken trial lawyers — a champion of the marginalized who has built his career defending clients in some of the highest-stakes criminal and civil rights cases in the country. With over 150 jury trials and admissions to federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court, he’s earned a reputation as one of the fiercest defenders of the Constitution and free speech. Known for taking on controversial cases and clients that others refuse to touch, Norm has spent over 30 years fighting against government overreach and injustice. In this conversation, he opens up about the realities of the criminal justice system, what it truly means to defend the guilty and the innocent, and the personal toll of standing up for what’s right in a system built to break you. #LockedInWithIanBick #TrueCrime #CriminalJustice #DefenseAttorney #LawAndOrder #CourtroomStories #JusticeSystem #realstories Thank you to BLUECHEW & K9S.ORG for sponsoring this episode: BlueChew: Visit https://bluechew.com/ and use promo code LOCKEDIN at checkout to get your first month of BlueChew & pay five bucks for shipping. K9s.org: Donate anytime at https://k9s.org/ Connect with Norm Pattis: https://www.pattispazlaw.com/ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Shop Locked In Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro: Who Is Norm Pattis? What Makes a Trial Lawyer Great 03:10 – Norm Pattis: Early Life, Background & Career Start 07:11 – College to Law School: How Norm Found His Calling 11:25 – Discovering Criminal Defense & Why It Hooked Him 13:50 – How Trial Lawyers Choose Clients & Case Strategy 17:37 – Social Media, Jury Pools & Modern High-Profile Cases 21:09 – The Media, Public Opinion & How It Impacts Trials 25:01 – Going to Trial: Tough Cases, Strategy & Client Decisions 31:05 – Juries Explained: Psychology, Testimony & Mirroring 36:26 – Federal vs State Court: Public Defenders, CJA & Differences 42:00 – Losing Cases, The Justice System & Prison Sentences 47:00 – The “Trial Tax,” Plea Deals & Sentencing Realities 52:21 – Pro Bono Work, Crowdfunding & Taking the Right Cases 55:55 – AI in Law: Helpful Tools, Risks & Hallucinations 01:00:00 – Sentencing, Pre-Sentence Reports & What Judges Consider 01:05:00 – Norm Pattis: Biggest Lessons After 30 Years in the Courtroom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. I'm competitive. So when I hear about a case, I'm thinking I should have that case. Do you have rules before you take on a client? Do you look for specific attributes in a client before agreeing to take him or her on? I think it's one of the great lies that we tell ourselves and we hold our nose and we bury our heads in the sand and pretend to it and we ignore reality.

What do you think is the most important aspect of a criminal trial? Consider for a moment what a trial is. We say that the government has the entire burden of proof. The defendant didn't prove anything. And we say in federal, and I think in state courts now, too, as a result of a recent Supreme Court case. The state has to prove its case unanimously. In other words, all six or 12 jurors must agree. So the government puts its case on, and the jury says, we can't agree.

Why doesn't the defendant win at that point? Norm Pattis has defended the guilty, the innocent, and everyone in between for over 30 years. He's one of the most controversial and fearless trial lawyers in America, taking on the cases no one else would touch. From high-profile defendants to everyday people crushed by the system, Norm has seen exactly how justice really works, and he's not afraid to call it out. Norm, welcome to Lockton. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. And thanks to Christy for graciously connecting us. Yeah, no, I mean, what a world, right? You know, Christy, I want to give her a shout out, Kay. I think it's canaions.org. She has helped, I think, put hundreds of dogs in police department hands.

450, I believe, at least, and they've engaged or got about $9 billion of contraband off the street, none belonging to my clients. Christy, keep those dogs away from them. But she's got a heart of gold and the looks to show. I mean, when I heard she was a former, I saw her across the room at a comedy workshop in L.A. And I'm thinking, boy, she's gorgeous. And then I found out she was like a former playboy model or something. I thought, well, she's dangerous.

So I stayed away from her. Took a couple months for me to say hello. But when I did, I was glad I had it. Yeah, she's connected us to amazing law enforcement guests. And we'll have her LinkedIn and the description of this episode. But when she said she knew you, I've been a fan of you since I was going through my criminal case years ago because I was telling you off camera that you had done like a blog, it kind of like in my defense talking about the case. And that's when I first saw you appear.

You were like in front of a book shelf, I think, doing like these social media videos or Facebook-type videos. Well, so, you know, I'm a criminal defense lawyer, so I love to talk and I love radio. But I'm also old. I turned 70 the other day. So social media has always been at the periphery of my vision, and I've never quite got it. I've played with it some. I've done blogs. I've done a podcast for a while.

But every time I do it, I get an enormous amount of trouble. I end up pissing everybody off, including my family. So I've taken a few years break from it all and I'm trying to decide whether to get back involved. I think with the climate of the world right now it's the best to be on social media to share in your opinion. You know, I've got so many haters out there.

You know, that's the bracing thing about social media and being a criminal defense lawyer. You've got to have a thick skin, you know. The number of people who've called or written or appeared at my office to wish me ill is overwhelming. They actually show up to your office? Well, in one particular case, I had it coming. So I was in the office one night writing and picked up the phone. You're a

scumbag. Hang it up. That calls back. You're a scumbag. So then I got a little pissed. And so about the seventh or eighth call, I said, let me guess. I'm a scumbag. I said, yeah, well, you're a low-rent loser dick who's got nothing better to do. And I'm not going to pay any more rent for the space I occupy in your head. Wham! Guy turned up. It was awkward. What did he say to you? We had reason to believe he was armed, so we called the police. Yeah, I mean, in those types of cases when you're representing, say, a high-profile people, are you ever in fear of your safety? Or do you think it reflects more on the client? You know, I never really worry about my safety.

We all live on borrowed time. And when my time comes, I mean, I don't worry about death. I mean, I'm 70 years old. It's common for me. I know it. It's just a question of how. when and I'm not looking for it, but I won't run. My wife gets a little upset with me from time to time for taking bold and aggressive positions or very unpopular clients. And do you have to do that?

And I said, well, I do. Because when you run, you're done. And so, you know, I had a guy threatened to kill me once. And I said, well, when you do it, put the bullet right there. Okay, do me that courtesy. Because if you don't, you can kill me, but I'll hurt you on the way down. Do you think people, the public, has a hard time separating the fact that you have a job to do and that it's not necessarily your personal opinions being expressed by representing, say, someone that's a polarizing figure? You know, I don't know. I don't worry about the public.

