Briefcase on the Kitchen Table

There are moments in life that bring everything into sharp perspective, a flip-your-world-upside-down reality check. I had one of those this past week.

For my final year in law school I have had the privilege of working in the Legal Clinic at my school. I work in the Criminal Defense Clinic. Our clinic works only with individuals suffering from severe mental illness. We are student public defenders working with a seriously stigmatized population. While there is no end to the obstacles my clients face, well outside of what is considered “normal”, I must say I love the work.

Part of doing this job means finding joy in the little wins, because there aren’t a lot of big wins in this business. Getting a client housing, getting a client psychologically stabilized, taking care of an ordinance violation, or getting a client a plea-deal that won’t interfere with their treatment; all of these go on the list of little victories.

However, these don’t feel like little victories to our clients. These are big victories. Most of our clients are invisible people; there is no part of mainstream society that so much as acknowledges their existence let alone helps them. For many of our clients, the student attorneys at the clinic are the first people they have had advocating for them in years. Because of this, these “little victories” bring clients to tears. I had one these clients just a few weeks ago. We will call her Mary.

Mary had been picked up on a misdemeanor drug paraphernalia charge and, with a lengthy rap sheet (nothing violent), she was worried she was not going to get out of jail this time. I was able to work with the prosecutor and explain the situation; that she had serious drug dependency as way of self-medicating several severe mental illnesses and that part of her plea was going to be active engagement with one of the Clinic’s social workers to get her stabilized. When Mary came into court in her orange jumpsuit that morning the judge said she was going to be released. Mary cried and hugged me.

After that we worked with Mary for several weeks to get her on track with services and doctors. Then one day we couldn’t get a hold of her anymore. We called, checked with family members, nothing. Then this past week my professor came in to the workroom and told me that they had found Mary; she had been found dead behind a vacant house having been shot several times.

I didn’t know what to feel. This woman had been crying with happiness only two weeks prior, overwhelmed with emotion as someone was finally on her side, helping her; now she was dead. I had a wide range of emotions over the next few hours; sadness for Mary and her family; frustration for working so hard and for what; and then anger. And it is the anger that has stuck.

I am not angry at Mary. We have since found out that she went off the map because she began using drugs again. You may think this should make me mad but it doesn’t. Working with mentally-ill drug abusers comes with relapse; it is just part of the deal. What makes me mad is that no one is really going to look that hard for the person who killed her. We can call police stations and family members and try to pressure more investigation but eventually it will die down; law students who have decided to work in the world of the mentally-ill and criminally-culpable don’t have the political clout needed to keep such an investigation alive.

To the rest of society she has too many strikes against her. She was 29. She lived in the slums of St. Louis. She was a single mother of multiple children. She was a drug addict. She suffered from multiple mental illnesses. This is only a small piece of Mary’s story but it what much of the world will use to define her and subsequently as a justification to ignore her.

What makes me mad is that I can’t make Mary un-invisible.