By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer

Lawyers don’t always have the best reputations and public defenders are often portrayed as overworked and unprepared.

Local attorney Jerome Price is working to change perceptions one case at a time. Price serves as first assistant federal defender for the Eastern District of California and while he’s doing more supervising these days, he’s still representing clients – and the legal profession – in courtrooms across the state.

“We sort of get wrapped up into the perception of public defenders, in the perception of being overloaded, not caring, not knowing your client’s name. It’s completely different. We know their family, we know everybody,” Price says.

The Eastern District spans from the Oregon border to the northern tip of Los Angeles County. Its jurisdiction includes three of the state’s 10 most populated cities – Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield. There are federal courthouses in Sacramento and Fresno. Federal public defenders like Price are appointed by the court to represent defendants who are unable to hire their own attorneys.

“We have vertical representation, meaning an attorney will be assigned to a case at the very outset and they will stay with that client until the end of the case whether the client’s acquitted at trial or whether they’re sentenced and we handle appeals to the Ninth Circuit, even up to the U.S. Supreme Court, if a cert is granted,” Price says.

Federal public defenders tend to have smaller caseloads, which can mean more time to focus on each client.

“In the federal system, it’s very manageable,” Price says. We don’t have the same volume that the state does. They have to take whatever comes in, essentially. In the federal system, a lot of our cases are going to be the product of sometimes months-long investigations. When the U.S. Attorney feels like it’s appropriate that you have enough evidence to charge somebody, then they will charge them.”

In his 11 years in the Eastern District, Price’s personal cases have spanned the gamut.

“Sometimes, you’ll get a case, what we call a ‘complaint,’ where something just happens and a federal agency has to react. There may be an incident in the national park or maybe an incident at a prison or [on] some sort of federal land where something happens and you’re reacting to it. But a lot of the cases are going to be based on an investigation – wiretaps with drug cases; we get a lot of child porn cases, either the possession, distribution, production of child pornography; sex trafficking cases; a lot of firearm cases now; sort of the run-of-the-mill firearm cases, being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm.

“Somebody who has a felony conviction gets caught with a firearm. There’s dual jurisdiction. The state can charge that person and the federal government can charge that person if the firearm traveled in interstate commerce, and most firearms aren’t manufactured in California typically, so most firearms are going to be interstate commerce. And sometimes manufacturing, selling and dealing without a license, [we get] those types of cases as well.”

A Certain Appeal

Price went into public defense even though there are more attractive, i.e. lucrative, forms of law.

“When I went to law school, I wanted to be a civil rights attorney,” he says. “I was very inspired by Johnnie Cochran and being a young man when the O.J. Simpson trial was going on.”

Price grew up in Turlock. There weren’t many lawyers in the small Black community at the time.

“My parents are both from Los Angeles,” Price shares. “They moved to Stanislaus County to go to Stanislaus State. The college brought a lot of the Black community there actually – people who were originally from Los Angeles, maybe some of the Bay Area. During the ’70s and ’80s, there was a push for affirmative action. There are people who had generationally been in that area, but that’s my story.

“I didn’t have the exposure to an attorney. So when I saw on TV – the whole world saw – this brilliant attorney who was very capable, very competent. I said, ‘I want to do that.’ 

Cochran led a “dream team” of attorneys in successfully defending football legend Simpson, who is Black, against multiple murder charges in 1995. His in-court line, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” is now legendary in its own right.

“It connected me to something I think that was within me already,” Price says of watching the late Cochran in action.

“I wanted to fight for the underdog. I’m very bothered to this day still by police brutality cases. I just feel like that was perfect, being a trial lawyer to sort of vindicate the rights of people who have been abused by the police. That was back then and look at the new wave that’s been going on. This police brutality has been front and center the last couple of years.”

While Price wasn’t initially interested in criminal law, he’s always been “kind of defense-leaning.” 

In a defining moment, Price did a federal clerkship for a legendary Detroit judge, Damon Keith. Judge Keith passed away in 2019, still presiding at the age of 96.

“He was the best mentor I could imagine,” Price says. “In the course of the clerkship, I was exposed to issues in the criminal laws because you’re dealing with them, because those types of cases are coming to the court and I got really intellectually interested in criminal law. I wanted to be a trial lawyer, so that dovetailed real nicely to either being a prosecutor or a public defender, because those are the type of lawyers who get to go in courtrooms most often.

“That goes back to how the frustration is and how limited our role can be sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes we’re just explaining an unjust situation to our clients and really there’s nothing we can do to change that.

“I came to the realization, this is about 2011, that I think a lot of the civil rights issues of my generation are going to be involved in the criminal justice system, and I said, ‘I want to be a trial lawyer.’”

Race To Judgment

“It’s been interesting work, but I’ve been very satisfied with being a federal public defender,” Price says.

He’s leading in interesting times.

“Just in the time I’ve been here, there’s sort of a culture shift in how we think about mass incarceration,” Price says. “We’ve seen sort of an equalization of, for example, the powder to crack cocaine. Sentencing. I’ve kind of had an opportunity to see that pendulum shift. It’s a pendulum, so it can go back and forth with any given administration.”

Price also has had time to ponder the disproportionality of Blacks in the criminal court system and the carceral system.

“I would imagine there are civil rights issues in every stage of what we do,” he says. “In terms of who gets arrested, who gets stopped, who gets prosecuted, which charges are levied against the person when they get here. Who gets the federal public defender versus who gets the [Criminal Justice Act] attorney, versus who goes out and retains an attorney that may not be as resourced as the federal public defender’s office, but because of the perception of having a court-appointed attorney, they believe it’s better to get a private attorney. Who gets released from custody at the very initial appearance? One of the first determinations is whether you can be released from custody while pending the outcome of this case or whether you’re going to remain detained pending the outcome of this case, and our district cases can take a year and a half, two years, that’s not uncommon at all, so that is a very important determination.”

