Interview with Shaun Kleber

Shaun is a public defender in New York City dedicated to representing individuals who cannot afford legal counsel and ensuring fair treatment within the criminal justice system. Originally interested in medicine and foreign policy, he ultimately found his calling in education, law, and social justice. His experiences in community organizing and law school shaped his belief in addressing systemic harm from within oppressive institutions. Through his work, he aims to reduce injustice and create space for communities to pursue lasting, equitable change.

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Transcript:

Hello Shaun! Let's get right into it. As students, we're curious—what do public defenders do?

Shaun: You are constitutionally entitled to have an attorney appointed to represent you. The attorneys who are appointed to represent what are called indigent defendants, who are people who can’t afford their own representation, are public defenders. So that’s what I do.

What is one recent event that has happened that you feel really passionate about talking about, or you have a stance that you want to talk about?

Shaun: One recent event that I’m passionate about is, I don’t know if y’all have been following the mayoral race in New York City. So I’ve been living in New York City; there was a big mayoral race that happened this week, with Zorhan Mamdani, who is a Democratic socialist candidate, made and had a real underdog win against Andrew Cuomo, who is more of an established Democrat. And I did some volunteering and canvassing for Zohran and was just super excited that he won. Both because I really agree with his policies and as a lifelong Democrat, I just think that the party has a lot of work to do to clarify its policy positions and just the way that the party campaigns and the ways that voters, and I think that Zohran really demonstrated, by speaking out and standing on real positions, that he as a candidate believes in is a far more compelling campaign to voters, even if every voter doesn’t necessarily agree with every one of his positions. It’s just a much more compelling way to be as a politician than a more centrist institutionalist approach to try to appease the theoretical centre of the political spectrum, and I’m really just a firm believer that there is a lot of value and legitimacy in Democratic socialist policies, and we haven’t had a lot of testing ground for them yet. There’s a lot of fear-mongering about what if our economy collapses if we offer free buses or free healthcare? So, I think, we’re finally gonna have moving ground to try some of these policies on a large scale and to show that the world doesn’t end.

In regard to workplace logistics, as public defenders work with various people, how do you handle the different needs of clients, such as cultural barriers? Or, for example, more specifically, language barriers?

Shaun: Yeah, it’s very real. In terms of language barriers, the office…So, I do have a lot of clients who specifically speak Spanish. So, that’s like the big language that I have. Although I have a couple of clients who speak some more scarce languages. And both the courts in our office are really good about offering language translator services, which helps. I also have a good enough fluency in Spanish to be able to at least navigate basic conversations in Spanish. When it starts getting more into technical conversations around the law and substance of people’s cases is generally when I wanna make sure that we’re bringing in language translators to make sure that we’re really understanding each other, but I also have some Spanish fluency. You also raised a really good point about conversation not just across differences in language, but differences in culture, differences in experience, and that’s where I think just openness, listening, asking questions, and being client-centred come in. And what I mean by client-centred is really trying to create space for people to feel comfortable offering what they want for their case and what their personal priorities are for their life, and not impose what I think is best for them. I think my role in that is both creating a trusting relationship, but also recognizing that the unique knowledge that I have is the various options that are available to them and the benefits and risks of those various pathways. So, my role is to, as clearly as I can, communicate what the options are and what the opposing consequences for those options are. From there, I really need to make it so that they feel empowered to choose the path that they want to take and then do what I can from there to try to support them to the best of my ability in whatever choice they make. So, a recent example of this is that there was a client who had an active criminal case with me, and he then picked up a new case. So, there was a warrant out for his arrest, and without getting too much into the legal nuance of it, basically my advice in this situation is your legal outcomes are going to be better if you voluntarily turn yourself into the police on an open warrant than it is waiting until your next interaction with the police, at which you are going to be brought into custody and your outcomes from there are going to be much worse than if you had voluntarily turned yourself in. That client did not want to turn himself in, and he very much understood that at some point, if he were to interact with the police and they brought him into custody, his outcomes would be worse, and that was absolutely his choice doing it. And he decided that he did not want to voluntarily surrender, and I made sure that he could fully understand what options were available to him and the various outcomes of those pathways in those choices, and then it was for him to choose what he wanted to do. That’s a big part of navigating these relationships and these dynamics. It’s not about imposing what I might present as wisdom on what I think is best for my client’s life. I might be the expert in the law, but the clients are the experts in their living experience. Ultimately, I need to defer to them on that at the end of the day.

