San Francisco Chronicle - March, 01 2002

PRESUMED GUILTY: Documentary. 9 tonight, KQED (Channel 9). Television movies, not to mention recurring cop and lawyer series, only dream of having the goods that “Presumed Guilty” has bursting out of its seams.

As part of KQED’s “Bay Window” series, “Presumed Guilty” gets its first television airing tonight and then will air nationally on the PBS system in the fall. For Bay Area viewers, there’s plenty of headline-grabbing history wrapped inside.

Shot over the course of three years, “Presumed Guilty” looks at the inner workings of the San Francisco public defender’s office and its struggle to represent the 90 percent of the population that can’t afford a personal lawyer.

The public defender’s office has 80 attorneys handling roughly 19,000 cases a year. At the time of the filming, Jeff Adachi was second in command, the chief attorney in the office. Adachi is described by a fellow attorney this way: “If this was some sort of tribe, he’d be the high priest.”

San Franciscans know by now one of the kickers in this documentary—that despite years of dedication to the job and the respect of his fellow public defenders, when Adachi’s boss quits, Mayor Willie Brown swears in politically connected family friend Kimiko Burton, who promptly informs Adachi that he’s no longer needed.

For filmmakers Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy, the news is just another eye- opening revelation in a documentary that is already touching on two famous trials—the murder-for-hire case known as the “Pink Tarantula Murder” and the “Tenderloin Confidential” trial, where a powerful gangster was gunned down by a teenager.

Yates and Kinoy get to the essence of a public defender’s life, what motivates them to take a job where you normally lose far more often than win, by focusing on Will Maas, who’s representing the defendant in the murder-for- hire of a San Francisco hairdresser, and Adachi, who’s representing the defendant, now an adult, in the Tenderloin gangland killing.

Mixed in, we get seasoned advice and perspective from public defender Stephen Rosen, someone who understands the complexities of fighting the good fight (especially when not everyone sees it that way). The filmmakers also follow two rookie defenders, Phoenix Streets and Michele Forrar.

Forget “The Practice” or “Philly” or any of the other courtroom dramas. “Presumed Guilty” is the real deal, and the richness the filmmakers extract from the public defenders’ real lives is riveting television. (This documentary recently ran at the Roxie as well.)

It doesn’t hurt “Presumed Guilty” that there’s a rogues’ gallery of witnesses, sartorially challenged investigators, salacious trial details and real lives at risk. “Presumed Guilty” gets to the gray area of public defense - - that sometimes these people really are guilty, that sometimes defending them takes a toll on your soul and that not everyone who’s guilty is a monster at heart.

That’s always the tough trick—avoiding the neat black-and-white morality of a TV show and trying to understand the complexities of crime in this country.

If viewers don’t know or don’t remember the outcome of those two celebrated cases, it only heightens the built-in drama of the documentary. But even if they do, Yates and Kinoy get their cameras into the courtroom and into the jail cells and frame each case with humanity, making each trial more compelling than it might have appeared to be in the paper or on the news.

It’s pure luck, in a sense, that the likable Adachi—who joins his fellow attorneys in opening up his emotions for the documentary—gets the shocking news of his dismissal on camera.

San Francisco politics rears its ugly head in the public defender’s office just when the filmmakers have shown the grueling, emotional roller-coaster lifestyle they lead, and Brown and Burton look like the interlopers they were.

The film ends as Adachi is running for public defender against the woman who fired him, and you can’t help getting a sweet rise knowing he defies the odds as justice prevails at the polls.

But the real meat of “Presumed Guilty” is not so much about the trials that are happening during this three-year filming period. It’s about Maas’ raw, out- there passion or Rosen’s wily insights into the profession or Streets’ (who’s got the style and aplomb to star in his own show) fulfilling his calling in life.

There’s not a lot of glamour being a public defender. The people who do it are passionate about justice and making sure the system doesn’t unfairly put away someone innocent. The attorneys here acknowledge that a lot of the dregs come through, looking to get off, but they remain focused on the big picture --

that even if you’re presumed guilty, that doesn’t mean you are.

The Recorder - February, 27 2002

The Tales They Tell by Terry Diggs

Possibly the worst aspect of our long and nasty Public Defender’s race has been that the political sparring has never adequately communicated what public defenders do-—or ought to do. That’s unfortunate because public defense is ultimately the antithesis of politics. It is rather--as Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates demonstrate in their new San Francisco-shot documentary, Presumed Guilty-- the articulation of the very stories the powerful want least to hear.

Certainly, pop culture has given us an overview of public defender life. There’s the occasional feature film (Suspect), the odd series (100 Centre Street), or the case-specific episode of Nightline. But mass media invariably gives us the job’s accouterments—-shoddy office furniture and brimming file cabinets—-not its alchemy. And the nature of public defense is alchemy: the transmutation of grim biographies into our wisest parables; the transfiguration of other’s lives into the narratives through which we come to understand ourselves.

