MOST OF US HAVE NOT RECENTLY REQUIRED the services of a criminal lawyer.
But, in the event you or yours have a need for one, it might be prudent to get some better information than you get from, say, a reality show or Dostoevsky.
I met Sam Ruyle and Thomas Clark in their Galisteo Street offices on one of those weirdly warm, sun-dappled Santa Fe February afternoons. There is an ancient bar and pool table underneath their brick colonial office. It looks well-attended.
It would be wrong to see them as laid-back country lawyers, Santa Fe-style (though they are that). What you actually see when you spend time with them is this: a sense of responsibility for what they do that seems stamped into their beings, with an intensity that creates its own barometric pressure.
Their clients are, as a rule, in big trouble. They may have killed someone or stolen something very valuable. If they are found guilty, even if they settle, they are often facing jail time, often extended jail time. Contrary to our fanciful idylls, these guys believe there is no redemptive jail time – it is not designed to rehabilitate. It is intended as a punishment, and its effects are invariably punishing. Even so, a lot of prisoners are transformed from their jail-time reading.
But not most. The US has the highest number and highest percentage of jailed prisoners in the world: 698 per 100,000. El Salvador comes in second (614), with Turkmenistan as a lagger (552).
Sometimes crimes are a kind of sociological inevitability. Sometimes they happen out of passion, or from happenstance, all too complex to describe or understand. Job number one for a defense attorney is to secure the best outcome for these very bad situations. Sometimes, their clients are guilty. Sometimes not. But most of them are sorry.
What made you become lawyers?
Sam: My grandfather was an attorney, as was my father. I grew up running around law firms, hiding in the stacks of books. I learned the way they think.
Tom: It seemed like something I might be good at. I didn’t really want to go to work after college and law school seemed an extension of undergraduate.
What are the best day-to-day things that you like?
Sam: There’s an excitement to this job. You never really know what’s going to walk through the door. It could be a homicide, a dog bite, a wild DWI, cops misbehaving, political figures misbehaving.
There’s an adrenaline kick to it. Almost a morbid fascination. We have a saying around here; If you look for the depths of human depravity, you’re not going to find them.
Tom: This job I equivocate to standing very close to a flame. We don’t have the guts to act outside the law, but we have the guts to defend the people who have chosen to act outside the law. And an older lawyer once told me, there’s almost an addiction to the adrenaline that comes from trial work.
We get to go after government officials. We get to go after cops. I get to cross-examine a cop, and that’s something you can’t imagine. The adrenaline rush of cross-examining a cop during a murder trial is like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.
Why?
Tom: Because all eyes are on you in that moment, and you’re sitting next to somebody who’s likely done something horrible. Murder, rape, molestation, high-level trafficking. And you’re acting on that person’s behalf because our legal system mandates it. That person, no matter what they’ve done, should have the best and the brightest.
How do you do that if they’re guilty?
Sam: It’s a very important question. We are a stopgap to the slippery slope that keeps cops honest, keeps them operating within the confines of what’s been written down in the Constitution. Because there’s a lot of good cops, but there are some bad cops. There’s a pretty thin line between many law enforcement officers and the people that we represent. The law enforcement officers just got a badge and a gun. The client can be as guilty as the day is long but we still have to hold those cops to task.
I also think that to be successful in this business and to balance your life, you compartmentalize things. I do my damnedest to take my work hat off when I go home and not think about some of the horrible stuff that I have to put up with during the day, because that’ll eat you alive.
Look, our job is to make sure that the appropriate procedures were utilized, that everybody’s constitutional rights are protected. And if clients are innocent, then our job is to get them off. If our clients are guilty of something, then our job is to get them the appropriate penalty. Oftentimes, cases are way overcharged.
Tom: A lot of times someone gets charged with whatever the top count is that a cop thinks they might have done. There’s a dead body –it might be first-degree murder, it might be second-degree murder, it may be a self-defense claim. But the person will get charged with first-degree murder because the police officers believe the client committed first-degree murder. But during the course of investigation, it turns out that this was just a drunken brawl between two idiots over a gram of heroin. And that’s not first-degree murder. So my job then is to interview all the witnesses, scour the discovery, present my view of the case to the district attorney, and work the case out in a meaningful way. There’s a big difference between premeditated murder and a stupid homicide.
What’s a stupid homicide?
Tom: Drunk, drug related. Most people don’t start the day thinking, I’m gonna go kill somebody.
Most homicides start with a 12-pack and some coke or something. Most of the homicides I do have no level of premeditation. Just, somebody ends up drunk and on drugs and killing somebody.
You’re right there when something terrible has happened in a person’s life, in their rawest time.
Tom: Nobody comes to us in good times. We see people at their very worst, the very lowest in their lives. And it’s a tough spot oftentimes because you don’t see a lot of good in people unless you look really hard.
What do you see?
Tom: A fragile human being who’s probably born very unlucky, probably suffers from mental illness, drug addiction. We deal with the very fringes of society. People who are the most marginalized. Often the victims of abuse when they were younger. I consider myself to have been born very, very lucky. And part of the reason I do this is because I think I have an obligation to some degree to give back to the community that I was born very lucky into.
