Sociologist’s Book Explores Moral Dilemmas Faced by Women Defense Attorneys
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 4, 2004
CONTACT: Kathleen McPartland
530-898-4260
Sociologist’s Book Explores Moral Dilemmas
Faced by Women Defense Attorneys
Cynthia Siemsen, Department of Sociology, California State University, Chico, recently had her book “Emotional Trials: The Moral Dilemmas of Women Defense Attorneys” published by Northeastern University Press (April 2004).
Siemsen, who has been at the university for four years, focuses her research on social psychology, sociology of law, theory and development. She came to CSU, Chico from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Before pursuing her education, Siemsen worked for several years at a public defender’s office, first in secretarial and then appellate work. When she left the public defender’s office, she still worked occasionally on cases where a solo attorney needed a woman to help interview victims and defendants. She experienced first-hand the emotional dilemmas of doing criminal defense work.
“Emotional Trials” is an ethnography based on 16 months of fieldwork. It is structured around case studies based on in-depth interviews that occurred over a 20-month period. In it, Siemsen explores how female defense attorneys handle their emotions and beliefs when they defend men who are accused of reprehensible crimes against women.
What Siemsen found was that most of the lawyers she interviewed believed that their work was based on everyone’s right to a fair trial and that it upheld ideals of equality for all. The younger lawyers, who had been doing the work for less time, showed more external symptoms of inner conflict and stress than the more experienced lawyers did.
At a reading from her book held on campus May 3, Siemsen said that the most experienced criminal defense attorneys seemed to have the clearest and strongest beliefs in the ideology behind what they were doing. Vivian Gold, one of Siemsen’s subjects, has been a defense attorney for 35 years. She has a strong sense of the service part of her work and the need to, like Mother Teresa, “get her hands dirty” and defend those who others consider the lowest of the low.
Women were only 3 percent of all lawyers in the late 1960s when Gold began practicing. Now, over 50 percent of law students are women. However, said Siemsen, women attorneys still fill the lower echelons of legal work such as public defense and legal assistance, and that will most likely continue. “I think that will be a good thing for the criminal justice system,” said Siemsen. “Women have a sensibility that works well in defense work.”
“Emotional Trials: The Moral Dilemmas of Women Criminal Defense Attorneys,” is part of the Northeastern Series on Gender, Crime, and Law, edited by Claire Renzetti, professor of Sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
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