“If this were some kind of tribe, he’d be a high priest,” a young lawyer says of then-PD Jeff Adachi, whose preparation of a homicide case—the conversion of a street shooting into a saga of human displacement--connects Guilty’s multiple plotlines. But the power to recast horror in such a way that it is recognizable as human tragedy isn’t inherited, it’s earned—-the hard-won accretion, the filmmakers suggest, of a special kind of experience. Guilty makes the gradual building of that skill its subject matter, focusing on four defenders--Adachi, Will Maas, Phoenix Streets and Michele Forrar—-each demanding to tell a story that we would otherwise ignore.

And there’s a reason we’re reticent. Guilty juxtaposes wide-angled shots of the people who roam Seventh Street by night against fixed scenes featuring the elegant commentary of defender Steve Rosen, an observer who articulates the larger social principles that justify vigorous public defense. The gap between reality and Rosen’s ideals is apparent. It’s also deadly, sending would-be defenders—-who revere the constitution, but can never quite see the human potential in their constituents--into new jobs after only a few years.

The bridge between back-alley con men and the constitution has always been the defender, excavating and articulating the backstory: “We take this person and we show him to the jury, and we try to bring out the best in him,” Adachi says. And the best in ourselves, as well. The film’s rookies, Streets and Forrar, overcome culture shock—wryly observed by the filmmakers without comment-—and force jurors to confront questions not raised by the police reports. Eventually, Streets’ panel sees a wrecked and battered alcoholic in the context of her abuse. And Forrar shows jurors something of an unlucky addict in themselves.

“How do I tell the jury who Lam Choi was?” Adachi asks. Kinoy and Yates make the conundrum visual, intercutting scenes of Adachi’s late-night rehearsals--his false starts, his pauses, his abrupt revisions--with images of the chaos that led to the infant Lam’s being swept away in a human storm. Then Adachi marshals facts, showing the unbroken connection between childhood injury and a desperate act committed in the Tenderloin, years later. Ultimately, the work emerges as a public defender’s quintessential argument, the summons to place ourselves in the circumstances of another human being: “Imagine we are in the desert,” Adachi begins, and the invitation is irresistible.

Guilty requires us to recognize that the trial has an singular role in public defense. Neither the civil lawyer’s bargaining chit nor the civil libertarian’s constitutional rite, the jury trial offers the only forum on earth where a PD client’s story will be heard. Indeed, the certainty that a story will remain untold outside the courtroom should create a presumption that--absent a genuinely compelling reason for withholding it—the defense will proceed. Otherwise, we are denied the information that explains what the community is and how it got that way. “I’m always going to be haunted by not having the opportunity to try that case,” Adachi says when Lam accepts a plea bargain before trial. But the complaint has less to do with personal ambition than the loss of air time: Absent the presentation of Lam’s history, twelve San Franciscans will continue to dismiss the consequences of a Southeast Asian diaspora as cultural lawlessness.

If Adachi constructs a personal narrative outside the prosecutor’s case theory, Will Maas builds a human story within it. The effort produces Guilty’s most memorable footage. Representing the suspect in a high-profile murder case, Maas is deluged by images: network depictions of his client as a lethal cyborg; photos of the client’s lovely, laughing victim; police videos of interrogations; and an America’s Most Wanted segment that suggests, through John Walsh’s repeated mispronunciations of the suspect’s name, that no suspect is really entitled to individual identity.

But Maas does something remarkable, establishing his client’s human qualities by revealing his own. To convey the strategy, Guilty juxtaposes trial footage with Maas’ video diary, an intensely personal account of Maas’ fears, his mistakes, and his own inexplicable conduct in Vietnam. In consistently offering his own humanity as issue, Maas opens up the trial, producing a narrative that seems nearer the truth than anything derived from the physical evidence. The point isn’t exculpation but expiation. Eventually, even the prosecutor recognizes the suspect’s human capacity for remorse. If Maas’ method seems aberrational, perhaps it shouldn’t. By film’s end, he has restored law to a kind of grace.

The message we derive from Maas’ private agony is that public defense isn’t produced by appointment. Rather, it is the end product of a hundred tests, a dozen excruciating failures and a thousand dark nights of the soul. “Forgive me,” Maas says in the film’s most moving sequence—Maas’ prayer that, in defending his client, he has not lost his human capacity to mourn the victim. “Sometimes falling into the pit of hopelessness is what you need to open you to an opportunity that’s there,” Adachi says of his own worst pre-trial moment. The point is that building the capacity to defend is excruciating. And it’s supposed to be.

If seminars ("Litigation as Story-Telling") and academic screed ("Nomos and Narrative") have devalued the power of narrative, or overworked the concept of story, they shouldn’t have. Stories have always been the means by which we make sense of our world. And telling is, after all, the only real function of the trial-—not to locate an inviolable truth in fixed facts but to arrive, through the recounting of detail, at the certainty of who we are and how we live and what we value.

God created man because he loved the stories, the adage goes. If so, god produced public defender to ensure those stories would be told. And told they are--in public defender tales that are the sagas of us all.