I worry about my clients. To me, being a criminal defense lawyer is a semi-religious vocation. You know, I think Jesus once said, greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his life for a friend. or maybe it was Paul, I don't recall. But I see myself and everyone that I represent, and I think that we're all capable of everything. And, you know, in Paul's epistles, he said, you know, that which I do,

that which I wouldn't do, I do, what I would do, I don't. In other words, the divided nature, or this notion of original sin. And so I view myself as really blessed and fortunate to represent people in extraordinary trouble. And I view my job as being their friend and promising them never to desert them. You know, we often clients and I read Psalm 23 together during trial.

You know, the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. And, you know, yay, though I walk through the valley of shadow of death, I will fear no evil, thou are with me. And that's my commitment to my clients. And it comes from a personal level when I was abandoned as a kid and knew sorrow intimately and struggle still to this day with depression. And so when I see a client with the world, a lied against him. I see a friend in need of a friend. Where do you grow up, Norm?

I haven't. But I passed my childhood in adolescent years in Chicago and Detroit. Oh, you're not even from Connecticut. No. How do you end up in Connecticut? So I'm an accidental lawyer. I grew up amid chaos. My father deserted our family. It was my mother, he and I, when I was seven. Didn't see him again for almost four years. I was seven. Didn't see him again for almost four years and my mother went to pieces and so I was sent to live with relatives and when she returned to my life we lived a peripatetic sort of life rooming houses we lived in an unheated attic for one year in in Detroit cold in the winter hot in the summer and she eventually hooked up with a guy who he and I didn't see eye to eye so I left home in high school and haven't really been back since along the way

I didn't know I was a good student. So, you know, my, I went to night school in high school so that I could graduate early and leave Detroit. And the assistant principal called me down and said, what are your plans? I said, well, I met this girl and I think I'd go to Hayd Ashbury, you know, because I mean, I wanted to be a hippie, right? You know, and she said, well, you know, you test really well on these standardized tests. You're among the highest scores in the school. Would you like to go to college? And I said, I don't know many people who've done that.

And so she got me into college. And they let me go for, they just let me go after a couple months of my senior year. Just leave. Go to, you know, they knew that I was in trouble and at risk. So I went to Eastern Michigan, then Purdue. And while at Purdue discovered I was really a very good student. I was winning all these awards and contests. And so they said, you should go to graduate school.

And I thought, okay. So I applied to Columbia. Columbia and got a full scholarship or fellowship to study the history of political ideas and did that for a number of years while working on a PhD that I never completed, but taught at Columbia as well. And I hated teaching, I think part of it was I just felt socially outclassed by the environment. The first year I taught I was a nervous wreck. You know, I taught a seminar in great books, you know, Plato to Machiavelli or something.

And I would have diarrhea before. class because I was so nervous. You know, now I am. But so I needed to do something. And I cast about and found a job in Waterbury writing newspaper editorials for the Republican American. And I thought I was in heaven. I was paid to read the newspaper, study current events and write about them.

I went from there to the Hartford Current, also in Connecticut here, and began to feel a sense of isolation. Like I was writing about things. things that other people were doing. And I thought, shouldn't I be doing things? So I went to law school. And one thing led to another, 30 plus years here I am, or 35 plus years here I am. When you went into law school, did you know what specific law you would focus on? No. I simply wanted to know how the world worked. As an editorial writer, especially at the current, anybody in the state or in New England would answer my calls. And they would explain to me what

they were doing, and, you know, whether it was a question of banking regulations or housing this, that, or whatever. And I, and most of them were lawyers or the language they used was steeped in the law. So I thought, well, I want to find out how the world works. So I went to law school. And while there, fell in love with criminal procedure. It's the drama of the individual versus the state, you know, and which was what inspired me as a political philosophy student in Columbia. And so I, I'm still in love with that drama. I'm still stunned by it. You know, Emmanuel Kant, famous German philosopher once said that two things filled them with wonder, the starry heavens above, like, wow, what a vast universe.

And the moral law within, how do I have this intuitive sense of right that I know to be right, but can't account for it? To me, the third most marvelous and amazing thing is government. How is it that perfect strangers get the chance to tell, and the right and the power and the authority to tell me what to do and to dispose of me if they choose? I'm stunned by that. And when I have clients now, you know, most of the cases I handle now are very serious crimes, murder or federal crimes that carry decades behind bars. I like high stakes cases.

And what I like about them is going toe to toe with the government, looking the Leviathan in the eye and say, fuck you, bring it. If you want my client, you've got to do it the right way and I'm going to make you do it the right way. My cases are difficult. Often they do. And it's heartbreaking, but I never forget the person who goes away, you know. Do you have rules before you take on a client? Do you look for specific attributes in a client before agreeing to take him or her on? Yeah, can they pay?

Can they pay? And can they pay? I mean, I've got bills to pay. No, I, you know, I mean, I think that, so this is going to sound cold, but it's real. I don't take phone calls that come in. I have people who do that for me. I've got a junior partner from the process of turning the firm over to Brittany Paz. beautiful, you know, and brilliant woman.

I couldn't be more blessed. But people answer the phone, and I tell them, look for four things. You know, can you understand what the person is talking about? A number of people, they don't have significant mental health problems. They need probably social workers more than lawyers. Can you understand them? And tell me in a sentence or two what their problem is. Do they, do they have an ability to follow instructions?

You know, in other words, do you want to work with them? Can they pay? And then the most important question is, do you like them? Because when a person calls you to ask you to represent them, it's the first date. And if you're saying, God, I never want to talk to that person again after the first date. How do you think it's going to go when the rubber meets the road? You know, picking a lawyer is a lot like getting married. You're in it for sickness and her health or health.

And you better trust that lawyer. And so by the time you get to me in my office, you've been vetted by two or three people. and I'll always ask people, why me? And if at the end of that answer, I conclude I'm the wrong person, I'll tell them I can't do it. Because, or if they don't trust me or they've got too many questions, all I can do for a person is walk them through the valley of shadow of death, spot the legal issues, assess their odds, advise them on the decisions, and then accept their decisions. And if you're going to fight me at hello, then I'm going to say goodbye before we've had too many hellos. Do you ever think about the cases you didn't take and maybe follow them in the news or in the court doggots? Um, not really. I mean, I'm competitive. Um, so when I hear about a case, I'm thinking I should have that case. So, for example, a new book was just published this week. And I'm drawing a blank because I'm nervous, you know, in here. The fellow who killed the insurance executive.

Oh, yeah, Louise, Louis, Louis, Giancionia. I'm offended that he hasn't called, you know. I would love to have that case. However, I have every reason to believe that the lawyer. he has is spectacular and he'll be just fine. So I think that, you know, I have only so many trials left in me. I want each one to matter and I want the issues to be important and consequential. So when I see a case that looks significant to me and I don't get it, I'm like, damn, damn, wish I had it. Now, that's interesting you bring up that case specifically because it brings in the topic of social media. How does a case like that ever get a fair jury pool? The most difficult, I don't know that you do, especially in the era of social media, I handled one of the January 6th insurrection trials involving Joe Biggs and the proud boys. Joe Biggs was one of the leaders of the proud boys.

