When I applied to intern at the Public Defender’s Service for the District of Columbia (PDS), I assumed I would be sorting paperwork, taking notes in meetings, or canvassing a neighborhood or two. Later, as I was assigned to be an “investigative intern,” I thought my Instagram stalking skills would make finding the information I needed an easy process.
I assumed that because PDS was a government agency, it would have a database of sources. I would then quickly peruse it to find the details I needed to write the reports I was assigned.
I was utterly wrong.
As it turns out, I wasn’t anything like a crime show “technical analyst” who could get you any information you needed with just a few minutes and a keyboard.
PDS represents those who cannot afford a lawyer in criminal proceedings. I interned with the Special Litigations division, which is set up to review cases where individuals under 25 committed a crime and have been in prison for at least 15 years.
New psychological research has shown that sentencing for this group may have been issued without sufficient background information. I was part of a team tasked with retroactively protecting their rights by gathering that information and appealing their extensive sentences.
I eagerly jumped in but was disappointed to learn that the Bureau of Prisons– an important source of information– was an antagonistic partner. They wouldn’t provide even basic information, like a comprehensive list of the facilities and corresponding client incarceration dates.
Left with few options, I started looking for any details that might provide a more complete background picture for the case. I looked at incident reports and other public records. I searched through newspaper archives. I focused on records of violent events in the areas where clients grew up.
I thought that my search efforts would reveal the one right question or (even better) my office would provide it. But buried in endless information and not sure how it would help protect our client’s rights, I realized that to find the right answers, I had to learn how to ask the right questions.
By learning more about the purpose of the information I was tasked with gathering, I learned I needed to focus my research on events that could have influenced our client’s development and psyche–the environmental factors that might have contributed to the client’s psychological state at the time of the crime.
Gaining access to newspaper archives was the first big hurdle, primarily because there was a plethora of newspapers in the area. I had to identify the right sources to avoid drowning in irrelevant information.
After a month or so of trial and error, I started distinguishing which newspapers were helpful. Better questions led to a clear direction, making my search a lot more manageable.
But I was still overwhelmed by data. I soon realized my search terms were too vague, so I approached my supervisor with my information overload problem, and luckily, he had some suggestions.
To get the relevant and specific information we needed, my supervisor told me to narrow my search even more. He taught me how to use a Boolean search, focus on smaller date ranges, and use keywords. With that, I set to work with more tools to ask the right questions.
Instead of searching for violent events generally, I homed in on the things that I knew for sure—location and time. By focusing on specific instances and types of crime rather than crime in general, I was able to pick out relevant information from the thousands of articles I initially encountered.
The next step was sorting through the data I had identified as being useful. One of the biggest challenges in compiling research is presenting it in a digestible way, which means some things don’t make the cut—I had to identify the right information.
Filtering the information was difficult until I approached it from a different angle. Taking my supervisor’s suggestion, I read through previously written memoranda. I started to identify the information the legal team needed in the mitigation report.
I started to understand what was required to create a complete history of the client’s personal background to be presented to the judge.
But I wasn’t quite done yet. The information then had to be organized into a memorandum.
I again turned to the already completed reports. I looked for patterns that would help me choose the most important details from each individual source to create a short summary of the events. I organized the data in a way that helped my supervisors quickly access the information and determine what would help our client’s cases the most.
I was able to determine the right method of presentation by looking at examples of what had worked in the past.
Looking back, at the end of my internship, I felt proud of my work. I wasn’t the proverbial “guy in the chair” or tech genius who could seemingly pull information out of thin air, but I could put together a concise, informative memorandum that helped contribute to protecting our clients’ rights.
By going through this multi-phase process to discover the reason behind my tasks, I got better at asking the right questions, identifying the right information, and presenting the information I had learned in the right way.
Written by Alyssa F.,
Investigative Intern at the Public Defenders Service for the District of Columbia–Winter 2022