Committee for Public Counsel Services

RADHA NATARAJAN

Controlled chaos - Five cases, four cities, three courts ... a day in the life of a CPCS lawyer

By Barbara Rabinovitz

This is the first in a series in which Lawyers Weekly spends a day with a legal-services lawyer and reports on what transpired.

Somerville District Court is astir with the business of a busy urban court early this morning — a harbinger of the whirlwind day that awaits Committee for Public Counsel Services staff attorney Radha Natarajan, calmly seated on a wood bench inside the courthouse as 9 a.m. nears.

When this long day is over, Natarajan will have represented clients in Somerville, Malden and Woburn District courts, reported to the Cambridge offices of CPCS to attend to her duties there and returned to Somerville, to her home, for a few more hours of work in the evening.

This schedule and burden of responsibilities as a public defender in Middlesex County seem not to faze the 29-year-old as she scurries from courthouse lobbies to lockups, confers with prosecutors and prisoners, juggles sidebars and cell-phone calls and, in the middle of it all, manages a quick lunch.

It is a job, she tells a reporter over sandwiches at Panera Bread in Everett, somewhere between Somerville and Woburn, that invariably elicits skepticism, if not outright criticism, from those inquiring about her line of legal work.

"Most people ask: 'How can you defend people who are guilty?' or 'Are you ever afraid of your clients?' ... I tell them it's more important for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be jailed. I really believe that," she says, citing an oft-quoted constitutional premise for the right to counsel.

Back at her office by late afternoon, with all five of the clients whose cases she handled earlier in the day still in custody, Natarajan is not deterred.

"There's nothing about today that makes me feel I shouldn't do what I do," she says. "It's important for my clients to know that there is someone who cares, that they know someone is fighting for them."

9:05 a.m. A reporter meets Natarajan inside Somerville District Court where she is deep into the reading of a folder full of court documents about an alleged kidnapping in Malden. It is Thursday, Oct. 25, and, as part of "duty day," she is responsible for picking up serious felony cases in Somerville, Malden and Woburn District courts that are headed for Middlesex Superior Court and also covering for any other CPCS attorneys who may not be able to be in those courts that day.

A CPCS colleague who had been assigned to the kidnap case in Malden is on trial in Superior Court, so Natarajan will fill in for him in that District Court. She has already notified a Somerville court clerk that she has to go to Malden. "They'll just wait for me," she says as she slings a heavy black leather satchel over her shoulder and heads for the exit.

9:25 a.m. Natarajan arrives at Malden District Court and quickly locates the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case. The defendant is alleged, in three separate incidents, to have attempted to lure three high school girls into his car and to have pulled out a gun; he is charged with kidnapping in one incident and attempted kidnapping in the other two. Within minutes, she is bounding down a flight of stairs to speak with him in lockup.

She returns to the lobby to speak with the ADA. The case had previously been scheduled for probable cause and dangerousness hearings, but the prosecution had indicated it was not ready to proceed with the probable cause hearing. Now a hearing date has been set for Nov. 21, and Natarajan has asked First Justice Lee G. Johnson to mark the date with "no further continuances." She says she may move to dismiss the charges on that day if the case remains stalled.

9:58 a.m. Still in the Malden court, Natarajan is awaiting word on whether two other clients have been transported to the Somerville District Court's basement lockup. One client is in custody at the Suffolk County jail in Boston on a drug trafficking charge and is not able to make bail; the other, found to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, is being held in a state hospital in Taunton for three alleged assaults on people over age 60.

Meanwhile, Natarajan hastens downstairs again to consult with the alleged kidnapper. Back upstairs, she learns from the ADA that he plans to speak with the young women who are claiming the defendant victimized them and then will decide whether to prosecute further. After a brief conversation in a noisy hallway in which she updates the client's brother about the status of the case, she leaves the courthouse and heads back to Somerville.

11:02 a.m. En route, Natarajan retrieves a message on her cell phone; a staffer at the CPCS Cambridge office is asking her to call in. A young man is to be arraigned in Woburn District Court on an armed-robbery charge and needs a public defender.

Natarajan asks her secretary to inform a Woburn clerk that she has to be in Somerville until 1 p.m., but that she could be in the Woburn court by 2.

That conversation completed, Natarajan calls a court officer in the Somerville lockup to ask if either of her clients has arrived; they have not.

The cell phone rings, and Natarajan is told to proceed to Woburn in the afternoon. "The court is willing to wait," she says.