And the case was tried in Washington, D.C. And jury selection began the day that the House Select Committee released its report on the proud boys' role in organizing the violence. And okay, going to be a little hard to get full. fair and impartial, especially in a blue city like, you know, like Washington. So normally in federal court, it takes about a day to pick a jury. It took us 13 days to pick the jury there. And it was still a train wreck of a group. And, you know, so we're, that case will go up on appeal soon. I think the briefs are doing a month. You do the best you can. I mean, you know, the standard for jury service is not whether a client is absolutely ignorant of the case.

Many people think that's the case. It used to be the case in old England, in early modern England, when juries arose, that you pick people who knew about the folks because they'd know their character. And so the notion that somehow we pick ignorance, as the standard is, is just flat out wrong. The standard is knowing what you think you know, can you put that aside and decide the case based solely on the evidence? Some people can, some people can't. I don't know. I think there are cases where you can't get a fair trial.

You know, Sam Shepard, I knew F. Lee Bailey real well before he died. He took his case to the Supreme Court and got it reversed on the grounds that the trial took place in a carnival-like atmosphere. That's likely to be the case in the Manjone case as well. Guys, enter the room, cock first. Blue Chew isn't just a tablet. It's a cheat code for your crotch, making things stronger, harder, longer lasting, like your downstairs hired a personal trainer and started showing up with a motivational playlist. Blue Chew is the original brand offering chewable tablets for better sex. And listen, the first time I tried one of Blue Chew's tablets,

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and pay only five bucks for shipping. That's it. Join Bluechew's mission to upgrade humanity one thrust of the time. Head to Bluchu.com for details and safety info. And as always, huge shout out and thanks to Blue Choo for sponsoring the Locked In podcast. When a judge tells the jury, you know, don't look up anything related to the case over the weekend or when they leave the chambers. Do you think that's actually a thing? No, I think it's one of the great lies that we tell ourselves and we hold ourselves.

and we hold our nose and we bury our heads in the sand and pretend to, and we ignore reality, you know, because there's a presumption in the law that a properly instructed jury follows the law. If you get winded the fact that the jury hasn't, a juror or hasn't, you have to ask the court for, you know, for a hearing. And then under the federal rules of evidence, Rule 606, it's not 666, it could have been, but under Rule 606, you can't ask a juror ever about deliberations. And so, you know, the court goes out of its way to create this fiction that a properly instructed jury follows the law and then does everything within its power to ignore dealing with reality when reality mirrors its ugly hand, ugly head. Now, these rules and guidelines were made well before there were cell phones and social media, right? So do you think they'll adjust these to the current times?

They have sort of. So courts give instructions to jurors during the case and included in those instructions. Now are explicit instructions to ignore social media. We've not reached a point where we sequester people and put them in a room without social media. We trust the jurors will do the right thing. I think we're kidding ourselves. Also, another issue that I saw going through my trial was that the jury will come back and they'll say they can't reach a verdict and then in federal court the judge has to urge them to go back and reach a verdict? Well, every court does that. In federal court, that's called an L. Allen charge after some poor guy named Alan. In Connecticut, it's called the Chip Smith charge.

I don't know Chip, but we remember you in name only at least. And so the theory is that, and this is another area where the law is just dead wrong. Put me on the U.S. Supreme Court, we'll correct this. So consider for a moment what a trial is. We say that the government has the entire burden of proof. The defendant didn't prove anything. And we say in federal, and I think I think in state courts now, too, as a result of a recent Supreme Court case, the state has to prove its case unanimously. In other words, all six or 12 jurors must agree. So the government puts its case on, and the jury says, we can't agree. Why doesn't the defendant win at that point? The government's failed to produce enough evidence to persuade the jury. Well, in the name of

judicial economy and out of respect for all the hard work of trial, let's make the jury resume deliberations. That's a fair request. So you can ask that one or two times, but at some point the court will say, okay, enough. Nomaz, mistrial. Why is it a mistrial? Why isn't that a win for the defense? The jury has been instructed on the law. They've heard the evidence.

They can't meet this. The government can't meet its standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt with all 12. Government failed. Letting the government try again gives them the benefit of a sneak preview of the second trial and denies the defendant the presumption of evidence. innocence, and it's just flat out wrong. And if you're a juror looking up to the judge who's telling you to go back and deliberate, if I was a juror, I would be thinking he wants us to find a verdict before we leave. Well, and there is a presumption in favor of a verdict. And so I've gotten in

trouble with judges during voir dire by saying, you understand the law doesn't care. One way or the other, not guilty, guilty, you can't reach. Mr. Pattis. Well, okay, you got the robe. I don't. So I'll follow your instructions, even though I don't like them. And I'm doing so with my fingers. my nose. But I do, you know, there are cases where jurors just don't agree and it does happen. I think the Allen or Chip Smith charge has to be given in a certain way. You know, I think the form that I request and usually get is, you know, the judge will say to the jurors, we understand that you can't reach a verdict. We don't want to know the vote. We're not asking anyone to change their vote simply for the sake of unanimity. But out of respect for one another, would you resume your

and reconsider your view. I think that's fair. Coming from a press background like yourself, how do you feel about the press in cases? Extremely disappointed. The best court reporter that I ever read, I think, is now retired in New Hampshire. She was with the Hartford current Lynn Toey. Lynn Toey could take a complicated set of facts and breathe life into it, tell the human story beneath the law, and get it both right. Most court reporters don't, and I think in an era of declining budgets, people who cover courts do so on a part-time basis. And they're not familiar with the vocabulary. They're not familiar with the process. And they end up reporting the highlights of the day. And so when I was a baby lawyer, I'd be all excited when the press covered my case.

You know, oh, mom, I'm going to be famous someday. A little voice in my head would say. And then my mother's voice would come up and say, I don't care. But the press, I used to, I used to to think was perhaps a 13th juror. But here's what I learned. They're not even reporting the same case often, more often than not. You can read the story and say, was that what, is that what happened yesterday? I don't think so. Or the harder part is, especially from a criminal defense perspective, they will present the defense's witnesses and what they said without the cross-examination or the reasons to doubt what the witnesses say. So I think it's smart for jurors to avoid press during a trial. I don't think the public is well served by it.

