There was no way I was going to be Crown Counsel. Two of the friends I had graduated with had chosen that noble calling. “You’ll be serving society, Win,” they tried to tell me when it came time to seek work. “Ridding the streets of unwanted low-lifes, protecting the innocent from the ravages of criminal activity.” Both of them still toil away proudly in the courtrooms on behalf of Her Majesty, working seventy-hour weeks on a civil servant’s salary. I chose the other side.
The real money for a lawyer is in criminal defence. It does take a considerable amount of time to build a reputation and really learn the ins and outs of the Criminal Code. But once a good defence counsel’s name is known, he or she can almost print their own money. When you travel down to the yacht club and see all those two thousand dollar suits getting out of their Jaguars, they’re not the prosecutors.
It isn’t all about the money, however. I like to think I was motivated by a real desire to see justice done. I never really wanted to help criminals get away with their crimes, but I never wanted to see an innocent person go to jail either. There’s an old saying that it’s better to set ten guilty people free than to put one innocent person in jail. I believed that. And while Vancouver isn’t exactly a mecca for police brutality and wrongful convictions, the court system, criminal or civil, is intimidating, and no one should have to go through it without someone helping them along the way. Plus, I’ve always really liked Jaguars.
Since the high-powered firms didn’t want me right out of school, I began my career as defence counsel with Legal Aid: the dreaded Public Defender’s office. This is the place where those with no real means of buying the high-priced Jaguared lawyers come. It is also the place where some of the most difficult, if unsophisticated, legal grunt work gets done. As a newcomer, I was assigned most of the petty cases: theft, break and enter, minor assaults, even vagrancy. Almost all of my cases were related to drugs.
It seemed like a good place to learn the trade, and it was. I learned it so well that within a few years I was managing a team of lawyers in a small firm doing mostly Legal Aid work. And that Jaguar was nowhere in sight. Within four years of beginning my law career, I realized I was working as many hours as my co-graduates in the major Howe Street law firms, for about a tenth of the income.
Worse, no matter how hard I slaved, how many cases I could plead down to misdemeanours, how many injustices I felt I had undone, the workload never ceased or even slowed down. And despite a fairly steady increase in pay that came with a concurrent increase in working hours, as I hit my seven year itch during a mad bout of work-induced stress and depression, I decided that “lawyering” might not be for me. Thus, after a short, illustrious career defending the downtrodden, the petty thieves, the junky prostitutes and runaways, I fled the world of legal defence to work with kids before they hit the court system.
At least that was my stated, altruistic reason. Secretly, I mostly longed to have summers off to sit outside a lakeside cabin and read Oprah’s book club novels. No one can accuse me of insensitivity.
Thus, at the ripe old age of thirty-five, I had begun my second professional career as a high school Social Studies, Law and Communications teacher. Sitting with Carl Turbot now, my former career had just thrust itself brutally into my current one.
Recognizing this conversation with Carl was going to take up a significant portion of our lunch period, I left him stewing in my room while I made the long, arduous trek to the staff washroom, deking out students along the way. I couldn’t help but look in the faces of the students I passed along the way, wondering what kind of pain a student experienced when a teacher crossed “that line” between teacher-student relationship and romantic or sexual relationship.
When I returned to my classroom, lunch in hand, Carl hadn’t moved from the student desk he had flopped into. He looked defeated and—despite all my legal training, which told me I ought to believe in my client’s innocence—I couldn’t resist thinking he should look defeated. If the university’s teacher training program taught us one thing—and believe me, it didn’t teach us all that much—it was that a physical, romantic or sexual relationship between teacher and student is absolutely forbidden. No questions. No exceptions. There was no situation Carl could provide for me that would exonerate him. But since I had rushed into a solicitor-client relationship with him, I was obligated to hear his side of the story. I could only hope he would plead guilty, and I could simply help him get the lightest possible punishment and best rehab.
“Sorry to use up your lunch period.”
“That’s all right. You sound like you need an ear, but I’m gonna eat while you talk if that’s all right.”
“Sure,” he replied, “go ahead.”
I reached down into my lunch bag and pulled out my pathetic meal. Quite recently having returned to bachelorhood, making a decent packed lunch was not a skill I had acquired, and unlike in lawyering, even legal aid lawyering, there are rarely opportunities for going out for a decent lunch when one works as a teacher. Cheez Whiz sandwiches were a staple of my diet. When I was feeling healthy, I also brought carrots, but only if I remembered to buy them pre-cut, pre-peeled and pre-packaged in lunch bag size pouches. I was a busy man, after all.
I waited for Carl to break the awkward silence. After a long pause, he looked at me with doleful eyes and said, “Win, what do I do?”
I sighed, took a bite of a carrot and paused before responding. I have found pregnant pauses often make it look like I’m seriously pondering, when in fact I don’t really have a clue what to do next. For the moment, he seemed to be buying it.
“Carl,” I began, “this is extremely difficult. I have to admit I don’t have much experience in this area of law, but I’m pretty well-versed with the statutes. The bottom line is that this is one area of law that is pretty clear. There’s really no grey area at all. I don’t know what kind of wiggle room we’d have in a trial.”
“Christ, this is unbelievable.”
“Why did she come forward now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you have a disagreement? A fight?”
“This is totally out of the blue. I just don’t understand it. I always got along really well with her, and suddenly she hits me with this. It’s incredible.” He got up and began to pace around the room. “It’s like some kind of vendetta. The thing is, I don’t know what I did to get her so mad at me.”
“Well, Carl, in situations like this, it’s not uncommon for a student to suddenly turn against a teacher. Something suddenly makes them feel like they’ve got to take action.”
“But why? She’d never given any indication anything was wrong.”
“She’s young. She’s taken in by a good-looking teacher. She feels strong, important. Who knows what other things are going on in her life? This could just have been the final straw, and she feels like she wants to get back at someone.”
“Biology is the final straw in a kid’s life? My class isn’t that bad.”
I sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy, but I had to know. “Carl,” I asked, “how long have you been, umm . . . with the student?”
“Forever. She’s in my Biology Twelve class, but I’ve had her since she was in my Grade Nine science class.”
“And you’ve been, umm, ‘together’ all that time?”
“What do you mean?”
He wasn’t going to make this easy. “You’ve been sleeping with her since she was in the ninth grade?”
“Jesus, Win!” he exploded, leaping to his feet and turning to face me head on for the first time. “What kind of an animal do you think I am?”
I was shocked. “Calm down, Carl. I’m just