What are some of the interesting experiences or interesting stories in working with, for example, we envision public defenders to be working with investigators or witnesses or social workers, so what are some of the really interesting stories that you have?

Shaun: Interesting in what way?

Alice: Just generally interesting? Or maybe it’s just really complicated and has a lot of different aspects to it that are worth discussing.

Shaun: So, I’m early enough in my career—I’m not even a year in—and so my cases haven’t gotten to a posture where I would have substantial investigation or substantial social work necessarily. But, there are a moderate number of cases that involve interpersonal dynamics, especially within couples. So, there is an honestly surprising number of cases that I have where a couple gets into a fight, one member of the couple calls the police, and the case sort of spirals from there. And in a lot of cases, people don’t fully understand what it means for a criminal case to be opened because, going back to what I was saying at the beginning of the conversation, there is civil law, where one party is suing another party. So, it's a case between two individuals or two organizations, or some mix of that. Then, there are criminal cases, where it’s the government charging someone with a crime. And what I think a lot of people sometimes don’t understand is that when they call the police, the case is no longer in their hands. It’s in the government’s hands. It’s not your case, it’s the government’s case. And so people might have involved the police in a moment of argument, upset, or feeling hurt, or wanting to de-escalate the situation and don’t want there to be a case that they then can’t control. And, things get out of their control, and they can’t switch their case off. They can’t, there are orders of protection that sometimes get put in place by the government; the parties need to then stay away from each other, can’t have any contact with each other. I have found myself in a moderate amount of couples’ counselling, almost, where I am trying to be a third party, trying to offer repair between two people who are legitimately hurting and legitimately confused and feeling out of control. A big part of the first couple of months of my job has been figuring out how to draw the right boundaries for myself and understanding to what extent it’s appropriate for me to step into that role. Also, to what extent is it beyond a service that I am able to offer, and that I need to not try to position myself as an intermediary or therapist or counsellor in relationship dynamics that are complicated and not something that I am positioned to address.

Since I know there are very common misconceptions about your work, what is one common myth that people have about your job that you want to debunk or clarify? 

Shaun: I think there’s a common myth that public defenders are not good attorneys. Public pretender. That’s the phrase that I’ve heard. That we’re not good attorneys, that we don’t know what we’re doing, that we do this because we couldn’t get better jobs, or higher-paying jobs. What I know from my own personal experience I have found and know from being in public defense organizations, being in school, on campus, in internships, I’ve been in many different public defender organizations at this point, and just consistently across the board, I have found public defenders to be some of the very best attorneys, and also the most skilled attorneys, and some of the most principled attorneys. I think people do this not because they can’t get better jobs, but specifically because they so firmly believe in the importance of this work and want to use their skills to help people and to address systemic issues that they and we see. And, to really bring those skills and that passion and that commitment to doing this work. I had a conversation with this client recently where he was upset about a development in his case, and he was venting to me. A big part of this job is just holding big feelings with people, and a big part of this job is bringing humanity to a system that is really fundamentally designed to strip people of their humanity and to not see people’s humanity because to do so would require the system to bear a level of empathy and nuance that it’s simply not designed to bear. And so I have a client who was upset, and he got himself really spun off and angry and started taking his anger out on me, which, again, I don’t take it personally. It’s fine if you need to use me as your punching bag for five or ten minutes over the phone because I can handle that. And he was like, “I’m just gonna…I don’t think you’re doing a good job…I’m going to fire you, and I’m going to hire a real attorney, like a professional attorney.” And I was like—this is going back to being client-centred, which is what I was talking about before— “You are free to make whatever choice you want. It’s the truth. If you want a different attorney, you should feel free to do that, and just so you’re aware, not a flex, but I did graduate from Harvard Law School. I’m a very good attorney. I know what I’m doing. I’m representing you well. And just person-to-person, I’d hate to see you burn several thousand dollars just to get a worse attorney.” Because in a lot of cases, private counsel is not as good as public defenders. So, I think that’s a big misconception that public defenders are lazy or don’t know what they’re doing. 

