On Behalf of Crime in D.C.

The good-looking guy sixth from the left is my brother, Ray. His beautiful wife Monica is standing in front of him

This past weekend, my brother brought a tour group down from Connecticut to visit Washington, D.C., and he asked me to serve as the informal guide.

I met the bus at 16^th and K Street.  Because of street closings around the Capitol Building, we were not able to visit the U.S. Supreme Court, but we did see the Mall, the Washington Monument, the National Archives, and many other monuments and sites.  We got out to tour on foot what has always been my favorite monument in the city, the Jefferson Memorial.  We also visited the Lincoln Memorial and the memorials commemorating the Americans who fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

I did some research on the Internet before the tour so that I would have at least some of my facts straight.  This was fortunate because it turned out to be a smart and engaged group, and there were lots of questions.  Although I have lived in the  D.C. area for most of my adult life, I was surprised by many of the things I learned.  Did you know, for example, that Pennsylvania Avenue – arguably the most important street in the city, connecting the White House with the Capitol Building as it does – was so named to pacify the state of Pennsylvania, which was sore about the nation’s capitol being moved from Philadelphia?  Did you know that the young Yale student who designed the Vietnam Memorial originally did the design as a school project for which she was given a grade of B?  Did you know that the man who is credited with designing the city, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, ended up getting into a dispute with George Washington and left the city in a huff, taking his plans with him, and that, according to some historians, surveyors who had worked with him had to recreate the plans from memory?

Washington, D.C. is a wonderful city with clean streets, vibrant neighborhoods, wide expanses of open areas, good restaurants and political gossip, and, as our tourists from Connecticut found out, lots of places to see.  It also has deep personal significance for me.  I originally came to D.C. for graduate work at Georgetown University.  I met my wife and began my first job here.  All three of my children were born at the now defunct Columbia Hospital for Women.

D.C. also has its share of crime.  It may sound perverse to rejoice in this fact, but for this too I am grateful. My father used to tell the joke about the tourist, who after hiking a couple of miles out to the train station several miles from town, asked the station master why, for heaven’s sake, the train station was so far from town.  The station master thought about that for a moment.  “Well,” he said. “Maybe it’s because they wanted the station to be near the tracks.”

As a criminal defense lawyer, I need to live in an area in which I can practice my trade. Just as a soldier needs war to make a career, so too does a criminal defense attorney benefit from a high crime rate.  A criminal defense lawyer can learn only so much from defending DUIs or traffic cases. Where the attorney’s craft can really be refined is through working on the sort of serious and complicated crimes found in a large metropolitan area. For this too, D.C., I thank you.