I became a lawyer because when I was going through college I was interested in the law. I was interested in legal history and constitutional history. But then also when I was growing up my grandfather had been in an accident and he was hit by a car when he was walking across a crosswalk. What my family always felt and what I later learned was he didn’t get a fair shake from the lawyer. He didn’t have a lawyer that guided him very well, and he ended up getting nothing out of this lawsuit, which was terrible. It shortened his life by at least a decade. And you know, a lawyer makes a difference, and I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives.

My philosophy as a lawyer is to stay very client-centered, which means you’re very clear with the client and you tell them what their decisions are. It is their case and I’m there to help them with their case. They have decisions they have to make and I’m there to help them make those decisions. Now that also means that I’m gonna be very direct and truthful with them about what their decisions are, and I’m very clear what I can do and what I can’t do for them. In a criminal case it’s the prosecutor who decides what the plea agreement’s going to be. You can continue to negotiate it and fight and work for something better, but at the end of the day they have to make a decision. And it is their decision, and I’m there to help them make their decision, whatever that decision is.

I’ve had a lot of great mentors in the criminal practice. Anybody who ever says they all did it themselves is simply either being untruthful or – well, they’re being untruthful either with you or themselves. My first mentor in the law was Chief Justice Stanley Feldman of the Arizona Supreme Court for who I clerked my first year after law school. So he kind of helped shape not just me but all of us law clerks that worked for him into understanding how the law really works as opposed to what they teach you in law school. Then from there I had many mentors in the federal public defender’s office, one of whom taught me how to try cases, who was a brilliant trial lawyer, a strategic and tactical thinker. And so those were the mentors that really formed me in my approach to law, which is prepare the case for trial. If the prosecutor offers you a plea that’s great, but you’re always prepared to go to trial.

My scholarly work has been extensive, and my philosophy about that is you have to know how to communicate with people in a jury, but at the end of the day you also have to have your foundation, which if you’ve got to know what the law says. Out of that I started doing a lot of work in criminal immigration cases, not immigration cases but criminal immigration cases. What are the effects of a criminal conviction if you’re not a citizen of the United States, for instance, or what if you’re charged with a crime such as alien smuggling or reentry after deportation? From that I wrote two books, one of which is The Criminal Lawyer’s Guide to Immigration Law, and the other is The Citizenship Flowchart to determine whether somebody’s a citizen or not. Both those books can be obtained on Amazon.

Then from there what a lot of work that a criminal defense attorney does is constitutional law. The Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, Eighth Amendment, even part of the First and Second Amendments all have criminal law aspects to them. So I went into the history of all these in order to help prepare my presentations to the court on current issues, and from there I branched off to just writing a book on the history of the Bill of Rights, Bills, Quills, and Stills: An Annotated, Illustrated, and Illuminated History of the Bill of Rights, which you can also buy on Amazon. And that is kind of foundational for me, informs my criminal practice and understanding of the constitutional issues.