Sam: People go through counseling, anywhere from a year to a two-year program. I’m hearing stories from them where they learned to shoot heroin from their grandparents. For a lot of these folks, it would be a herculean effort for them to extricate themselves from the lot they’ve been dealt in life.
Tom: Very few people reach this point in a vacuum. Their lives have been filled with tragedy from the beginning. And it’s generational. By the time someone’s 19 or 20, the hopelessness oftentimes is so ingrained that systematic failure begins to happen. And that oftentimes includes crime.
What I’ve really tried to do over the course of my career is treat every person sitting across from me like a human being. Of course, we have to deal with the fact that they’re gonna do time for what they did. But I treat them with the respect that comes from my position as an attorney and their position as someone who has been crushed under the wheel of society for so long.
And now they’ve got themselves into a spot they’re not getting out of. But there is a degree of respect between me and my clients. It comes from, I’m gonna do my best to help you. I promise you I will do my best.
Do you ever feel like you’re the first person to treat them with respect?
Sam: Most of the time we are the most educated person that they’ve ever had an interaction with that’s been respectful.
Tom: And there’s always a suspicion. I met with a guy at the jail yesterday that’s charged with the death of his six-month-old, who died of methamphetamine intoxication. When I met him for the first time, he was terrified I was gonna judge him because of his charge. This kid has been involved in the legal system forever. And I tell him, look man, I’m not gonna judge you. That’s not my job. I’m your lawyer. I’ll do my damnedest to get you the best resolution I can.
Do you look for remorse? Is that important to you?
Tom: It’s not important to me. Because I’m not the judge. But I see it sometimes. I see people very remorseful. Oftentimes I’m surprised by it. If they’re remorseful, then they’re confessing that they’ve done something. I’ll help them write a sentencing letter to the judge or write out a statement to make to the victim. That’s when remorse enters the picture.
Sam: I like to try to get people back on the right track. I get a lot of young, early-20s guys get charged with doing something stupid. I mean, if we’re going to throw people away for that, I’d be the first candidate.
But part of this job is helping people get back on the right track. What can we do to rectify your behavior moving forward? Do you need to go to six months of rehab? Do you need to meet with a mental health professional on a regular basis? Whatever it may be to get your shit together and become a productive member of society.
Does jail ever work? Do they come out better?
Sam: Yeah.
Tom: No. Jail is for punishment. There is very little rehabilitative effect of a prison sentence. You go to prison to be punished because a jury or a judge has decided that you need to be taken out of society for a period of time because of what you’ve done. Society needs to be relieved of that person for a period of time.
Prison is as bad as popular culture makes it out to be?
Sam: It’s worse.
Tom: It’s a cesspool. There is nothing you can say about prison to make it any better. It is exactly what you think it would be with all the violence, gangs, drugs. It is as bad as it is made out to be in public culture.
Then why do we think that people will come out better?
Sam: That is a misguided assumption. I’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of people go to prison. Not a one of them is gonna come out of that experience for the better, but for the fear of going back. It is a deeply flawed system.
Is there another solution for people who kind of didn’t mean it, they committed acts of passion?
Tom: They go to prison for a shorter period of time.
But is that the best way to handle people?
Tom: I don’t know, man. That’s an eternal question because the victim’s no less dead, that family’s no less deprived of a loved one. The amount of damage inflicted on society by a homicide is so deeply felt by so many people, especially in a close-knit community. We live in a relatively close-knit community, and that’s one of the beautiful things about Santa Fe. It’s also one of the tough things with the crimes that our clients commit. The ripple effect is just awful.
How do you look at what’s happening in law and politics now?
Tom: There’s a terrifying disrespect for the rule of law with one of the political parties in our country. I fear for this next election that we’d be staring down the barrel of something very similar to Germany in 1938.
The crimes that one of the presidential political candidates are charged with is enough to buy him the rest of his life behind bars. And I have clients who’ve done far less than this guy who’ve done prison sentences. It’s absurd. I represented a senator years ago who got entangled in some problems, and he went off and had to do some prison. And it was nothing compared to what our Republican candidate has been charged with.
Have you ever seen an innocent man or woman convicted?
Tom: Yeah, I don’t wanna talk too much about it, but I’ve got one client who I think was convicted of first-degree murder. It was up in Taos years ago. I don’t think he did it. I truly don’t think he did it. He’s still in the habeas proceedings. But I can count on one or two clients who were convicted, who I think were innocent. And that keeps me up at night. It causes me to wake up shaking in a cold sweat.
Why did you decide to practice in Santa Fe?
Sam: I love the outdoors. I mountain bike, ski. It’s my own version of Mayberry. I love it here. It’s got a charm. It reminds me of a Fleetwood Mac album.
Tom: I’ve been here 30 years. To go to Walmart on Sunday afternoon and have someone say, Hey, Mr. Clark, how you doing, man? Or have somebody see me at a stop sign and say, Mr. Clark, hey, it’s so and so. Do you remember me? To go to community events and run into people that truly like you, truly appreciate what you’ve done for them and their family. It’s gratifying. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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