Inside a stuffy, overcrowded Miami-Dade misdemeanor court, a 13-year-old boy clad in an orange jumpsuit watches in awe as his lawyer artfully demands that the judge toss evidence the prosecution has against the teenager.
On most days, Ben Reiss of the prestigious Greenberg Traurig firm defends commercial companies in cases with such high stakes they almost always settle out of court.
Today, he's fighting tooth and nail for an impoverished city kid, filing a motion to toss the improperly gathered evidence that's led to a piddling marijuana possession charge.
"The look on his face, when he realized that someone was fighting for him and when he saw the judge agree and toss the charge ... it was like he believed in justice again," Reiss said later in an interview. "It was beautiful."
So how exactly did a high-priced corporate lawyer end up defending an indigent minor on a drug charge?
It's the latest idea from Miami-Dade's massively over-worked and under-funded Public Defenders Office.
But in the meantime, his plan to pull white-shoe civil law firms
into pro bono misdemeanor cases has already born some fruit. About two
dozen civil lawyers have trained to represent clients who can't afford
attorneys since Martinez put out the call for help in January, says
Robert Coppel, the PD's director of training and professionalism.
"A lot of them want the chance to litigate a criminal case in court,
because they don't get to do that on a daily basis," Coppel says.
That's what drew in Lisa Pisciotta, an attorney at Hughes, Hubbard
and Reed who's working on her first ever criminal case -- a DUI.
"Our cases are generally worth so much money that they frequently
don't go to trial at all," Pisciotta says. "And when they do, a very
experience partner usually handles the trial. So this is a great
experience for me."
Poor defendants, meanwhile, get all the energy the Reisses and
Pisciattas of the world normally pour into keeping their deep-pocketed
corporate clients out of trouble.
After the judge accepted Reiss' motion to throw out the evidence
against his 13-year-old client, the state attorney's office dropped all
the charges, Reiss says. Along with some other attorneys from his
office, he's already working on five new cases for the public
defender's office.
"If we can take some cases off their hands so they have more time for their felony caseload, that's great," Reiss says. "But we really relish the opportunity to work on these cases in the first place."