What is one thing that you would advise everybody to do once in their lifetime? We are talking about everybody, as in law students or students who want to pursue law. What is one thing that you advise everybody to do?

Shaun: I think that you need to do some sort of extended service experience. What I mean by that is not volunteering on the weekends at your local park, as great as that is, and not mentorship of privileged students whom you’re connecting to in your community, as great as that might be. It’s like really immersing yourself in an under-resourced environment that you are in some meaningful way positioned to support, as a resource yourself, and having that be a sustained service experience over the course of ideally months to really understand what inequities in our society look like, and to really understand the gap between your own privileges and what other people have access to, and to really understand in real terms what injustice looks like so that you can then approach your study in work and law with your own personal definition of what justice is. This is like a crusade that I will beat the drum on for my entire life, which is: Everybody who is interested in working in the law, studying the law, needs to be able to define for themselves what justice means. And it seems like a basic thing that you know it when you see it or have a sense of what justice and injustice is, but I think we would be shocked if somebody did some experiment where they went around and to law school graduations and asked everyone as they walked off that stage, “What’s your definition of justice?” I would bet that a majority of law graduates would not be able to answer that question, and that is a major failure of our legal education system and just our society at large. That we claim to be built on justice and specifically for people that are interested in the law, claim to be oriented towards pursuing justice and don’t understand what justice really means. And I don’t think that there’s a single definition of justice, necessarily. I don’t think that it’s like everybody needs to know what the one definition of justice is, but you need to know for yourself what justice means. I think a big part of that is having an experience like what I’m talking about. An extended service experience that is oriented towards understanding injustice in real terms, like what injustice really looks like on the ground in a community and oriented towards pursuing justice, even if not necessarily in legal terms, just like in social and political terms. So, I think that would be my recommendation for what everyone should do. I think everyone should have a service year. 

We know that you went and studied abroad in China. So, what were some perceptions that you had towards China before that that were changed as a result of that?

Shaun: So, for full disclosure, my master’s program in China was during the core of COVID, so I was never able to actually go to China. With that said, I always studied in China in a distinct way for a year in a program with a lot of Chinese professors and students. I think one of my big takeaways is that there is some real benefit to a more collectivist approach. I think that in America, we are so hyper-focused on freedom and liberty that we lose sight of the ways that that can really easily bleed into hyperindividualism, both in culture and in policy. And, something that I appreciated seeing in the Chinese people whom I’ve met is that there is a little bit less of hyperindividualism and boundless freedom. Also, there is an orientation towards a collective good that I appreciate. And I think there are some lessons for America, as a unit, and Americans, as individuals. Some that come to mind are, for example, China’s climate change policy is really bold and really forward-looking with large and long time horizons. It is something that is really important. I have long thought that climate change is the Achilles' heel of democracy. It is something that requires a focus on a long-term time horizon, but that is not what activates people’s immediate political incentives. When you are asking voters to vote, and when you’re asking policymakers who are answering the voters to make policy, it is a lot more short-term considerations in that. And, climate change, in a way, hijacks that or falls to the wayside in a system like that. And China seems really to be able to set time horizons and policy on a scale of 2050, 2060, 2070… and it is really able to execute all these things because they are a less dynamic, less unstable, less decentralized form of government. It is more oriented towards stability and the collective good. And, sure, there’s a bit of tradeoff there in terms of freedoms and liberties, and maybe the world can’t sustain 9 billion people living selfishly. Like, we’re just upon a floating rock with a very delicate atmosphere and environment, and there needs to be some more orientation towards collectivism in that and recognizing that. And, I think China does a better job in some ways of that. That was one of the biggest takeaways for me for that year. 

Let’s rewind a bit to the topics of morality. What are some examples that are morally correct but legally wrong, or legally correct but morally wrong? 

