• home
• the firm
• our people
  • attorneys
  • staff
• experience
  • practice areas
  • cases
  • articles
  • tesitmonials
• contact us

Contact Us

(206) 726-6600

The Great Cough Syrup Bottle Caper- My First Trial

By William S. Bailey

There are desperate times in a trial lawyer's life when you want to be beamed up by an enemy alien spaceship or else dissolved into the floor like the wicked witch of the west after Dorothy douses her with a bucket of water. My first trial 20 years ago was one of those times.

Though it had been suggested by some that I consider the courtroom as a venue for my life's work, the mock trial I did in law school made me believe that I'd die of a heart attack from the stress of such a life. So, for my first two years in practice, I drafted legislation for a governor's commission and nearly died of boredom instead, relying on copious amounts of coffee, tea and toothpicks to hold my eyelids open.

Taking Horace Greeley's advice, I then moved west to Seattle and interviewed for any job I could get. The response was depressingly uniform - “Thanks, but no thanks . . . don't call us, we'll call you” (including two law firms in which I was later a partner). My big break came at last from the local public defender agency - one of their misdemeanor attorneys would be taking a family leave to go back to New Jersey after her father suffered a major heart attack. I got the call to see if I would fill in over this period. I was at home doing work therapy stained glass projects, despairing of ever getting a job as a lawyer, let alone a trial lawyer. My living room looked like
the day room of a state mental hospital, littered with debris from multiple arts and crafts projects. I happily accepted the job as a public defender substitute.

I inherited the departing attorney's full case load, with multiple trials coming up with frightening frequency in an unconscionably short period of time. My euphoria over getting the big chance to prove myself quickly turned to nail biting anxiety. After all, I only had one mock trial two years ago under my belt, which now seemed a distant memory. I frantically read a number of books on trial advocacy and found out that all the information left me with about as much residual substance as eating a box of Hostess Twinkies. I was in trouble and so were all of my new clients. The only scant comfort I could take is that all the charges were misdemeanors. At least nobody was relying on my questionable legal skill to escape the gallows.

My first trial was coming up in a week on a drunk driving charge. I knew that there would be no deal making reprieve on this case as my predecessor had written on the outside of the folder after the arraignment, “prosecutor says no deal on this one”.

My client was a pleasant, affable, somewhat chunky man in his early 50's, who had been pulled over by the Seattle Police Department in the course of making dry cleaning deliveries for his friend Ike in Seattle 's Central District.