Good morning. In 2003, I became a trial judge in San Diego. Because I had been a civil litigator for my entire legal career, my first assignment was, of course, in a criminal trial department. I didn’t know much about criminal justice. But I had good and kind judicial colleagues who helped whenever I asked, and both the prosecutors and defense attorneys who appeared before me taught me the ropes. When I left the bench in 2013 to work for the Justice Department, I assumed every state criminal trial court worked the way San Diego’s did. Bail was set according to a schedule; unpaid fines and fees were subject to a civil collection process which included the suspension of your driver’s license if you didn’t pay; lawyers—either private counsel or a public defender— were present at every stage of a criminal proceeding from arraignment to sentencing for felonies and misdemeanors. Plea bargaining was the norm, and for misdemeanors, the majority of defendants pled guilty at arraignment with a public defender standing by their side. And I assumed that the criminal justice system I had worked in was fair, just, and certainly constitutional. I was wrong on all counts.
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