All Intensive Purposes

Recently, we heard from Jonathan Aminoff, who’s spending the summer working as an intern in the office of the San Francisco Public Defender. Aminoff, who has kept a diary of sorts on his experience, is a student at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles with a public-interest streak — prior to law school he worked at the Eviction Defense Collaborative and the Habeas Corpus Resource Center in San Francisco.

In his first week, Aminoff accompanied a lawyer to prison, where they met with a client — a crack addict who graduated from Cal Berkeley, Aminoff’s alma mater — and helped facilitate his release. A few days later, Aminoff’s supervising attorney Paul Myslin handed him a story from the San Francisco Chronicle: “I read it closely, instantly recognizing the name of the prisoner from the day before. He was arrested for carjacking, kidnapping, and then raping a nun in the mission district of San Francisco. I begin to question my desire to join the public defender’s office.”

// posted by t.s. @ 6:54 AM