For the People Read online

  It was February 8, 2017, only ninety-eight days before the primary election, the only election that mattered in a one-party town like Philadelphia. The incumbent district attorney, Seth Williams, was in trouble: He was under federal investigation for improperly accepting gifts he didn’t declare, possibly in exchange for special treatment in his handling of cases as DA. His potential indictment had drawn into the race five other candidates willing to challenge him. I knew most of them well—and, as always in Philly district attorney races, the challengers were like the incumbent—predictable, conventional, connected. None of them was a real reformer, regardless of what they claimed. I was frustrated by the lack of change in the system—by the never-ending squandering of lives and resources. So, despite my dislike for politics, I decided I had to run for DA, at least as my own kind of protest. Yes, my team and I wanted to win. But more than that, we had to speak the truth as we saw it. At least our platform might move the conversation.

  I hadn’t found the light switch yet in a room full of switches and controls. Sitting in darkness, I looked through the glass that separated the control room from the brightly lit, black box studio. The studio was starting to fill up with my people, many of them activists I had defended for free over the years.

  “My people” looked powerless to others. They were anything but powerless. They had fought AIDS, fought for disability rights, were disabled themselves, gave out clean needles under elevated train tracks, did pirate radio, were advocates for homeless people or were homeless themselves, said their Black lives mattered, worked to end global warming, were queer, camped out with Occupy, fought pollution, opposed casinos, wanted peace, were sex workers fighting to be safe, were addicted to drugs and seeking treatment, were clergy who shut down dirty gun shops with hymns. Or they weren’t activists at all, but they cared deeply and found ways to support the ones risking arrest. I admired them all for having already changed the world with their selfless pursuit of justice and for aspiring to do more.

  At some point, I had begun to refer to the activists and organizers I usually represented for free, or to people in their worlds I respected who provided support for their work, as “my people.” I used the phrase to mean they were doing God’s work, fighting the good fight, willing to sacrifice so that others would be okay. “My people” and I weren’t the same. I didn’t control or possess them any more than they possessed me when I did their legal work for free. But we were a team of people who wanted the same things: We wanted fairness, equality, freedom, the protection we deserved from our government rather than its contempt, justice for marginalized people. We liked to knock down bullies and to speak about it as the Constitution mandated we had the freedom to do.

  Sometimes when I referred to “my people,” they were under my umbrella; other times I was under theirs. The phrase was meant to be humorous. It was meant to be ironic, to highlight that we were starkly different but somehow together. “My people” was the only tribal claim I liked—a descriptor for a group of people whose basic belief in equality made them skeptical of division and tribalism. My people were a tribe that could include everyone; call them an anti-tribe. As I looked around the studio, I saw my people, but there wasn’t a politician in sight. That was fine by me.

  My people were outsiders, but they were the opposite of powerless. Activists are more than people yelling in the street and blocking traffic. They are often visionaries who see the future we need before the rest of us see it. At their best, they are a fascinating bunch of theorists and communicators who catalyze change. They’d taught me that being outside the narrow halls of traditional power doesn’t mean you’re powerless—that power doesn’t just take one form. Power can wear a badge or a black robe, but it can also be nothing more than a courageous voice. Power can be any of us.

  A few days prior, I had sent out a couple hundred deliberately vague text messages to my people, inviting them to “an announcement.” A mild buzz of speculation had followed among the invitees and the few press members who showed up, but most of them had no idea what I would announce.

  I concentrated on the typewritten outline of my speech while I paced, whispering my way through several minutes of a solo rehearsal. Each time I rehearsed, it sounded okay until it didn’t. Then I stopped and drew arrows to change the sequence of phrases or add one or change a word. A couple of times I scratched out my new edits. The original sounded better. Then it didn’t.

  Lisa, my life partner of more than thirty years, wasn’t there, even though she was the one who’d taught me what I knew about electoral politics. Almost twenty years earlier she had gotten herself elected judge as an insurgent candidate, against all odds. But now, as a sitting judge, she was required to stay away from politics, including my announcement. It would have been nice to see her eyes through that glass, on the inside of the studio. I checked my watch and noticed a couple of my fingernails were slightly chewed, which usually happened when I was mid–jury trial on a heavy case. The seeming impossibility of my risky choice to run for district attorney weighed on me.

  For a minute, I was a broke thirteen-year-old again, wearing secondhand clothes and riding in the back seat of a squeaking, rusty car with my much older parents. For a minute, I felt slight and ridiculous again, was afraid of being laughed at and dismissed, was in that back seat dreaming of something bigger with no basis for believing it would ever come. My speech needed to turn everything I knew from a thirty-year criminal justice career into a ten-or-so-minute platform that was short enough for social media but long enough to explain our plan for reforming criminal justice in Philadelphia. A few other major cities had already elected some amazing progressive prosecutors, enough to create a nascent national movement. Now it was Philly’s turn to try to join that movement. Win or lose, there would be consequences for my family and for me.