I think that the problem is the public doesn't have time or an appetite for the complexity of trial. You know, I'm today, I'll leave here and resume pre-trial proceedings in a murder case in New London. That case will take about three to four weeks' worth of evidence. Who other than the participants are going to watch all of that and who has the time to? So I think, you know, we need juries. They're vital, but we need to give jurors the power to see that justice is done. So I'm a big fan of jury nullification. I think jurors should be told, look, your judge is not just of the facts, but of whether

the law should have been used in this way. And almost every jurisdiction in the United States prohibits jury nullification. Now, prosecutors love their press releases and their, you know, public speaking events about certain cases. Do you think defendants should be doing the same thing? Yes, and they can. Many, there's a debate among defense lawyers about how aggressive to be in the press and the white shoe people, the people who cross the street.

when they see me coming, hold their nose and say, oh, him, please give me my great Bupon. You know, they won't say anything. But the rules of professional conduct say that I can speak out on behalf of my client in order to rebut adverse pre-trial publicity. I just can't do it too close to the time of trial in a way that might influence the jury. So when the government comes up with what's called a speaking objection, a damning indictment that relays, you know, for 30 pages, what a schmuck. my client is. At that moment, I can stand up and say, oh, yeah, well, not so fast. But I've got to be

progressively more careful as time goes on. You know, they say innocent until proven guilty, but if the government is deliberately sending the press articles from their perspective and they're publishing that, how is that necessarily innocent until proven guilty? Well, if you read the press releases carefully, they'll always say, they'll always have that little proviso tucked in the end that nobody really wants to read, you know, I'm presumed innocent. You know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I do think there's a danger. I think until you've been touched by the government in that special way that criminal defendants have, I don't think you can understand how quickly things can go wrong,

how easily it is to be misperceived or how easy it is to be misperceived and simply how venal participants in the process can be. The government is supposed to seek to do justice and only bring cases it believes in, but it's an unstoppable train once it gets moving on the tracks, right? And I don't, you know, some jurisdictions in the world don't permit press coverage or they demand gag orders of both sides. It's not our tradition, not our way. I don't have answers to that. I just, you know, they're hand.

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No, I don't. I've been involved in some gag order litigation. one in a case that I can't say much about involving Fodos Dulus. And I won't say more than that. We had a case before the Supreme Court and a gag order. He killed himself. Then the case became moot. I also raised that issue in the Alex Jones cases as well.

And we didn't get the ruling we wanted there. I've got stock briefs. I'm ready to go to the Supreme Court on gag orders. So call me, folks. If you've been gagged, give me a call. You know? When you got out of law school, did you go right to private practice or did you do like an attorney's or a U.S.

attorney's office or prosecutor? No, I took a criminal procedure course with a guy named Mike Sheldon and fell in love with it. I realized this is what I want to do. It is the individual versus the state. And it's that mystery of legitimacy, that mystery of how the state acquires its power tested on a real basis in real time with real consequences. This is justice in theory.

This is fact. And so I said to him, what, you know, I think I want to do this. And so he said, you got to meet this guy in New Haven, John Williams. John Williams was the father of civil rights police misconduct litigation at that point. So I went down to New Haven and practiced with him for 15 years. Tried 100, 150 cases under his tutelage. My first assignment in his office was to write briefs in a death penalty case involving the death penalty as imposed on Daniel, or as decided against Daniel Webb. They never imposed

on it. We won. And I ended up writing about 300 pages of briefs on the death penalty in that year. And that was my senior year in law school. I didn't go to class much. I remember turning up to labor and employment final exam. And somebody said, I didn't know you were in this class. And I said, well, I haven't been. I bought the notes from somebody and read what's called a hornbook. And I got honors in the course. So I did all right. So I went to John's shop and then I thought, well, you know, if I'm ever beyond my own, I should. So about 20 years ago, I opened my own firm and I've been at it ever since. How hard is it to build clients when you go out on your own?

You know, I think I've been very lucky because John was an institution and he let me play. And I attracted a lot of attention. So we've had no difficulty. We've got, if anything, there are more people. call them, we can help. When you do end up having a loss, do potential clients look at that as your fault, or do they look at it at the case itself? It's never good to lose, and I lose a lot, and the haters hate it, and the haters love it, and they love to hate me. And I just move on. You know, I think that by the time you stand up to give a closing argument, you've made your best case,

and it's inconceivable to me that anybody would disagree with me. When they do, I'm crushing, I'll have trouble sleeping for a day or two. And then I just remember that line, you know, that Jesus said the cripple at the fountain of Bethesda, pick up your bed and walk. You know, there's another case out there. Let's go get it. When a client is in custody and doesn't have a bail versus when they're free

and fighting the case with you, is it harder to actually fight the case and go to trial? Sometimes it's easier. If the clients are pain in the ass and has ideas that are patently unreasonable, he doesn't get to come in and tell you for three hours. hours, why, you know, why beer is actually good for you. You know, it depends on the client. You know, in the federal system, there's not a federal holding facility for men. So a federal detainee might be in Wyatt. It takes two hours to get out there, clear security, two hours to get back. Maybe I only need to have a half an hour conversation. There are conversations

that don't get had because of the cost of going out there at the time. So it's harder. And it really depends on the client. And so that's one of the things that, that I'm assessing when a client calls, you know, how much do they really need from me? So I had a conversation with a woman in California the other day who's got a relative in a great deal of trouble. And, well, how much time will he get with you? And I said, well, you know, as much as I can give. And but that may not be enough. And, you know, she didn't want to hear that. I said, look, here's what I tell folks. When you're with me, you have 100% of my attention. And don't you like the way that sounds? She said, yeah. I said, what do you suppose happens when I walk out the door and I'm talking to somebody

else? She paused for him and I said, you got none of my attention. So you've got to be able to work with the other people in my office and help us do the triage. So, you know, it's tough. I've read and seen clip news articles and social media bites that the prison systems are now integrating better computer systems for defendants to look at discovery. Is that true? Yes, it is true. How effective it is. remains to be seen. So, you know, especially cases now are increasingly digital. In the Proud Boys case, we had 19 terabytes of data. I don't even know how much that is. That's a lot. You know, I had a case the other day a couple terabytes. You know, it's not uncommon now to get a massive

download. You can give some stuff to defendants, but not all. Connecticut operates under the so-called appealer rule. Years ago, a young man was facing a great deal of trouble. He got police reports, was able to identify a witness, and a friend or brother of his went out and killed the witness and his mother, the eight-year-old boy and the mother, you know, and so that was not good. And so the courts imposed limits on what we can give to defendants. And so often you have to reach an agreement with the state that certain things will be edited out of what you give to the defendants. It's very time-consuming to do all that. that editing. With video dumps, you know, there are sometimes you just can't look at everything.

