A Look Into My Internship With the Alamance County Public Defender’s Office
By Grant Gergen
This past summer I spent my first summer as a law student interning at Alamance County’s newly opened public defender’s office. The reason I chose this opportunity truly began from my time in college and the long journey I took before entering law school. I began law school as somewhat of a non-traditional student, having graduated from undergraduate studies at the University of Florida in 2019. I spent the next fifteen months living in Ecuador as a teacher for the Peace Corps (unfortunately, cut short by the pandemic), after that, a year in Wyoming for AmeriCorps, then, two years of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and finally, choosing to attend law school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
The right balance of circumstances and chance brings someone to where they are now. My path to becoming interested in working in public defense began with the right professor, in the right class, in my sophomore year of college. This man, whom many University of Florida college grads who went on to law school came to know, was Samuel Stafford. Professor Stafford teaches part-time at the University of Florida, with most of his hours and responsibilities dedicated to his work as a judge in Alachua County. It was him, and as a sad testament to our society’s failure to educate on inequality and injustice, and him alone, who pulled the curtain back on the deeply classist and racist strands that weave the American fabric and that touch virtually all aspects of our country’s criminal legal system. There is a much greater amount of text that could be written here to talk about my experiences in Professor Stafford’s three college courses (Civil Liberties; Constitutional Law; Race, Law, and the Constitution), which all took place at an almost-impossible-for-a-college-undergrad time of 7:25 a.m. in the morning.
I believe that these courses enabled me not only to think more critically about the inequality built into our country but also to actually see it in the everydayness of life when I looked the right way. Perhaps I would have found myself down a similar path eventually, but it was these experiences in the classroom with Professor Stafford that likely stand as some of the greatest inflection points in my life.
As described near the beginning, following college my life wound through Ecuador, Wyoming, and Wisconsin to now North Carolina. The choices I have made at each stage reflect a desire to not only build the critical lens that I had been taught by Professor Stafford, but to place myself in opportunities and positions where I could serve, and learn alongside others.
Always the reader, I spent those in-between years of college and law school in books relevant to my interests (with a healthy dose of randomly selected fiction), trying to think about ways I could use the privilege of my education and identity to somehow live a life that, while likely not in a position to change the world by any means, would maybe alleviate the harm of existing systems, or that would allow me to at least help where I could be most useful.
Again, without diving into all the events, thoughts, and nuances that brought me to write about my past summer’s internship experience, the path I have chosen (at least momentarily, I suppose; all things can change) when I entered law school was to work in indigent defense. I entered with this goal, and this past summer working in a tiny building and courthouse in Graham, NC has not dissuaded me in the slightest from this goal. Rather, this summer confirmed to me all the wretchedness that exists in our criminal legal system, and the need that exists for people like me and others to try and find some way to work against the grinding wheel of injustice that pervades relentlessly against those impoverished and marginalized in America.
My summer at a public defender’s office taught me that, yes, some people harm and hurt others (as we always have as a species, sadly), sometimes in horrendous and sickening ways, but that the vast bulk of what we choose to label as crime (remember, we construct this category) takes place in the backdrop of people’s lives who are experiencing deep poverty inflicted by an economic and political system that deliberately devalues the poor, working class, and non-white. During my internship at Alamance County, I spoke almost daily with the newly arrested ahead of their first appearances, hearing stories of addiction, despair, family, death and poverty, some accepting the reality of knowing they could sit for months in the inhumane conditions of the local jail and others fighting for a chance to get out to save their jobs, get their kids to school and fed, or get to an important medical appointment. Later in the afternoon, I would represent the new arrestees under the supervision of a staff attorney and work to relay to the judge the humanity of the person they were deciding to set bond on.
At this newly minted office dedicated to indigent defense, the attorneys I worked with seemed to, implicitly at least, recognize that I was looking for as much exposure as possible as to what it looks like being a public defender. The day in/day out of being a never-ending grind of new clients appointed, families calling about their loved ones still stuck in jail, filing motions, continuing cases, dealing with prosecutors who have seemingly forgotten the humanity that exists even within those who do harm, and working cases through an obstinate, slow-moving court system. I was able to see and experience all this and more. I understand better that the life of a public defender is tough work, there’s never enough that can be done in the face of resource and time constraints, and, ultimately, people just want to get out of jail or get the legal process over with, which compels them to take plea deals. What I saw over this past summer was not a good system, but a ruthlessly efficient one that takes people who are already in bad life situations and worsens it through its dehumanizing nature and failure to even bother to think about the root causes that cycles the poor in and out of the criminal legal system.
What we have built is a failure, and it’s been a failure for decades. Despite this, I cannot turn away from it. There is a role for me in this systemic disaster where I might be able to make a client’s life a little bit easier, prevent a bad situation from becoming far worse, or ensure that someone is heard and that they know that someone is fighting for them, someone who is willing to protect their rights and human dignity at all costs in the face of a system that will never actually solve problems, but only deepen the sickness of inequality and injustice that we have built our criminal legal system to maintain.
Grant Gergen is a second-year law student at the University of North Carolina School of Law. This year, the NCBA’s Government & Public Sector Section partnered with the Zoning, Planning, & Land Use Section and the Criminal Justice Section to provide joint scholarships to law students who show demonstrated interest in public service and who work in an unpaid summer internship in a federal, state, or local government office in North Carolina. Gergen received a $1,200 scholarship to support his internship with Alamance County’s public defender’s office in summer 2024.