I give you my child

Her hair is long, fiery red and curly, just as unmanageable as mine. She sits in front of me at the office, and tries to get the words that come out of her mouth to sound coherent, but her uninterrupted sobbing makes for a difficult conversation. Her 19 year old son sits next to her, addled between looking like a wanna-be bad-ass gang member and a scaredy cat looking at a 15-year prison term with a 7 year prison offer on the table.

We talk about the case, the evidence, the gang evidence, the gun used, the forensic evidence, ballistics, Gun Shot Residue, the "admission" signed by the client, the video showing the shooting, the field identification cards... We talk about his age, his lack of prior brush with law enforcement, his immigrant family and working parents. His successful siblings... and the path that this young punk has chosen.

"It's very simple", i say to this 19 year old whose innocent childish eyes betray the menacing facial hair covering his face. "i am not your mother. i don't have time for your excuses, or bullshit. Don't waste my time if you're not gonna listen to me. But if you want me to represent you, you gonna have to man up and do as i say. If you don't, i'll break your knee caps and will make you cry. This is the day you decide whether you gonna clean up your shit and say goodbye to the gangs, drugs and your street life or you gonna end up living in the shadows as a gang member. Which one is it??"

Before he has the time to answer, mom says: "I give you my son... please do what you can".

Nine months of fighting in Court, 9 months of motions, conferences and setting up a defense. 9 months of fighting the DA, and the best that we have on the table is a 3 year state prison offer.

In the meanwhile, he has enrolled and continuing with his college education. He has a full time job, and has moved to a better neighborhood outside of gang territory and lives with his girlfriend. He is dressed up in slacks and a sweater, and is clean shaven.

We can't take the offer. Prison will make him a full fledged gang member. I can't go to trial either. I will lose as i have no defense. I ask for a chamber conference with the Judge, and try to explain to the Court why he should be given a chance at probation so that he can eventually reduce his felonies and strikes and clean his record. I explain his immigrant parents. I explain the 19 year old's life. and i find myself welling up and becoming emotional.

"Your honor, i have a 19 year old" i say... "but for the grace of God, it could have been my child. Give him the chance to prove himself and yet the rope to hang himself. Give him the choice to redeem himself. I will stand by him and my office will provide him will all sorts of support services. Give him a probationary sentence. I will deliver a respectful member of the community to you".

My client pled open to the charges today. He faces a maximum of 15 years if he violates. But if he does well for the next 5 years, the court will reduce his felonies to misdemeanors, his strikes will fall by the wayside, and he'll be able to clean up his record.

He won't do any jail time. He won't do prison time. He will remain in school and finish his education and will become a fully integrated member of the community.

As we walk out of court, mom and dad and my client hug me and sob. I look at him and say: "Don't disappoint me" and i walk away unable to hold back my tears. My thoughts are with my own teen age sons. I thank you boys for teaching me love and patience, for making me understand life and teaching me the power of communication and forgiveness. I thank you for showing me the challenges of your generation and the avenues to deal with it. And most importantly, i thank you for making me a better mother so that i can be a better advocate for my clients...

And to you mothers out there who have trusted me with your teenagers. Thank you for sharing your kids with me and allowing me the opportunity to be a part of their wondrous life. I have hundreds of children out there, who have risen up to the challenge, and made exceptional members of the society from the wreckage of their arrests. Thank you for making my job an incredibly rewarding career....

Namaste

3/20/2017

Alaleh Kamran, Attorney at Law

A Professional Corporation
15760 Ventura Blvd, Suite 1010
Encino, Ca  91436
ph: 818-986-6222
Lecturer, Radio Host, Citizen Journalist, Blogger

http://www.alalehkamran.com/

https://www.yelp.com/biz/law-offices-of-alaleh-kamran-encino

http://alalehkamranlaw.blogspot.com/

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THE DEFINITION OF HAPPINESS

At the center of every single major epiphany of my life, has always lain a client whose life was placed in my hands.

I am once again walking towards the Inmate Visiting Area.  The cement floors are grey, smooth and polished to a shine.  The silence of this corridor is pregnant with pain and despair.  As I walk down this hallway which is perhaps the length of a football field, I find my breath narrowing in my lungs as it makes it way up to the back of my throat. 

I slow down, pull up my breath from my stomach and stop in my step.    I close my eyes while I roll my shoulders, pull my shoulders back, and breathe deep into the lungs…  The air in county jail is laden with a heavy dark element that enters the human soul and grabs the light within for sustenance and survival.  “Breathe” I tell myself.

The muffled and muted noise of steel rolling doors opening and closing periodically can be heard through the walls of this giant detention facility. The only constant is the white noise of the air conditioning which blows icy air with an unremitting persistence.   The hallway stretches longer under the clippity clop of my heels, one of which is worn to the metal creating a bad syncopated rhythm.