11: 17 a.m. Seated in the courtroom of Somerville's presiding justice, Maurice R. Flynn III, Natarajan takes advantage of a break in the morning session to share with a reporter news of the whereabouts of her two clients who were to be brought to the courthouse. Court personnel were not notified that the client being held in the Suffolk facility in Boston was to be transported to Somerville. "They'll set a probable cause [hearing] date here in Somerville, but he'll be arraigned in Middlesex next week," she says. "We can't move to dismiss today; we'll have to wait until that official transference of the case to Middlesex before this District Court case will be dismissed."

Later in the morning, in the case of the man in the Taunton facility, Flynn will tell Natarajan to "pick a status date down the road," and they will settle on Nov. 19.

11:35 a.m. Natarajan learns that a colleague, who had been representing a man charged with domestic abuse and confined in the Somerville lockup, is out sick for the day. She asks the judge for the second call and then leaves the courtroom with the alleged abuse victim, who is accompanied by the defendant's uncle.

11:42 a.m. Natarajan returns to the courtroom and heads down a stairwell alongside the prisoner's dock to speak with her new client.

11:51 a.m. She climbs the stairs up to the courtroom and gestures to the alleged victim, who has a black eye, and the uncle to join her in the lobby.

12:05 p.m. Natarajan approaches the bench and tells Flynn that the woman "does not want to go forward."

But the ADA on the case wants to check with his counterpart in the Superior Court on whether the prosecution should assent to Natarajan's request that the man be released under certain conditions.

"I appreciate the efforts of the lawyers," says Flynn, but "[the alleged victim] made very serious allegations at the time" the defendant was arrested about having been struck with a wrench. He sets a dangerousness hearing for Oct. 29 and announces that the defendant will be held without bail until that time.

During the half-hour Natarajan allows herself for lunch, the Stanford University and New York University Law School graduate offers some insight into her decision to return to Massachusetts (she spent her childhood in Southborough) after law school in 2003 to take a job in the Roxbury office of CPCS.

As a public defender, she says, "I have to make sure my client is humanized. Our job is to tell who that person is, to be a voice for that person."

And if the outcome of that effort is a guilty finding, "the sentence still needs to be appropriate. Our role is to fashion that sentence."

When she tries to answer the skeptics and critics of public counsel work with such explanations, "it's very rarely that I hear, 'That's really great that you do that,'" she says. "I think that people believe that the safety of the public is only in the hands of the prosecution. But I think that we, too, protect the public; we protect the public who can't afford to protect themselves; we protect people from arbitrariness and excessive punishment. ... Very few people recognize that's the role we play."

1:55 p.m. Approaching Woburn by way of traffic-choked Route 93, Natarajan has her cell phone to her ear and is talking with colleagues at the Cambridge office about what needs to be done in anticipation of the following day when she will be away attending a daylong workshop on civil commitments for mentally ill clients.

2:42 p.m. Having visited her client in the Woburn court's lockup, she is in the bar enclosure in the courtroom of District Court Circuit Judge Stephen S. Ostrach as a young man in handcuffs is led into the dock. He is charged with having taken, at knifepoint, the pocketbook of an 83-year-old woman outside a Rite Aid drugstore in North Reading.

Natarajan tells the judge that the woman, shown several police photos of suspects, picked out two people who she said "most resembled" the attacker and that otherwise "the only people who identified him were police officers."

"I find probable cause to hold him," the judge says, setting $5,000 bail and scheduling a probable cause hearing for Nov. 23.

3:20 p.m. Back on Route 93, heading south this time, Natarajan learns about the cancellation of a planned visit to the Somerville Police Department's evidence room. She was to have examined magnetic boxes said to have been used by a client, charged with possession with intent to distribute, to hide 202 bags of heroin along the steel supporting his car's front seats. The ADA on the case is waiting for a jury verdict in another case, and the evidence officer is ending his shift, so the visit is put off until 8 a.m. the following Monday.

3:45 p.m. Seated at her desk in CPCS' cozy quarters on Cambridge Street, around the corner from Middlesex Superior Court on Thorndike Street, Natarajan is asked how she would characterize her day.

"It was certainly busy," she says, a weary smile crossing her face. "I had five cases today where my clients were held. The best, best thing for a public defender is watching the cuffs come off. So I'm just thinking that all of them are in custody, and that's difficult for all of them. Three of them are being held without bail; one is civilly committed; another is being held on $100,000 in Suffolk County."

A note of determination in her voice, she concludes: "Just because it was a difficult day, that doesn't diminish any of my passion or enthusiasm. When I leave my clients in custody, I'm still thinking about them, about getting them the best result and trying to figure out how to make their situation a little better and do the best I can to resolve the case in a way that is appropriate and fair — and kind."

A Day in the Life of a Public Defender