You don't know what's important, but you don't want to rely on the prosecutor, the prosecutor to tell you what's important, you know, and so I don't know, I don't know. It's better than it was and the computer systems are good. Some systems really suck, though, you know, like you have to go down to the library to look at material and you might only be able to go to the library for an hour or two at a time, a few times a week. Well, that's just not enough time. Listen up, everyone. I want to highlight an organization doing truly incredible work, canines.org. They provide fully trained canine teams to law enforcement, schools, and even healthcare facilities at zero cost to the agencies, removing the financial barrier that keeps so many communities from having a working canine unit.

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If you want to support the mission or learn more, head to canines.org. And even $9 a month helps get more of these life-saving canines into the communities that need them the most. You can donate any time at canines.org slash donate or visit the link in the description of this episode. Thank you for helping make school streets and neighborhoods safer one dog at a time. Do you think there's such thing as an unwinnable case or is there always? some chance to take a look at it and roll the dice and take it to trial? That's not a question I ever ask because the decision to go to trial belongs to the client. So if you're my client, somebody's decided you've broken a law

and they've charged you usually by way of an indictment or some charging document. That's a summary. You come to me, I read the summary, I get discovery from the, the government. In other words, what information that I'm entitled to, and that's a long story in and of itself, that supports their claims. I share it with you. We talk about it. The first question I ask is if every allegation factually that they've made is true is it's still a crime. So, for example, I could be charged with being an ugly loudmouth. It's all true, but I'd win the case every time because it's not yet a crime to be one, right? So first question is, have they charged

a crime? Second is, if they've charged a crime, does the evidence, the information they've given support it. And if so, have they obtained the evidence lawfully? In other words, can you suppress evidence as unlawfully obtained? I'm in a couple days' suppression hearing right now involving a murder in New London. If you lose that hearing or win but when only part of it, then you know what the charges are and you know that as a matter of law, if true, you got some explaining to do. You know that the evidence that the government proposes to use, you know what it is.

And then you talk to your client about potential defenses. Was it self-defense if it's murder? Was it alibi? Was it mistaken law? You know, there are all sorts of different misidentification defenses. We've developed a factual defense. We know what the evidence is. We know what the charges are.

We know what the consequences are. Most cases resolved by way of a plea. Suppose knowing all that, and it takes a year, sometimes two years, to figure all that out. I come to you and I say the government's offering you seven years to enter a plea here. and you say, I can't do seven years? You know, that's ridiculous. Well, if you lose, it could be higher. I can't face the seven.

What do you do in that case? It's not a trip to the used car lot. It's not like you've taken you out and said, oh, look, you can get this old Ford or this old clunker and there's that dead Porsche, but you could breathe life into it. I don't want any of those cars. So in that case, you put off shopping for another day.

Being a defendant is being tied to a train track. and that rumbling you're in the distance is the locomotive approaching you. And it's getting closer and closer and closer. And what you're looking for me to tell you is, can I get that train off the tracks? And you want me to. But if I can't, I have to come to you and say, it's going to cost you a leg, but I can get you off the track. Maybe you don't want to live without your legs. It's going to cost you two legs.

I can't decide. It might cost you all of your limbs. I can't decide. Then you go to trial. So the decision to go to trial is not, it's not, any athletic contest, hey, let's go fight this case. If you lose, you get 30 years, but hey, I get paid. You know, great story about lawyers. Catastrophic result for a lawyer one time. A client turns to him, says, now what do we do? Lawyers says, I'm going out for a drink.

You're going to the lockup. It's a horrible world, as you know, it's just a horrible world. So it's not, are there unwinnable cases? It's what am I going to do to honor my client's choice. My client has chosen to go to trial. It's his right, absolute right. My client has the right to choose to testify or not, whether I agree or not. My client has the right to choose jury or non-jury. Those three rights belong to the client, not the lawyer. Everything else the lawyer has got a lot of input to him.

If you say trial, I want to plead to a jury. Off we go, and my job isn't to say, is this unwinnable? My job is to find a way to win it if it can be won. Do you believe in a client testifying on his or her behalf? Yes. I think juries want to hear from it. Sometimes it's a train wreck, you know. Um, sometimes clients can't. They're too nervous. Sometimes they have too much in their past. Um, but I think people want to hear from their client. I, you know, I had a case in Stanford years ago. A cabby ended up dead. Um, suffered more than a hundred knife wounds. Several of them were stabbing wounds. A stab as a matter of definition in forensic sciences. Uh, its depth exceeds its width. So there were very few stab wounds with lots of nicks, but there were more than 100 of them. And, you know, the client's claim was the cabby was gay and came on to him and they had a struggle over that, the disagreement about sexual preferences.

The response was, 100 wounds? You know, come on. He wanted to testify and he wanted to go to trial. It took the jury three days to convict him, but that's because they had to look him. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own.

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...in the eye and call them a liar, and that's hard to do. Do you believe that, depending on how long the jury's out for, that kind of is, you gives you the seeing of how, which way they're going to rule? No. I think when you're waiting for a verdict, it's, everything goes back to childhood, right? It's three days before Christmas and all these packages are under the tree and they got your name on it and you know what's in each box. Now, if you're me as a kid, you're peeling a label away and acting surprise, you know, when nobody's looking and the acting surprise on Christmas morning. But, you know, you don't know.

You have your expectations and hopes and it's impossible not to speculate. And so you do, but the speculation is meaningless. How often are you convinced that a jury is going to rule one way and they rule completely different? Convinced is an interesting term. By the time a case gets to trial, I've imagined the possible outcomes and weighted them. By the time the evidence is on, I've got my own confirmation bias and in vanity and believe that I've always done a great job. and therefore how can they say no? But every now and then they'll say no, and I'm like, well, yeah, you know, what was I smoking?

Every now and then they'll give me a verdict that I didn't see coming. And I'm like, wow, what were they smoking? But more often than that, I think juries get it right. Are you able to tell at some point in the trial which way they're going to lean? You know when you don't have them. That's when they're like this. So what you do is you try to lure them in in the course of the trial. everybody wants to be respected.

That's the drive. That's the fundamental human drive to be respected and appreciated in your own right. So you search for the jurors. I see a juror in the back like this. And I'll stand in the wall of the court like this until he looks at him.

And then I'll smile and put my arms down. And when they smile and put their arms down as they almost invariably do, it's called mirroring. You know that you've opened a channel of communication with them. And then you try to talk to them. When someone gets indicted,

Is it better to take the case right to trial like we saw in the Diddy case? You have a right to go to trial, a speedy trial, and you can hold the government to it. The risk is you won't know enough. I think a prompt trial favors a client with enormous resources who can, you know, who knows a lot about the allegations, can summon investigators, can get a gazillion people to look at all the video stuff in a hurry. It might be better in that case, yeah, especially if they're going to be cooperating witnesses, you know, You know, people who might flip against you in the course of the proceedings. You want to get to the jury before the government gets to the cooperators.

