|
Hey, I'm in Las Veags. Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney. I was our Capital Case Coordinator so I handled litigation on all death penalty cases. I now run the largest attorney team in our office.
I roped a fellow deputy, David Stanton, into joining and reffing this year. We are both having a blast.
I love the NAC back in South Carolina on the SC campus. I taught trial advocacy there for prosecutors from across the country. It was a blast too. I've taught at our state DA Association seminars and I do our own internal CLE classes on ethics, prosecutorial misconduct and trial advocacy. I also teach the LVMPD academy and I am involved in training our new deputies.
So it is interesting for me to be on the newbie end of the stick. And it is a lot of fun.
I try to do all the things I tell our new deputies to do: listen, get advice, dont think you know it all yet, try it and dont be afraid to fail and try it again. I tell them to find a reliable senior mentor to help them and to find a good person just a bit more experienced than them to ask them the quesitons they may be too embarassed to ask the senior guy.
I wish I had never mentioned the attorney thing though. People alwasy instinctively think you are saying you are better than them which, if you knew me, is the farthest thing from the truth. My dad was a corn farmer in Nebraska and if I grow up to be half the man he is I'll have achieved something.
Anyway, I have a mentor in Vegas who is a dialed up ref and also an attorney. It is nice to have another ref who is an attorney to talk to. 3 years of law school warps your mind. Only attorneys think about things in an attorney way. Not got, not bad. Just in a particular way. So he and I can really try to break things down in a legal analysis way in little steps. But often that is just more frustration than it is worth since the rules arent written by lawyers and many of the legal principles (like your "the specific takes precedence over the general") dont really apply. A good example is the 0/00 thread. In a legal document, you would say the language "0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 00, 10..." says without much doubt that the drafters intended 0 and 00 to be different numbers. But these rules are so jacked up. For example, it drives me nuts as a lawyer that the definitions are in chapter 4. the most important chapter. it should be chapter 1. But it is nice to have someone with the same warped mind as you.
But I often want a detailed discussion on the "why" of things that I think most people dont have the patience for.
Of course I turned my type A personality to reffing. I am absorbed by it. But the good thing is that my job has pretty much made any pressure from reffing non-existent. Closing in a murder trial with TV cameras or arguing in front of the state supreme court is more nerve-wracking than a bunch of yahoos yelling at me from the stands. I actually love it. It is all I can do to keep from smiling when they yell.
Nice to meet you and feel free to email me any time.
Clark
|