The Healing is in the Work: Jen DiFazio's Tragedy

(Please note: all names, firms, and cases are fictional)

Jen DiFazio is a 39 year old criminal defense attorney who has been employed by the law firm Coursey, Bowen, & Cohen for the past six years. She is currently an associate in the firm. Jen is petite and looks young for her age. She tries to compensate with a stern hairdo and impeccable attire on the job. She lives in the South Loop with her life partner of ten years.

Jen has gained a solid reputation for her commitment to defending people against an unjust system, for her passion in the courtroom, and for her attention to detail. She seems to be the only one who has noticed the change in her performance in the last few months. She thinks she can trace the change to the Chuy Mendoza case.

It was just a low-level drug case. Chuy Mendoza had been swept up in a huge bust and caught with a few ounces of weed. After 30 years in Chicago he had no family in Mexico, but wasn't naturalized. Jen's team didn't adequately prepare Chuy for losing at the trial level. He didn't understand his chances on appeal. Right before the trial Chuy told Jen that in the '90s he worked as a mule for the Sinaloa Cartel, and had left on bad terms.

When the judge threw the book at him, Chuy told his wife he wanted out of immigration prison and self-deported to what Jen knew would be an ugly death. All for a few ounces of weed. It had never occurred to Jen that Chuy wouldn't appeal.

Jen knows that she didn't give it her all. Her mother was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer a few days after she took on the case. Jen worked on the briefing as long and as hard as she always did, but she was distracted by fear for her mother and responsibilities to her family. Her mother was in and out of the hospital and her father called Jen every night in need of Jen's support. Jen wonders if the case would have gone differently if it hadn't been for her mother's illness.

Jen can't stop scrutinizing her choices in Chuy's case, heartbroken that she didn't educate sooner. It wasn't the first time that she had been demoralized by the injustices of the system, but in the past she could let losses go and use her anger for the appeal or the next case. Since the Mendoza case, she found her anger increasing after every jail visit and every loss. She felt helpless and lost when she stopped to breathe, so she avoided reflection and pushed herself with an increased workload. When her father called in the evenings, she struggled to not become irritable with him, but she couldn't let herself see how scared he was.

Jen's client Mike Wallace is a naive babyfaced twenty-year-old, who reminds her of a young client of hers who lost his life in County a little over a year ago. She wonders if she's visiting him too much. Whenever she shows up for a jail visit the guards snigger and joke about Mike's "special friend." Jen shrugs it off. Two weeks ago Mike had a ten-thousand yard stare. She asked him what had happened. His whole body shook. Finally he whispered that it was her fault he was still in jail. He told her that she hadn't done anything for him but visit, and that he needed a real lawyer.

Jen wanted to scream at him. She'd be able to represent him better if he'd quit lying about key facts of his case! Instead she calmly said that she understood the huge pressures that were being put on him, and that she understood his hesitance to trust her and the system. She told him the team was working hard on his case. When she got back to her car, she took an advil to kill her pressure headache and pounded the steering wheel with her fists.

Almost every night Jen has to drink a couple of glasses of wine before bed to help her relax. Her partner tries to be supportive but after ten years together he still doesn't understand the legal system and has no capacity to understand the brutality she faces every day. She continues to visit Mike twice a week because she promised his mom she wouldn't let him get killed in jail, but now she has to force herself to work on his case. It doesn't help when her mother finds out that the radiation therapy didn't work. Jen's mother is going back into chemotherapy and wants Jen's support during the treatments.

On the six-month anniversary of the Mendoza sentencing hearing, Jen started her morning at the probable cause hearing of a client who was raped by a cop during a prostitution sting. She tried to clear her head as the hearing began, but the advil took a while to kick in. Then she forgot to file a motion that she had prepared. After the hearing the client, Alicia, told her that she hadn't had her period since the rape and doesn't know who will take the baby if she gives birth in jail. Jen was crushed. That motion probably could have gotten Alicia out. Due to Jen's oversight, Alicia will still be in jail when the baby is born unless someone makes bail, and it will be Jen's fault.

She drank, but she couldn't sleep that night or the next. She lay awake worrying fruitlessly about Alicia, and tormented by guilt over Chuy's fate. On Wednesday, exhausted and with no solutions, Jen scheduled an emergency meeting with a psychiatrist who had good Yelp reviews. She took off early to see him the same day. The psychiatrist only seemed interested in her feelings -- she didn't want to waste her time talking about something as insignificant as her feelings! She wanted to know how she can stop failing her clients! But she cannot admit fault. She is terrified of professional or social liability. She told the psychiatrist that her work is demoralizing and heartbreaking, but not doing it would be even more demoralizing and heartbreaking. The psychiatrist wrote her a prescription. His secretary scheduled her follow-up.

On her way home Jen filled her prescription. She was overwhelmed with anger -- anger at the psychiatrist for wasting her time, anger at herself for her inability to save her clients or be there for her mother or even ask for help, and anger at the world, at the injustices that her clients suffer, at judges and male colleagues who don't take her seriously, at being taken for granted by her father and her partner. Jen took the pills she was prescribed and went on autopilot to a bar she hadn't been to since law school.

Jen awoke in a hospital. She struggled against her IV lines, frantically looking for her phone, desperate to know what day it was, needing to call her office to keep up appearances and find out what damage she had caused by her absence.