Hundreds of empty pinkish beige plastic chairs line the walls. Like the cemetery, there is a presence.  Yet no one can be seen…  Today is not public visiting day.  But as I walk down, I see them, I see their faces, I hear their voices, I feel them inside my bones… The little girls with their curls all fancied up in ribbons, the little boys wearing their lighted up sneakers, the wives, the baby-mamas, the girlfriends, with their fabulous manicures, their lipsticks, their meticulously applied make up, the Sunday dresses made for church, worn with a world of expectations, hope, and dreams on visiting day move invisibly around me in this hallway.

I am still walking down this long corridor….  And finally arrive at Unit 800.  “Turn left”, they told me at the security check point.  I walk into a beehive of compartmentalized glass booths each equipped with a telephone and a short stationary metal stool… I sit and wait for my client to come.  The graffiti etched on the chipped paint of the booth chronicles monograms belonging to shattered lives, tragedies, hopes, love, deceit, failure, survival, resilience and faith.

He walks in.  He has jet black eyes, deep set in the bone, with dark circles under as if they were lakes gulping in the moon’s reflection.  He sits down, flashes a huge smile and picks up the phone from behind the glass pane.

We talk. We discuss strategy.  We discuss defenses.  And we discuss the harsh realities of life, of the possibilities and probabilities laying ahead in the case.  Do we roll the dice and risk losing and getting a 150-year prison sentence?  Do we take the offer that’s in front of us?  He is 32 years old now, and by time he is done with the proposed offer, he will be in his 60’s. 

How does a man end up here?  What child ever dreams of growing up with ambitions of spending a lifetime behind bars?  I am lost in thought as he talks about trivial details of the case.  I raise my hand, palm facing out towards the glass pane, and wordlessly ask him to stop talking. 

“What’s your earliest memory from your childhood?” I ask.  The businesslike expression in his face changes to a somber one with quizzical furled eyebrows.  Pain washes up in his black eyes.  He looks down and inaudibly says on the other side of the phone:  “my father kicking me in front of the bathroom door”…

“How old were you?” I ask. 

“4 years old… maybe 5”.

“Where was your mother?” I ask.

“She’d watch.  Couldn’t do much.  He’d beat her up as well.  He was an alcoholic”.

Mom was a special-ed teacher.   Dad, carpenter or something or other, turned into an alcoholic, a wife beater, an eventually a heroin addict. He, as all other heroin users, used and lost all family savings.  Ultimately, he abandoned the three kids and the mother.   And this single income family, this nth statistics, unable to meet expenses, soon found itself on the streets only to be rescued by the limited generosity of the neighborhood church.

With mom struggling to make ends meet, no permanent address to call home and a shamed sense of self as his zip-code, he took to the streets with his friends and his skateboard.

How does one run away from pain and shame?   Soon enough, on the streets, he learned to numb the pain with pot, alcohol, and eventually, heroin.      And how does one buy more drugs to escape one’s shame?  One must then steal.  And then one gets caught, and slowly one goes from being an abused child to a drug addict to a thief to a burglar to a convicted felon and eventually to a prison inmate facing over 20 counts of armed robbery charges.   

The progression is undeniable and sometimes inevitable.  How does an innocent child turn into a “discardable” or “disposable” member of the society?

Twenty-five years of Criminal Defense.  25 years visiting different detention facilities around the country, and each time I am awash with the same overwhelming sense of being flummoxed….  How can anyone own his present if he was deprived of his childhood?   How can he own himself, if during his formative years he was dispossessed of himself?   He learned early on to disengage his soul from his body when his dad beat him to a pulp.  And then, when he learned to survive in face of abuse by the hands of his loved ones, he’ll soon learn that survival in jail, prison, dirty sidewalks and vomit-filled beds is easier than surviving a tortured, tormented and twisted childhood … 

He will steal. He will lie.  He will betray.  He’ll do whatever is necessary to get through and survive.  He will transfer the shame of the abuser unto himself, and with time, he will learn to transfer that into anger to destroy those who try to love him and protect him.  

He keeps talking… I have to lower my eyes and I can no longer keep his gaze.   My thoughts are fixed on his mother.  I feel her devastation in having lost this child to the sad fate of her own life.  I can only imagine her desperation in watching her son slowly spin out and down the vicious cycle of crime/abuse/drugs/jail like water spinning down the drain… her inability to stop the train wreck and her ultimate capitulation and submission to “what is”.  The guilt of having failed a child, like a rope must have wrapped itself along her neck…

I feel the shavings of the rope around my neck, sliding up to my ears.

“Where is your mother now?”  I ask.