Shaun: I think putting people in cages or the death penalty are examples of something that is legally correct but morally wrong. Part of the reason I chose to become a public defender is that I firmly believe that no matter what someone has done, the correct response isn’t locking them in a cage. A correct response is not objecting them to surveillance to the state or sentencing them to death. These very carceral and punitive policies are deeply ingrained in our legal system, and are absolutely legal, but I do not believe that they are moral. And this sort of connects back to my personal view on justice, which is reflective of how Mariame Kaba describes justice. She is an abolitionist practitioner and scholar, and she describes justice with the unit of interest being harm, and the unit of impact being relationships. So, for me, the way I think about justice is that justice is restorative and transformative. When you consider the unit of interest as being harm, when some harm happens, our focus should be, at best as possible, addressing and healing the harm that has occurred, centring the person who experienced the harm. For the person who caused the harm, we should centre what harm they had experienced and address that harm, and orient towards healing the harm. This is the restorative piece. Now, separately, we should transform the connection that led to the harm occurring, such to that the harm is less likely to occur when moving forward. So, very focused on the present experience of harm and the future prevention of harm, as opposed to the past-looking punishment for the one causing harm. Our system is very punitive and looks into the past, centring the person who caused the harm, with very little regard for the needs or even the desires of the person who experienced the harm. And, so, we have a system that I think is deeply legal and not very moral, as its orientation is more towards meeting harm with more harm as opposed to actually healing harm. 

From the perspective of students, what do you recommend we do to get hands-on practice or to become a lawyer? 

Shaun: I think my biggest piece of advice would be to prioritize finding yourself and let your professional intuitions follow that, rather than finding yourself through professional ambitions. It’s very easy, especially in the legal world where things happen all the time, that people decide that they want to be lawyers. Then, they apply to law school right out of college to become a lawyer as soon as possible, and find some legal jobs, whichever would pay them the highest. Nowhere in this process are they finding themselves, finding their passions, finding their values, finding their principles, and leading with those. And people become oxes within a legal machine and, understandably, more unhappy as a result of that. I’m a very big proponent of “let your passions and interests guide you”. If those guide you towards the law, that’s great! But if they guide you away from the law, that’s also great! Don’t prematurely decide that you want to be a lawyer and that you are interested in law and policy and theory, and decide that therefore you should be a lawyer. Because an interest in law and an interest in politics isn’t in major ways very different from the practice of law, which could be very boring, very slow, and very incremental in terms of social change. A second advice, sort of related to the last point, would be—I think a lot of people come to the legal work and law school because they are interested in social change. I think that’s awesome. And what I think people need to recognize, in thinking about social change, is, in my view, at least, that social change is necessarily coalitional. What I mean by that is that social change does not happen through one individual’s work. Social change happens through social movements, which is the alignment of many people doing many things over in many cases throughout many years. I think what people should be really thinking about and considering is not, “what is the issue that I care about and how can I best address that issue?”; rather, what they should be thinking about is, “what is the social change that I want or hope to see in this world, and where is there a social movement in that direction?”. And, within that social movement, within that constellation of people who are working to advance that social movement, “where do I best fit, considering my skills and social positioning, like class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. ?” Further, consider, “what makes me feel alive, and what is sustainable for me?” This is a journey that I’ve very much gone on, as someone who went into college, sort of thinking that, “I want to help to make the world a better place”, and “I have all these skills and privileges that I want to bring to making the world a better place.” So, as an individual, the best way for me to do that is to focus on foreign policy, because what better way to, at the largest scale possible, use my work to improve to people’s living experiences, and go to the biggest scale that I could possibly reach, which is the global issues. Then, having ultimately gone through a variety of twists and turns, I realize it’s not one person’s mission. I am but one part of the constellation, and the best thing I could do is to figure out where I best fit in that constellation. That is what brought me into public defence. It is a more depersonalized, de-individualized approach to social change. 

This is a question out of curiosity: have you heard about the defendant in the court case that was using AI as their lawyer? Do you think we will be represented by AI in the future? Or, how do you think AI will be integrated into the legal world? 