Yeah, what I've learned in my case, the more you stall, the more they can just have more ammunition, more people come out of the woodwork. Yeah. And they more time to mess with you, you know, I mean, and subpoena more stuff and do all this. Yeah, no, yeah. What do you think is the most important aspect of a criminal trial? The facts. I think, you know, you, when you want a. courtroom is a place, the courtroom is a palace of fear. I'm afraid I'm going to lose. You're afraid,

if you're my client that we're going to lose me. The government is afraid that it's going to get it wrong. The judge is afraid that he's going to get reversed on appeal. But we have the benefit, those parties of at least knowing what the case is about. The jurors are afraid they're going to make a mistake. And I think they needed to be treated with respect. And they need to be shown what the facts are and told what to do with them. So the most important thing is the facts. The second is the law and getting jurors to agree to follow the law and then show the jurors why the law requires them to regard the facts in such a way that they'll give you a not guilty verdict. So closing arguments are important in that way as well. Because you care so much about your cases and your clients when

you do actually go to trial, how hard is it for you to talk to them after a loss to sit in that courtroom, sit in that seat with them? It's devastating. It's devastating. Every few years, we will lose a client to suicide. And I always understand that because lives are undone in the criminal justice system, in my opinion, for very little reason at all. The length of sentences that are passed out are obscene. People say, oh, how can you defend this person?

I said, if you knew what was going to happen to him, how could I not? I mean, the criminal justice system is a farce, in my view. We pass out time as though it meant something. We give people years, decades of imprisonment saying that it's going to rehabilitate them or that it's going to somehow deter the public or that it's going to somehow give them just punishment. You know, bullshit. I mean, it's just bullshit, let's call it for what it is. Most of recorded civilization went by without prisons.

And now we've got this prison industrial complex that is enormously looping. for some, but does what for the rest of us? Nothing as near as I can tell. Do you believe that there are certain crimes that prison is justified? Yes. I mean, if a person, you know, I mean, in only one case in my life did I ask to be relieved because it was so horrible. The court asked me to represent a man who was convicted of sexually abusing his daughter in ways that were horrible. And I'm not going to bother your listeners with the description, simply take horror for what it is. And the claim was that she was now wanted to recant that the ex-wife had set her up to say it. And so I got a call from a judge,

you know, would I consider representing the guy? Well, a judge calls. Of course you do, right? You know, so I went to the prosecutor and got permission to interview the girl, who was not a little girl anymore. And she said, that's just absolutely not true. And so I don't know where this came from. So I just didn't want to torture the kid. I just had make her relive the allegations, which would be what was required. This was what's called the habeas corpus proceeding. So I moved to withdraw on the grounds that I didn't think there was a basis for the action and it was repugnant to me, which are legitimate grounds.

So we're in front of the court and I say this and the judge looked at me and he started to laugh. He said, Mr. Pattis, I've known you for however many years. now, when did you develop a conscience? I'm going to deny that motion. I'm like, oh, man, never, never answer a judge's phone call again. And so then he turns to the client and says, well, what do you think about what Mr. Pettis said? And he said, well, if he doesn't want me, I don't want him either.

All right, motion granted. You know, so I think it's a hard environment. And, you know, in that case or, you know, there are cases, you've heard the expression, some people just need killing. Well, some people just need being locked up. I mean, there are some folks who just can't get it right no matter how hard they try. But for most folks, it's just not that way. And, you know, most people get through life without ever getting arrested.

As odd as that sounds to me. But what are life's fundamental tasks? Get up in the morning, brush your teeth, comb your hair, get something to eat, put some clothes on, go do something that doesn't hurt other people for a living. Come home, relax, go get a good night's sleep, and then hit the reset button. do us manage to do that for 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years without any problem at all. Some people just can't. And what they do is so enormously destructive that the rest of us need protection from them. Those are legitimate. Those are legitimate. Is there a different in the public defender system with federal and state courts? I'm sure there are plenty of them. I think the major difference

between state and federal court is that is the difference between having limited jurisdiction and police power. What do I mean by that? In the United States, States, we are governed by two governments, wherever you are in the territory, within the territory of the United States, at least two, the state government and the federal government. And they have differing powers. They sometimes overlap. But federal courts are allegedly, courts of limited jurisdiction. They have fewer cases and greater resources because they've got the fisc of the United States government behind them. States, on the other hand, have to deal with everything that happens, the so-called police power. And there's just a lot more low-level

crimes. So correspondingly, the state system, public defender system is overwhelmed in a way that I don't think the federal system is. Now, are federal public defenders have their own practices as well? No. Oh, they don't. No. There is a, well, hmm, there is a federal defender system, and those are full-time employees. Then there are lawyers who work under something called the Criminal Justice Act, and they are lawyers with their own practice who agree to, on a contract basis, except work from the government. And the government pays them a certain rate and has to approve their expenditures and so forth. That's called CJA work. You know, I stopped doing it about 20 years ago. And I stopped because these penny-pinching dicks in Washington were just ruthless with our bills. We'd submit a bill

and, you know, they'd question this. And so I remember submitting a bill for something and my paralegal comes back in and says, you know, they're asking questions about this, out of the other thing. I'm like, that was four trials ago. How am I going to remember? Do this. She comes back there still asking questions. So one day I just said, hell, I wrote him a letter. I said, keep your fucking money and keep your fucking cases.

I don't want to deal with this anymore. And so I get a call from some suit in Washington. I'm Mr. Pat, I'm with the Federal Judicial Center when we'd like to talk to you about, you know, your views on the Criminal Justice Act or something. I said, I think it sucks. And I don't want your cases anymore. If I'm going to give my time away and be abused,

I'll choose by whom to be abused and who to give it to. but I'll be damned if I'm going to beg you for a dollar. And that was the end of that. So you got a significant pay cut to do CJA? Oh, yeah. My attorney was CJA. That's how I was able to go to trial. You know, I think that pay, so I have a large infrastructure of people who support me and

therefore I'm expensive. If you're doing CGA work and you're doing it alone, you can make a living and you can meet your expenses. But I can't meet my expenses at whatever the hourly rate is and pay seven people. Do you ever take on pro bono cases? Oh, yeah. What justifies a pro bono case for you to take on? I can't live without it.

They're alleging, what? Oh, that is such a cool issue. I love that guy. I remember one time this mom came in, Hispanic woman. She didn't speak English very well, just as loving and kind of person as could be. And she was talking to me about her son's case. And I got, you know, we got to the mom. money line, you know, what's it going to cost? And she started crying and she didn't have the money.