The issue of implicit bias in the courtroom has been getting attention of late. In January the Legislative Analyst’s Office released a report, “Promoting Equity in the Parole Hearing Process.” Analysts found that commissioners have “overly broad discretion” in determining who gets parole and that can lead to inequitable outcomes for people of color. In 2019, the Prison Policy Initiative found that in large urban areas, Black felony defendants were more than 25% more likely than white defendants to be held pretrial.

Race doesn’t play out overtly in the courtroom, Price says.

“It’s not like you’re going to hear the judge say, ‘You’re Black, so …,’ but you notice these patterns. You notice that they’re African Americans who tend to be detained more than their white counterparts.”

It’s a pervasive issue.

“There are actually interesting studies being done going all the way to Afrocentric features,” Price says. “I went to a … seminar a couple of years ago and there was a retired federal judge who was talking about how defendants with Afrocentric features tend to get harsher sentences. I can imagine that that plays out in detention, in who we perceive to be dangerous. One of the big issues in detention hearings is, are you at risk of non-appearance? They believe that if we release you, you’re going to flee or are you a danger? That danger component really came into effect in the late ’80s with the Bail Reform Act of 1984. That was the first time the perception of somebody’s dangerousness became a factor in terms of whether they can be released, because the whole idea was you’re presumed innocent. We’ve been in that system since the 1980s.”

‘Walking A Fine Line’

The knowledge exists, but using it to help clients isn’t easy.

“You have to first be armed with that information,” Price says. “It’s very difficult as a practical matter to approach a judge when you have an African American client to try to get at this issue that there was bias, either implicit or otherwise, these factors that are maybe making this judge see my client differently. I’ve noticed I’ve had to work extra hard when I have African American clients, whereas with clients who weren’t – for example, say a white woman who may look a certain way. I can go into this and no one’s going to say I’ve got to take this person. So how do you address that? How do you get at that?”

You can’t say, “What if my client was white?” as Matthew McConaughey did in the 1996 film “A Time to Kill.” In the movie, McConaughey plays a Mississippi attorney defending a Black man who killed the white men who raped his little girl. In his closing arguments, the attorney asks members of the jury to close their eyes and imagine if the girl had been white. Would they see her right to justice differently? Would they see her differently? 

“You can’t really do that,” Price says.

Holding up a mirror to a system often results in pushback.

“You don’t want to go in there and say, ‘This whole system is racist,’” Price says.

“And I think judges genuinely believe that they’re doing the right thing, that they’re not being discriminatory. A lot of this, I think, going back to perception, is just implicit. As an advocate, you’re really walking a fine line because you need the judge to make other decisions on this case. You don’t want to anger the decision maker, but you do need to speak truth to power. That’s the tightrope we walk. How do you speak truth to power, because you need to educate and I look at it as a lawyer, you’re constantly charged with educating decision makers.”

Data helps, he says, because it calls a thing a thing, as does bringing in experts to testify, as they can help judges look at things from a different perspective.

Price points to how pretrial services recommends whether to release or detain people based on previous arrests. That’s problematic for African Americans.

“There’s probably issues of implicit bias caught up in that because part of the assessment might be how many law enforcement contacts that they have. One of the things that they put in pretrial service reports is how many arrests has this particular defendant sustained. That doesn’t take into consideration overpolicing in the Black community. The Black community is overpoliced, so the likelihood that you’re going to confront or interact with a police officer is much higher than in some more suburban, white communities.”

Improving Faith In Justice 

A lot more needs to be done in looking and evaluating who’s getting released, Price says.

“That’s the key in federal cases, to try to get released from custody because then you can either go to a program, if you have a drug addiction, you can resolve that addiction or get help for that addiction, get employment, do the things that are putting you on the track to be a productive citizen. So when you get to sentencing you’re looking at a judge and you’re saying, ‘Look, judge, my client is doing all the things we want him to do anyway. What purpose will imprisoning my client do?’”

Price is “doing the work” against the backdrop of calls to defund the police and shut down more prisons. Low public confidence in the system hurts him deeply.

“People look at the courts and they expect justice,” he says. “That’s a problem that the court system itself is grappling with, [the question of] how do you project and how do you improve public confidence in the courts, which aren’t supposed to be politicized and aren’t supposed to be political?

Price is both passionate and humble.

“I feel like I’m making the most impact through the individual cases that I touch, but that’s just the one case. I don’t feel like I make, necessarily, broad impact. Though being in management and being a supervisor allows me to kind of feel like I’m doing more because I’m able to assist attorneys and shape policies and make hiring decisions, things that could have bigger change.”

Price isn’t satisfied that there’s enough diversity coming down the pipeline, so he does what he can to encourage the next generation and to raise visibility of Black attorneys. He engages with high school students and serves as a mentor at mock trials at his alma mater, UC Berkeley.

“I love to be involved,” he says.

Students have to see career options to see themselves following those paths.

“I didn’t know about the federal public defender’s office when I was in law school, but I’ve spent most of my career here to date,” Price says. “It’s about outreach and educating people about what we do and why it is important to have people of color in this.”

“I think diversity is very important,” he continues. “Iron sharpens iron. You need to have African American lawyers in your office, you need to have African American judges, you need to have African American probation officers and not just African Americans, but there needs to be a healthy diversity because we’re going to make each other better in our respective offices. Then ultimately, that’s going to hopefully make the system work a little better. The system is always going to be [around]. I don’t see prisons going away. There’s always gonna be that incarceration in the foreseeable future. But even within this system, there can be a lot of changes that result in much fairer sentences. That’s sort of the crusade we’re on right now, to do that lofty work.”