  When I decided to run for district attorney, I knew that when incumbent chief prosecutors run for reelection, they run unopposed over 80 percent of the time. Almost no one dares to run against them, and for good reason. Qualified candidates come from two camps: current prosecutors who work for the chief prosecutor they would run against, and criminal defense attorneys who work in courtrooms where losing means they could be badly hurt by the office of the chief prosecutor they would run against.

  Life was not going to be easy if I lost. I knew the drubbing I could expect as payback for my campaign against the incumbent DA if he won: pettiness, dirtier tactics, worse plea offers for my clients for the rest of my career. If another candidate beat the incumbent and beat me, it still wouldn’t be easy. But I had to put fear out of my mind for this announcement and for the campaign, or I’d start acting like a politician. People hate most politicians for being self-absorbed weather vanes, chameleons—frightened, hedging, poll driven, unprincipled putty ready to conform to any shape to get approval. They are proud of their ability to answer yes and no simultaneously, and equally proud of their ability to “pivot”—and respond to anyone’s question by answering a question they weren’t asked. Just ask them and their operatives, who brag about it. We call it ducking, evasion; to them it’s artful. Most politicians struck me as less truthful than many of my criminal defense clients, whose motivations weren’t always great, either, but who sometimes told the truth even when that meant admitting to a crime. I viewed most incumbent elected officials as politicians to whom people had given all the resources and all the power to make things better for them, but who wouldn’t make things better for reasons that were almost always selfish.

  In 2017, the activists and organizers I knew or had studied inspired me much more than most politicians. I was born in 1961 and grew up with civil rights movements on television, especially the Black civil rights movement. I was fortunate that this was my first, formative lesson in activism. These black-and-white forms on television were men and women who faced down violence to fight a genuine evil; they weren’t just brave and disruptive but also strategic and pe
rsuasive. They didn’t just fight. They won. Or at least they won more often than they should have. But those wins changed the country—and the world. As a small child, I watched them wage their campaigns, and ever since I had lived in the better world they dreamed into existence. There were other great movements besides the one for Black equality that played out on our television screen—movements against war and pollution, for labor, for women’s rights and Latinx and immigrants’ rights.

  The sacrifice of the women and men who fought for others felt brave and real. At worst, activists merely failed to improve things. At best—embodied by people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks—their righteous work lured in and crushed their opposition, without money or violence. They were strategic and smart, but fully committed. They risked it all as the movements they served gained ground.

  I went to law school inspired by the legacy of America’s civil rights era, of its activists and organizers. Even before I graduated from law school in 1987, I was too driven by goals and deadlines and financial needs—and fear of how an arrest might wreck my unrealized future as the first lawyer in my family—to become an activist myself. I didn’t put myself on the barricades, but I found my own way to fight as a young lawyer: I could defend activists who got arrested in a courtroom. Defending them meant I had to study the history and theory of protest to explain the motivations and intent behind their actions, which are central to any criminal case. I did, and was particularly inspired by civil disobedience strategy: the how-to of righteous, non-violent action that provokes the oppressor to reveal its claws. Once those claws are exposed, the public sees the oppressor’s true nature and everything changes. During the civil rights movement, authorities used dogs and fire hoses on well-dressed idealists while they prayed. The world watched. We know the result: The haters lost. Illegitimate, violent governmental power lost those crucial battles, even though the war has not yet ended.

  My people were the same. They had engaged in non-violent direct action to achieve positive social change in Philadelphia, so police arrested them, and prosecutors went for their throats. Philly prosecutors charged them with crimes, demanded jail time, and nearly always lost, as haters do, failing to convict them of anything. Far from intimidating or dissuading my people, the Philly prosecutors and police radicalized them. We won cases at trial time after time. The unfairness and injustice the protesters endured in the process only built their capacity and resolve. Their movements had already changed the city against the force of institutionalized power. They had wins: countless lives saved from HIV, AIDS, and hepatitis; better public schools than the government was prepared to provide; the closing of a dirty gun shop; advances toward equality for poor people, labor, Black and brown people, and LGBTQ people; reductions in pollution; increased mobility for disabled people via curb cuts now enjoyed by every tourist in Philadelphia hauling a rolling bag; greater access to addiction treatment; casinos pushed away from the city’s center toward its outskirts; and even the very existence of the public access television studio where we were all gathering. My people knew their unrecognized power. And they disdained the subset of police and prosecutors who had chosen to treat them, and everyone else inaccurately seen as powerless and marginalized, so unfairly.