And I said, well, I don't know that I can do this. Oh, I love that mom so much. I said, but what do you got? And then, you know, 100 bucks, 200 bucks. So I did the murder. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

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So keep it real. Look for the seal. Real California milk. For $100 or $200 because I couldn't say no to mom. You know what's interesting is now that they have these crowdfunding sites. I mean, you look at a case like Luigi, he's raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses. Yeah, crowdfunding. I've had, I've had crowdfunding cases and not. Crowdfunding presents some ethical dilemmas. I had a crowdfunded case where the guy made a request for crowdsourced funding before he retained me, but he announced to the crowd that it was all for legal fees.

Then he asked me to do it. And he said, I've got funding. And I said, how much you got? He told me. And it was well beyond what I thought I could charge. And I said, I think that's a lot of money. And it's more than I would charge you. But if I take the case, I'm going to take it all so that you're not accused of fraud

on the crowdsourcing. So I made out in that case. In the proud boys case, you know, a friend of mine was involved in it. And he didn't do a lot of federal criminal work. So I was helping him out along the way. And when we got closer to trial, he said, you know, would you come in and try it with me? I said, I'd love to. But I said, what are we going to do about fees? Oh, don't worry about it. We'll be crowdsourced. And somebody ran off with the money. I ended up going to trial and living in an Airbnb in Washington, D.C. for five and a half months, and I didn't even make enough money to cover my Airbnb. My firm lost probably half a million or more dollars on that case, and that hurt. So if you're out there and you want to help, please give us a call, because the bottom line is I'd

try, I'd do it all over again. I mean, there was no place in the United States. I would have rather been during that trial than standing next to my client. How do you guys decipher between the many cases that are probably submitted because once you put yourself out there on social media and you're defending high profile figures, I'm sure there's hundreds if not thousands of cases that get swarmed into you. A lot of them probably frivolous. I don't know. I mean, we have, so where my office is located, I can hear people on the phones and it just, oh, I don't do this anymore. I can't stand that everybody's so unreasonable, you know, won't, you know, can somebody just say thank you once, you know. They write summaries to me, the folks do.

And I read the summaries and I say, is it interesting? Is it something I'd like to do? Do I have time to do it? And is it going to help me pay the bills? And if the answer to all of those is yes, then I'll call. Usually it's a representative of the client or arrange a legal call if the client is in, as we say in the trade or away. And then, you know, have a discussion.

And among the questions I ask is, you know, how'd you find me? Oh, I've right about you online. And I'll say, well, that's a horrible place to go shop. You know, I mean, you know, and then, you know, I'll ask them what their expectations are. And if the expectations are unreasonable and they won't listen to me when I push back, I'll say no. So I think for me, you know, I turned 70 in September. And, you know, doctor tells me I'm healthy and I don't intend ever to retire. People say, when are you going to retire?

And I'm dead. I love cross-examining people. I think what we can know about the external world is an endlessly fascinating topic and challenging your certainty and finding the degree to which what you tell me is reliable is the life of a criminal defense lawyer. And so I choose no other. But I also know that at this age, you know, I mean, the reason I have a younger partner is is I know that one of these days I'm just going to drop dead.

And the clients in the firm need a new hand at the death. And so that she is it. She's the managing partner. I'm like my own employee now. You know, we're moving offices in January. I didn't want to move, but she thought it was a good idea. Tell me where to go. And so for me, it's about passion.

Do I like the case? Is it some, I love cases that are steeped in science, you know, cases that require me to learn stuff. I loved the political cases early in the Trump administration. You know, I represented the proud boys. I represented Nick Fuentes. I represented Mike Cernovich. You know, I've been consulted by people with interest, all the right-wing names in the marquee and have had calls from all over the country on them.

Those were fascinating cases. I think for me, I hope to live another 10 and practice another 10 to 15 years. I think AI is the frontier of the future. Who controls the algorithms, controls the world, and how the various populisms react to that is going to present challenges to fundamental freedoms, freedoms of association, freedoms of thought, freedom to be the person you want to be. So I'd like to be on the front line of those fights. I just saw that ruling chat GPT just came out with about not offering legal advice. Do you think that helps lawyers or hurts lawyers? I don't think lawyers have adapted to chat to AI yet.

It's really unreliable. There's this problem of hallucinations. You ask an AI device for help, and it'll give you help. So when I got my first AI device, I remember what it was, I asked them to do a I said, who's Norm Pettis? And it gave me all this shit. And it was so much better than I am. It had me going to law school I didn't go to. I clerk for a federal judge I never heard of, you know. I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool.

I should stop. And then I had a brief petition to do in the U.S. Supreme Court, and I was having difficulty conceptualizing the issues to just write. So I thought, you know, let's see what happens. Give me 14,000 words on this. And so moments later, there it was. And there were three cases cited in it that told me. me, I was right. And I'm like, I had heard of one, the other two I hadn't heard of. So I looked

up the two I hadn't heard of. They didn't exist. I looked up the first one. It didn't say what the AI device said it did. So that's an AI hallucination. Lawyers are getting in a great deal of trouble by submitting hallucinated briefs to the court. The court does the research and boom, you're out. That happened in the Michael Cohen case, of Trump's lawyer, because he wrote it for his attorney who submitted it and the judge said this doesn't exist. It happened to me just the other day. You know, I'm teeing up an issue and, and what I find AI to be useful for is, is how do other people see things, you know, because of what it's doing is it's scraping the written world for content and it's showing you the perceptions of others. But I, you know, I looked at something and it gave me a case, again, told me I was right and I looked up the case. It was wrong.

Or in another occasion, you know, I've written four books and I want to write a book on the Proud Boys case. I can't find the time. One these days I hope to. So I wanted to see what AI would do with it. And then, you know, good, you know, average book, 80 to 100,000 words. So I said, give me 90,000 words on this perspective on the proud boys case. And there it was. And so, you know, I didn't read it carefully because the writing is horrible.

But, you know, it's not elegant. It's not graceful. It's not fun to read. But it's serviceable. And I looked through it and I thought, okay, you know, that's an interesting perspective. Hadn't thought of this. Hadn't thought of that. So I filed it away.

and someday, you know, I may use that to inform what I write if I get around writing it. Have you gotten to hear kind of like the rumblings from these prosecutors who spend hours and months and, you know, weeks, maybe even years prosecuting certain people only to just get a pardon? Not personally, but, you know, I know that in the January 6 cases arising from the violence at the Capitol that day, I had any number of those cases. And some of the folks got pardons and some got commutations. And a commutation is not forgiveness of the felony. We need pardons for these guys because they lost military pensions as a result. Prosecutors, I think, are frustrated, you know, I think. So the answer to your question is no, but I can imagine a frustrated prosecutor saying,

I applied the law as given I got the verdict and now you're taking it away. But these January 6 cases were all political in the beginning. And, you know, in my view, the insurrection cases should never have been brought. The United States is a violent country, period, full stop. When I was growing up in the 1970s, we had bombings daily in this country. The weather underground was active. Look at the history of our country in every era has had violence that would make people wet themselves today. Social media has made us into a nation of hysterics that we can't live with ourselves

and live with one another. And the danger is that we're now penalizing speech because the speech makes it uncomfortable. So we've become a nation of pussies. Now, I want to talk about court sentencing. Do you believe that a judge will actually read every letter it gets? Because I look at some of these cases where there's hundreds of character letters sent in. Is the judge reading every single one of them? I'd like to believe they are.