“She hanged herself a few weeks after I was arrested.” He says.

The noose tightens around my neck. Unconsciously, I bring up my hands to my neck and pull away at the tight collar that I am not wearing.

……….

 Maybe the definition of happiness is the combined total sum of the miseries that we didn’t suffer. 

Alaleh Kamran, Attorney at Law

A Professional Corporation
15760 Ventura Blvd, Suite 1010
Encino, Ca  91436
ph: 818-986-6222

Lecturer, Radio Host, Citizen Journalist, Blogger

www.alalehkamran.com

https://www.yelp.com/biz/law-offices-of-alaleh-kamran-encino

https://www.avvo.com/attorneys/91436-ca-alaleh-kamran-188112.html

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alaleh-Kamran-Criminal-Defense-Fan-Page

https://twitter.com/AlalehKamranLaw

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alaleh-kamran/4/965/799

Montecito

You know how you float into an old un-inhabited house, lost in time, lost in history, off the maps, and you look at the furniture, the walls and the space around you and it seems as if time has stood still. And you slowly walk around and there are memories sitting on the furniture. And you know life is suspended here. You can feel the words, the conversations and the life that once was here and is no more.

I am there… I am here… in the middle of this living room with huge windows looking out to the green hills behind me rising up to the turquoise and kissing the sky with its pine needles… The expanse between me, the brush, the hills and the sky is enormous… I turn around in this room, this house… I know this place. I have been here before. My soul has been here. I don’t know when but I know I have felt this room. My breath catches. There is a part of me that’s twined to souls in this room. I don’t know who they are and where they are… but I know they are a part of me.

My breath… my breath is shallow. I am afraid to breathe any heavier or deeper or else I risk losing this imperceptible silky fine thread that connects me to here… My eye catches the silver reflections of the horizon dancing on the ocean laying bare out of the other window.. Eternity has been here and reaches to the end of the horizons…

I need to walk and move … my bare feet slide on the rustic hardwood floors, and the sound of laughter, the ecstasy of joy and the relentless pitter patter of children’s feet moves through me. And pain… tremendous pain… heartbreak, loss, sorrow… All I can do is to stop… stop.. stop! STOP. Close the eyes, move within myself to inside my core and feel the breath go in slowly, through the nose, to the lungs and the back of the lungs. Keep it there. Feel this, feel them… Talk to me.

I am floating between two worlds, between the here and there, between what is and is not. There is a parallel world that is moving within me and is running its roots around me, pulling me pulling pulling me ….

There are stories to be told. With the words lingering in the air and the memories sitting on the shelves, I am waiting for someone to listen to the stories, to tell me the tales, to listen to my words, to my breath. I am waiting for someone to recognize the warm embrace of the chocolate velvet couch in the corner of the musty room, waiting for someone to savor the words. This is home… and yet I have never been here. I am lost and yet I am home. I don’t know where this is, but I know this place… I know them, I know you… on a visceral level.

7/4/2015

Montecito.

Alaleh Kamran, Attorney at Law

A Professional Corporation
15760 Ventura Blvd, Suite 1010
Encino, Ca  91436
ph: 818-986-6222

Lecturer, Radio Host, Citizen Journalist, Blogger
alalehkamran@alalehkamran.com

Los Angeles, Las Vegas

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alaleh-Kamran-Criminal-Defense-Fan-Page

https://twitter.com/AlalehKamranLaw

http://alalehkamranlaw.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/AlalehkamranCriminalDefense

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alaleh-kamran/4/965/799

Tired

I am tired.

It is not easy to fight someone else's fight...

with all odds stacked against you.

it is not easy to fight for someone who,

more often than not,

was dealt a bad hand,

because of a bad mom,

or a bad dad...

or a bad decision....

it is less easy ...

to fight when the cop is dirty...

the prosecutor lazy,

and the Judge, ... compromised,

because there is political stake at hand.

i am tired...

of bringing it home,...

of owning it....

of making it mine...

I am tired of all that is not just...

all that is not right...

all that could have been...

all that should have been....

and the world that might have been,

had each of us,

been true

to our conscious

to our inner self

to our personal moral compass....

i am truly tired.

Tired beyond words...

tired beyond space...

Signing off

CDAK

8/20/2013

Alaleh Kamran, Attorney at Law

A Professional Corporation
15760 Ventura Blvd, Suite 1010
Encino, Ca  91436
ph: 818-986-6222

Lecturer, Radio Host, Citizen Journalist, Blogger
alalehkamran@alalehkamran.com

Los Angeles, Las Vegas

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alaleh-Kamran-Criminal-Defense-Fan-Page

https://twitter.com/AlalehKamranLaw

http://alalehkamranlaw.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/AlalehkamranCriminalDefense

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alaleh-kamran/4/965/799

To my son... who will be going away for college.