  For a certain stripe of Philly prosecutors and police, the antipathy was mutual. Rather than simply keep the peace when demonstrators gathered to advocate by peacefully protesting within their rights for these causes, these government agents were so affronted that the protesters had gathered at all that they attacked with bogus arrests and overblown charges. They hated the protesters precisely because they were different, effective, dramatic, and loud as they called out powerful interests, including the governmental authority that paid and employed police and prosecutors. When protesters chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!,” they were right. But much of the Philly criminal justice system went all out to prove them wrong. At times, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office assigned homicide prosecutors—their elite trial lawyers, who should have been handling the most pressing criminal cases—to go after non-violent protesters who had committed no crimes. In Philly, the place where our constitutional rights to peacefully protest were written, government through its police and prosecutors tried to destroy the protesters’ futures with more zeal than in any other American big city at the time. For ordinary, seemingly powerless, outsider defendants, it was terrifying. It radicalized them; they persisted. Some attended the announcement.

  The public access television station was a welcoming, no-frills venue to announce the campaign. It was a populist and egalitarian place, one that existed only because of activist friends and ex-clients who had fought for years to make the cable TV industry in Philadelphia reluctantly do what the law required from the beginning: give up a sliver of nonprofit bandwidth to the public in exchange for the massive windfall generated by their much larger, for-profit bandwidth. The public access station was also my choice.

  I’d chosen it partly because I believed in its mission and what announcing there said about our campaign, but also because I wanted a studio event where I could control and record the message and deliver it for free on social media repeatedly, at any moment of our campaign’s choosing. I had learned about media from defending activists in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a grassroots group founded to end the global AIDS epidemic whose tactics were epic. Nobody understood media strategy better than they did. They taught me that to own your message, you need to be concise, to tell it your way, and to do it all at once. And then repeat it with discipline. Media will have no choice but to take your message.

  I wasn’t well-known enough for mainstream journalists to dignify my upcoming and mysterious announcement with a story, or for them to take our unlikely campaign seriously unless they saw it getting traction. So if word of the campaign’s announcement leaked early, it would probably mean scoffing coverage in the mainstream press that might obscure our message and our difference from the other candidates. To avoid that, I decided to announce my campaign and my platform all at once, as I had learned from ACT UP, as briefly as would cover all that territory. My hope was that the platform itself, its goals, and the movement would become the story, and would overshadow the usual horse race coverage of the obvious improbability of my being elected.

  The typical horse race coverage is all about who will win rather than who should win; more about polling and conflict between candidates and sensationalism than about serious ideas and actual experience. Horse race journalism betrays democracy for the sake of ratings and advertising revenues. In a horse race story, we were losers. But our platform was full of ideas that were far more winning than we seemed to be. I hoped that by making the platform and the campaign announcement the same message, it would resonate with people’s lives and experience.

  When I was a trial lawyer, scripted closing arguments had never worked for me. Looking down at notes to read them made me look away from the faces and reactions of the people I needed to reach. Memorization of a scripted closing didn’t work, either. I wasn’t an actor who could make a memorized script sound fresh. And I couldn’t write my own word-for-word script without turning on an endless cycle of editing and overthinking that inevitably wrecked whatever was direct, genuine, and emotive in the first draft. So when I prepared a lengthy closing argument after days of obsessively thinking about it, I scribbled down short notes on a page or two of a yellow legal pad, a checklist to pick up late in the closing, a way to jump-start my memory if I forgot a point. When I was on, my closing arguments flowed from those days of thinking. I used notes only toward the end to ensure I hadn’t skipped anything that needed to be said.

  The morning of the campaign announcement, I huddled in the lobby of my law office with Brandon Evans, the main strategist in my new campaign, and Jody Dodd, my office manager for a decade and an experienced activist. Brandon was in his mid-thirties, Black, broad-shouldered, strategic
, focused, no-nonsense. That day, he was hyper-focused, all business. Brandon was raised by a single mother who held down two jobs during most of his youth. She worked for decades in high-level administrative spots for a criminal defense lawyer and then for a federal judge in Florida. His childhood around lawyers and courts helped build his real insight into criminal justice. Brandon went to college, then worked as an organizer and political consultant for labor, including in the South, where Stacey Abrams mentored him, and then for the Working Families Party (WFP), developing his political chops.

  Before I decided to run for district attorney, I met Brandon in WFP’s West Philly office, where his title was Pennsylvania state director. He and a national WFP director vetted me, as they had a few other potential Philly DA candidates. We met at a small table in WFP’s storefront office located in the commercial corridor of a mostly Black, working-class, and moderately poor neighborhood—one skinny, gray-haired white man in a suit and tie facing two younger Black men in casual clothes. It looked like an unlikely but intense poker game during which the other players, chips, and cards had been raptured.