I mean, you know, I've not seen hundreds. I mean, I won't submit more than 20 or 25 on the theory. that they become repetitive, so you pick the best. I've heard many, I've had friends become judges, and I've heard judges say that the hardest thing they do is sentence, and I think a good and conscientious judge does read everything. You know, they have four things to do with a criminal sentence. They have to deter, generally deter others.

You can't do what this guy did. They have to specifically deter the person charged or convicted. I don't want you to do it again. So I'm going to send a message to you. into the world. Then they want to give the person rehabilitation services, if necessary, and then they want to punish. And they want to punish the person, and they've got to know who the person is. Sometimes people make an honest mistake and really shouldn't go to jail or shouldn't go for long enough or all that long. You know, if you've got to send a message, yeah, 30 days will do

rather than 10 years. And I think how a judge arrives at that decision, just desserts, as it were, you know, is informed by letters and by the pre-sentence report, by the trial memoranda, by the argument, by the defendant's conduct, both in trial and at the hearing. I'll never forget a case I had. It was a state court case here in Connecticut. Somebody ends up dead, and it's the client's girlfriend. She's gutshot, bleeds out, dies in the house. Police arrive.

He claims it was a home invasion. The evidence doesn't support that, so they charge him with murder. I argue to the jury, it wasn't murder. Murder is the specific intent, the conscious objective to cause someone's death. If you're going to stand three feet from somebody and try to kill them, where are you going to shoot him? In the head, shatter in the stomach, it wasn't murder. At most, it was a reckless manslaughter. So the jury acquitted of murder and convicted of manslaughter with a firearm.

Now, in Connecticut, that's five years to 40 years. So he was going to do a minimum of five, a maximum of 40. he did not help himself at sentencing when the victim's family talked about what a wonderful human being she was and he sneered audibly such that the judge could hear and see yeah right that was a 40 year sentence do you think a defendant gets a fair sentence if they go to trial and the judge gets to understand the whole case rather than just someone signing a plea deal and the judge doesn't know who they are or the facts of the case to a full extent That's a complicated question that really raises issues about the so-called trial tax. I think that the prosecution in many judges say there's no such thing as a penalty for going to trial. There's the benefit you get from an early plea before the case is fully known to the court. You raise the possibility that once a case is fully known, the court might be more lenient

because he'll understand the mitigating circumstances that were presented at trial. having said that, I believe that a person who goes to trial is penalized more heavily than a person who doesn't, and that we do tax people for going to trial. 97% or so of federal cases are resolved by a plea. It's well under the mid-90s on state cases. If everybody that was tried wanted to go to a trial, the system would crash. And so the court's sending a message at sentencing. You don't want to do it.

You don't want to go to trial. Because if you go to trial, you're going to get scorched. And what's proof of that? go to a low-level court sometime and look at the business that gets moved in the court that day. Maybe it will be 100 cases. What are the first two that are typically called? A sentencing. They're sending a message to the other 98 people in the room.

This could be you. Cut a deal. How do you feel about the pre-sendence reports, especially in the federal system? Because I know in my case, I think it was kind of unfair that I felt like the pretrial officer just took what the government wrote and put it onto there. Well, they do that. the government's version. You have a right for an offender's version, and you have a right to produce as much information as you like. So for me, you know, if you've been convicted or you've entered a plea, the government's entitled to what it has to say, but you're entitled to what you

have to say, and it's incumbent on you or your lawyer to develop those themes. I don't like pre-sentence officers in general, no offense folks, if you're listening. But, you know, I just wake up in the morning and say, well, what kind of person decides, oh, I've got so many years to live and I want to spend them locking people up. Oh, I want to decide what to recommend for prison for a person I've never met. That just sounds to me like a person who does that's sort of unhinged at birth. But if we have to have that function, then you better get a lawyer who's going to tell your side of the story. Do you think judges understand that that pretrial officer wasn't necessarily involved in the case and can only give so much input? Yes.

You know, they're employees of the court, and they're there to generally develop background information. The facts of the case, there's usually in the federal case, there's what's called the stipulation of offense conduct. If you enter a plea, the parties will agree about what the facts are. And if there's a disagreement that can't be worked out, but the pleas to be accepted, there are so-called Fatico hearings, at least that's what they're called in the Second Circuit, where we are now. Typically, in a white-collar case, this involves loss amount. and the loss amount, how it gets calculated, is just bizarre. It's the wild, wild west out there. And so I would never, ever trust a pre-sentence officer to do the loss amount, unless it was the loss amount I agreed with.

But I think in terms of general biographical information, I'd rather have them do all that work than me. With over 30 years experience as an attorney, what would you say is the biggest lesson you took away from that so far? Go to medical school. No. I still love it. You know, I start each day with some time with the Roman Catholic missile or readings from the Old New Testament, the epistles, devotional readings. I read through the Bible, cover to cover from time to time, you know, that just started another journey through. And I'm struck by verses like, you know, Moses saying, here I am.

I'm struck and I've talked before, you know, greater love had. man than this then lay down his life for a friend. I'm struck by God's solicitude for the fatherless and for the orphan and for the need and by some of the Old Testament prophets, Amos, the need to do justice. I think that for me, and it sounds corny, but it's true, the thing, when I die, if I'm sentient at that moment, I'll say, I'm proud of the fact that I got my kids through college without debt. I'm proud of the fact that my wife is what I call her the globe-trotting grandmother. She can go visit our six grandchildren all over the world whenever she wants. And I'm proud of the fact that I stood next to people at the worst moment of their life and lent them the dignity

that is reflected in the rule of law. If the government's going to fuck with you, they've got to do it the right way at the right time and in the right manner. And it's my job to make sure they do it. And it's my job to make sure that you feel the love, the love of God present even in that courtroom. Norma, I appreciate you coming on the show today. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is such a great conversation. You think so? Yeah, I hope so.

No, you did great. I tried to be straight, you know. No, no. I'm always worried about time. You know, I've got to run the new London. Yeah, no, you're on a mission. No, you did great. And I appreciate you giving us the time today.

Thank you.