He moseys to the kitchen…  dragged himself out of bed because the smell of breakfast wafting through the house and plumps himself in front of the breakfast bar.  He looks scruffy and ratty.  He is wrapped in his soft red blanket. His eyes are half open and incoherently he says:  “mom, what’s for breakfast?”

As I fill his plate to place it in front of him, the other one thumps around the house with elephant feet… We can hear him before we see him.  Within a split second, the gentle giant walks into the kitchen with a happy hungry smirk.  “Mom, what’s for breakfast, I don’t want any carbs” … “Good morning to you Sunshine.  Get the oatmeal from the cupboard.  That’s the best that I can do this morning.” I say. 

The hustle and bustle of Sunday morning breakfast is in full swing. The dog keeps running around, hoping for a piece of food, a game of ball which will undoubtedly not take place, and a wagging of tail that says: “I love you, whether or not you play with me, I am just a happy dog”  My husband, busy fixing the squeaking and rattling dryer,  moves in and out of the scene as the boys wolf down their food and tell their stories from the previous night, one’s lines lovingly interrupted by the other’s and accentuated by the sound of laughter and sarcastic witty responses to each other’s adventures. 

They are no longer boys… My toddlers, my precious little gems of innocence with eyes of wonderment and curiosity have become young men with chiseled cheekbones, muscular bodies and deep voices who establish their presence way ahead of their apparition. 

I am holding my cup of coffee and observing their raptured conversation about last night’s adventures… They are in the moment, they are so real … and their belly laughter and expressions of emotions raw and real.  The heat of my cup warms up my hand and moves up to my heart. 

It has been a difficult week end of introspection, of soul searching and self examination.  The never ending doubts and questions, the incessant analyses of my own “wheres and whys and wheretofores” have left me drained of all energy.  I have a mountain of work at the office with looming trials and motions and a myriad of other deadlines, but I can’t move.  The sound of the kids and their heavy-footed and boisterous no-longer-pitter-patter of their feet keeps me riveted to the kitchen. 

For the millionth time of any given day, it hits me, once again, with the same consistent velocity and vigor, he’ll be moving away to college.  My heart, my breath,  my precious one is leaving.  He is taking to the skies.  He is, as rightly he should, expanding his wings, and exploring the universe, to explore his horizons, to find himself, to discover his path, to walk his journey and to leave his indelible mark on the Universe. 

The impending feeling that my heart is about to be torn out of me and my inability to stop the world from turning, forces me once again to admit and accept my insignificance in this huge Universe, that will revolve no matter what my resolve…

I walk over and sit at the piano… My fingers have long been estranged from these keys who used to bring me solace and joy in my law school years when I, too, had left the house and was expanding my wings and taking on the horizons rebelliously, against my parents’ wishes with all the angst and anger of a young adult determined to discover herself, her path and her journey.

The notes shy at first, hesitant and timid… remind me of my younger self, scared and fearful of the future but thirsty for the adventure, play themselves on the keyboard.  Oh, to be 21 again.  Oh, to be that naïve and doe-eyed and bewildered once again.  How life batters one’s soul and fortifies the weakest parts of one’s soul…  I had rebelled, I had broken barriers, I had moved beyond the norms of all that was acceptable and understood at the time, because “no” was not and will never be an acceptable answer to me.   And how life teaches you that choices are real and permanent. 

My son joins me at the piano… and helps me with the notes.  I am having trouble with the F sharps, not because I don’t know where they are … but because the tears are making me blind to the sheet music…  He is leaving.  He is taking to the sky, and if I have done my job well, he’ll always know that he will have a nest to come back to… I get up and he sits down and picks up where I left off.  His gentle fingers make love to the piano and he gracefully eases the music from this old beat up instrument.  I watch him and walk away.  My heart cannot endure this. 

Go son… take on the sky … expand your wings.  Find your horizon.  Reach for the skies and take on the stars, the moon and the sun.  Glide and soar beyond infinity… find your path, discover your journey, stay true to yourself, be happy, be joyful and most importantly, always and forever honor thy soul….

 Alaleh Kamran, Attorney at Law

A Professional Corporation
15760 Ventura Blvd, Suite 1010
Encino, Ca  91436
ph: 818-986-6222

Lecturer, Radio Host, Citizen Journalist, Blogger
alalehkamran@alalehkamran.com

Los Angeles, Las Vegas

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alaleh-Kamran-Criminal-Defense-Fan-Page

https://twitter.com/AlalehKamranLaw

http://alalehkamranlaw.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/AlalehkamranCriminalDefense

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alaleh-kamran/4/965/799