Shaun: Yes, I’ve seen some social media posts about this. I haven’t really looked into this so much, but I’ve seen it. I think that in terms of distributive justice, which means people’s access to justice and legal knowledge, there are real limitations to the concrete set of lawyers that hold this knowledge, or to the masses that would benefit from this knowledge. This is talking about democratizing legal knowledge or spreading it. I think there are, at their best, some benefits to using technological tools to better distribute legal knowledge and an understanding of the legal process and procedures that these very opaque systems, which are very real gatekeepers of justice, can be better and more broadly, and more fairly distributed, so that everyone has the same knowledge as, for example, the richest people have. And, going back to my earlier comment about a big part of the work of a lawyer, especially a criminal defence lawyer, is to bring humanity to a system that is designed to see people as units, fenders, or problems, as opposed to, literally, people. I have real issues with losing that human touch in the legal system if we offload these legal services too far to AI. It could be useful for only spreading legal knowledge, but I think that legal services should continue to be one that is very human. I think that something I have really come to realize and appreciate, even with all my criticisms of the legal systems as it is now, especially if you’ve studied legal history in law school, is that there is no singular, objective monopoly definition of justice or legal system that we are required to apply. Justice is a very messy, unclear, and deeply human exercise in how we relate to each other, how we relate to the community, how we relate to the system that we create to navigate this world, and how we address harm and injustices. It is a very human exercise to figure these things out, as they are not just an objective application of rules. It’s very valuable, and I would hesitate to offload that exercise to algorithms. 

In your introduction email, you said you want to leverage your “proximity and involvement” with “harmful systems” to try to stop them from causing harm. We have briefly mentioned this before, but aside from “using more harm to solve harm”, what are some examples of the “harmful system” you were talking about? 

Shaun: I think “using more harm to solve harm” is the core of what I was referring to. The whole orientation of the system, for example, the definition of “justice” is punishment. It is not a system that is oriented towards healing, whether healing the person who experienced harm or critically healing the person who caused the harm—because, in many, many cases, someone who is causing harm is themselves responding to some harm that they’ve experienced. That could be systemic harm, being denied the resources that they need, or the passage of personal harm they experienced on the wound of which they are acting up. I am constantly seeing people being harmed by systems, whether that being because they need to pay arbitrary fines and they’re not in a financial position to do so, whether they’re going to jail and being locked in a cage, whether there’s an order of protection that is restricting them from going home and being with their family or even having a home to go to. It is just a system that is deeply harmful and deeply disruptive to people’s lives and to communities. In the most basic level, there are cases that never go anywhere, and even still when the prosecution is deciding whether the case is going to go anywhere, people still have to come to court once or twice to just appear just for the prosecution to report to the judge that the case isn’t ready to move forward yet. And, that keeps people away from their jobs where they might not have the flexibility for. And that costs people however much money they could otherwise be making. It’s a deeply disruptive at best and actively harmful at worst system. 

If you say, “The right way to address harm is by healing,” how would you prevent crimes from happening? Would you want to educate the public not to commit harm, or is there any other way?

Shaun: There is no perfect way to prevent harm. We can never prevent all harm. Though we can do a much better job of minimizing harm by providing people with the resources and life conditions that we know would lessen the likelihood of them causing harm. If you think about the likelihood of you causing harm, for example, stealing something or assualting someone, or, in the most extreme cases, murdering someone, the reason you’re not doing those things is not because the law is telling you that you can’t, but is because your life’s circumstances are such that you wouldn’t feel called to do that. To recognize that there is some moral violation to that, and even more than a moral violation, it is a community violation. You, for example, I imagine, feel embedded and ingrained in your community, however you defend that sense of community, enough so that you feel some sense of reciprocal relationship to where you are not going to violate the law in that community by violating someone else or hurting someone else. And that is so core to what prevents harm. We need to consider what, then, are the things that position people in a strong community. At the end of the day, as these exceptional, unique creatures, we are animals. We are tribal animals, specifically. We exist in tribes, packs, herds, or whatever you would call it, which parallels our understanding of the animal kingdom. We are animals, we need to be in community, and we need to understand that, sure, in some ways, our brains have evolved that we are superior to other animals in terms of consciousness and the ways we relate to space and to each other and to the world, but we need to be positioning people in strong and stable communities. There are certain resources that we can offer people, as they progress through life, that are likely to create those outcomes, for example, healthcare, stable housing, education, and food. These are basic but important things that, if given to people, they would be much less likely to cause harm. And, sure, that’s not going to be a perfect outcome because some people are still going to fall through the cracks of those resources and end up in an anti-social situation where they are still causing harm. There are, for example, mental illnesses that are still going to exist in us that are very real. There are going to be exceptional cases where people are causing harm, and there might even be exceptional cases where we are certain enough that someone is likely enough to cause harm moving forward, to where we might need to remove them for at least some temporary time from their community. Some of the underlying logic of our criminal system is, “You’re likely to cause harm moving forward, so we need to put you in a cage so you don’t cause harm moving forward.” Though there is still a punitive orientation towards putting people in a cage, removing them from art and nature, connections to people, and good food. It’s still a logic like, “You deserve a bad life circumstance because you’ve done some bad things.” And the way I think about it is that, if we determine, for some selected groups of people, that we need to remove them from our community because they are a risk to that community, I’d say, “put them on a paradise island! They don’t need to be harmed any more than is necessary to protect the community.” Again, the orientation is towards healing, transformation, and protecting the community from harm, not imposing additional harm on those who have caused harm. 

