The Question He Couldn’t Answer — and Why

I’m still planning my blog year — discerning what I want my voice to hold and what I want to pour into. But some stories don’t wait for your calendar. Some moments insist on being named while they’re still warm. And before I could settle into any goals or themes for the year, today reminded me why I write in the first place: to tell the truth about the people the system overlooks, and to give a clearer picture of what indigent defense really looks like.

I walked into court to handle the last case on my docket (the final case scheduled for the day). Instead, I walked straight into a reminder of how fragile freedom becomes when the system demands something a person simply cannot provide.

My client is young — bipolar and schizophrenic. And for the last two and a half weeks, he’s been sitting in custody without his medication. Two weeks and a half weeks of confusion, fear and trying to make sense of a world that already feels unstable on a good day.

The court needed one thing from him: his mother’s address. Not a confession. Not a statement. Not a complicated legal form. Just an address.

But he didn’t know it.

And the reason he didn’t know it is the part that broke me.

He and his mother had recently been evicted. They were bouncing between hotels, trying to survive one night at a time. When you’re living out of bags and praying the room is paid for tomorrow, memorizing an address isn’t a priority — survival is. Now his mother finally has an apartment, a small piece of stability after a chaotic time. But he didn’t know the address because he hadn’t been home. He’d been in jail.

The system didn’t care about any of that. It only cared that he couldn’t recite a number and a street name on command.

At one point, the court asked what not having a phone had to do with missing a court date. The answer felt painfully obvious: when someone is set up with text alerts and then loses everything in an eviction — their phone, their charger, their belongings, their stability — they lose the very tools the system relies on to keep them informed.

But that’s the part the system often misses. It assumes people have phones. It assumes people have homes. It assumes people have calendars, reminders, and routines. It assumes people have the mental clarity to track dates while navigating untreated symptoms and survival-level stress.

It reminded me of another moment, years ago, when a judge said, “We give them a paper with the reset date on it.” I had to say, gently but truthfully, “Your Honor, one-third of my clients read at an elementary school level.” The thought had never crossed her mind that the paper she handed out — the one she believed was sufficient — might as well have been blank to the people receiving it.

These aren’t failures of character. They’re failures of imagination. Failures of understanding. Failures of a system built around assumptions that collapse under the weight of poverty, instability, and untreated mental illness.

After my client reviewed his bond conditions with the pretrial officer, who supervises defendants on bond, I went back to the holdover— the temporary holding area for defendants who are in custody— to explain what would happen next. And that’s when I saw it — quiet tears rolling down his face. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just steady. The kind of tears that come from exhaustion, confusion, and the weight of being misunderstood.

I barely got out, “Are you ok?” when the bailiff rushed him to the back.

We talk about justice as though it’s blind. But today I watched it ask a question he was never going to be able to answer — not with untreated mental illness, not with the fog of incarceration, not with the instability he’s been living through.

We talk about “compliance” as if everyone has the same capacity. We talk about “following the rules” as if everyone starts from the same place.

But untreated mental illness changes everything — memory, focus, comprehension, emotional regulation. Poverty changes everything. Eviction compounds it. Survival mode rewires everything.

And yet the system treated his confusion like defiance.

And the hardest part is knowing he’s still in custody — still untreated, still overwhelmed, still trying to make sense of what happened in that courtroom. I later learned he was crying as he tried to explain what happened to his brother, but he couldn’t. The details wouldn’t come together. The meaning wouldn’t land. His mind simply couldn’t hold what the system expected him to understand.

That’s the part that stays with you as a defense attorney. You advocate, you negotiate, you translate, you stand in the gap — and still, the person you’re fighting for may not fully grasp what just happened. Not because they don’t care. Not because they’re defiant. But because their mind is in a storm the system refuses to see.

Instability is not a crime.

Mental illness is not noncompliance.

Poverty is not defiance.

If we’re going to talk about justice this year, we have to start with the truth: some people are being punished not for what they did, but for what life has done to them.

And that should trouble all of us.