Arienna Grody \u201910 has worked since September 2014 as a public defender in Birmingham, Alabama. Her client list typically includes some 150 indigent men and women facing charges from armed robbery to failure to pay child support, from burglary to shoplifting.<\/p>\n
A 2014 graduate of the UCLA School of Law, she is the inaugural fellow in a program jointly run by Gideon\u2019s Promise, a nonprofit organization dedicated to public defense reform and several law schools. Aimed at recruiting and training third-year law students to be leaders in public service, the fellowship places them in underserved public defender offices throughout the South. At the end of her own three-year fellowship, Grody will receive a permanent job in the Birmingham public defender\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
Her work is her dream job, a dream inspired by Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mocking Bird and Los Angeles attorney Johnny Cochran, perhaps best known for his successful defense of O.J. Simpson.<\/p>\n
Grody\u2019s ambitions were also nurtured by having grown up in Oakland, California, where she could not help but notice that whites and people of color were were often treated differently. If she and her neighborhood friends were caught violating a curfew, the police would ask her\u2014as the only white person in the group\u2014if she needed a ride home. Meanwhile in such circumstances, her friends were questioned by police, which she suspects was motivated solely by race.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to private schools but lived in a neighborhood where most kids were not going to private schools,\u201d she says. \u201cSeeing the disparities in the way that my friends at school and my friends in my neighborhood were treated really made an impact on me.\u201d<\/p>\n
When considering colleges, Grody,the daughter of a school administrator and the head of an alternative health care center, was drawn to Goucher\u2019s then newly instituted study abroad requirement. Once on campus, she majored in international relations and Spanish, volunteered as a tutor for ESL students, studied abroad in Spain, and co-founded a student-run project called \u201cA Moving Narrative: Facing Immigration,\u201d in which student participants interviewed and photographed immigrants to spark conversations about immigration.<\/p>\n
Now her days typically begin in court negotiating, arguing, filing. She may need to persuade a judge that a client suffering from dementia and schizophrenia did not mean to be disrespectful by smoking in a courthouse restroom. Or she may need to call the family members of a jailed client and patiently listen to their complaints about him before asking them to attend court to express their support of her client. Or she may need to discuss with a jailed 19-year-old charged with robbery both the particulars of his case and whether belief in God is necessary to be a good person.<\/p>\n
She learned early on the value of standing her ground. Once, she was representing a homeless sex offender who didn\u2019t have enough money to pay for an ID and was about to charged with a new felony. Despite being relatively new at the job, Grody argued compellingly on her client\u2019s behalf; in the end, the judge pulled $25 out of his own wallet and paid for her client\u2019s ID.<\/p>\n
The work can be grindingly difficult, and it can bring disappointments. Some clients are mentally ill and don\u2019t fully grasp the importance of compliance. Some are disaffected and don\u2019t care. Others disappear into the system, seemingly \u201clost\u201d to counsel and the courts for days
\nat a time. \u201cOur clients are not viewed as people whose lives matter,\u201d Grody says. \u201cWhen paperwork gets lost, they are left sitting there. It\u2019s as if the system thinks they don\u2019t have lives waiting for them outside of jail.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there is solace to be found. \u201cGetting through the bad days sometimes means finding a supervisor to tell me it\u2019s not my fault, sometimes a peer to vent to,\u201d she says. \u201cSometimes I stare at my TV and eat chocolate. Sometimes I call my mom or my grandparents and let them tell me how lucky my clients are to have a lawyer who cares about them.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut mostly, I have to remind myself that I still have 149 other clients who need me to get myself together and come back to work tomorrow. And I do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Inspired by Atticus Finch and Johnny Cochrane, Arienna Grody \u201910 serves indigent clients as a public defender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[54973,56332],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[87540],"class_list":["post-859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-spotlight","category-women-of-goucher"],"yoast_head":"\n