Is there ever a key precedent case that you hope to establish or overturn? 

Shaun: So, I might be going outside the bounds of your question. I think a legal precedent that needs to be set in the Constitution is the right to education or the constitutional right to literacy. There was an interesting, innovative case in Detroit, which connects back to my service of working with students there, who have tried to establish the right to education as a constitutional right. It is basically rooted in the theory that in order for people to meaningfully access the civil rights that the Constitution guarantees, such as voting or jury duty, they need to be able to read. So, they tried to establish a legal constitutional right to literacy. They didn’t end up winning the case, but I do think that it is very important, and it is probably what I will do. 

Last question! Are there any legal or philosophy-related books that you would recommend everyone read? 

Shaun: One that quickly comes to mind is When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, I believe. It is a great book that connects to the point I was making before about finding yourself rather than finding your job. Paul had dedicated his whole life to that point, pursuing very rigorous medical work, to moral ends that I think he wanted to help people, and he was really doggedly focused on his work. Then, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and realized that he had limited time to live his life, so he had some profound reflections and realizations on the limited time we have on this floating rock. That’s one, another… why am I forgetting the name of Bryan Stevenson’s book? It’s a good one for people who are going into the law. Oh, it’s Just Mercy. That’s a really good one that is a reflection on some of the themes we’ve been discussing, such as “what is justice,” “what is our system orienting towards.” Another is We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba, who is the woman I mentioned before, who has profound wisdom on abolition; there’s Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, which better expands on some of the commentaries on what we are really doing in our criminal system and that, “do we really need to be doing what we are doing in our criminal system, and to meet what ends?” 

Alice: Thank you so much, Shaun! We are going to read all of these books and recommend them to everyone else! 

Shaun: Certainly! Well, tell me something about yourself and your club that you’re doing.

Alice: So, I “claim” to be interested in Law—after this conversation, I think I need to rethink it [laugh]—and I want to make law more accessible to all. I know a lot of students who are like me, who also claim to “like the law”, but they don’t really know what the law is. So, I think that they need to know what they’re doing, and they need to know that they really want to go into this before they go into this, or it’s just going to be miserable for everybody. 

Shaun: That is very true. You’re going to save a lot of people from misery! Because either people are going to realize that they don’t actually want to be lawyers and go down the path that they don’t want to go down, or they are going to more consciously choose the path that they’re going to go down, in which case, that’s going to be great because they’re going to be happier on that path. 

Alice: Yes, that’s basically my mission. I have interviews with professionals and legal panellists writing on this to spread more influence. I think it’s really important. 

Shaun: That’s awesome! I think it’s a really great project of great importance. I’m glad, and I appreciate that you’re doing that. 

Alice: Thanks! Do you have any advice for me? Are there any potential ways to make it better? 

Shaun: I would ask every person you are talking to how they think about justice. This was a question that whenever we had a guest speaker in law school, I would ask every single person. It was very interesting because people have really different definitions of justice, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I do think there are different ways to approach it. It informs how people approach their work within the law, and people should be conscious of the ways that their understanding of justice is doing that and should be conscious of what their version of justice is that they’re doing, or else, they would just end up replicating systems that are in many ways unjust right now, in their current forms. 

Alice: Cool! Thanks so much! I’ll look into that and maybe perform some research and present the data! On that note, are you open to having another interview sometime in the future?

Shaun: Sure! If there are any other ways I could be helpful, please let me know! It was very nice meeting you, and good luck with your project!