One year later, still standing with Keisha and Dean

On grief, grievances, and the long path to justice

This week marks the one year anniversary of Montgomery County’s unjust, retaliatory firing of Dean Beer and Keisha Hudson, its former chief and deputy chief public defenders. I wanted to write this week’s newsletter in reflection on that event and its aftermath, to think about the changing landscape of public defense in Montgomery County and across the Commonwealth. The Sheller Center recently released its preliminary report on Montgomery County’s justice system, recommending, among things, an independent Oversight Board to replace the county executive’s role in appointing and managing the Public Defender. Around the same time as the Sheller report, Pennsylvania also lost one of its longtime advocates for statewide independence for indigent defense services, former state Senator Steve Greenleaf, who died earlier this month. Then there are, of course, last summer’s protests against police violence, which have reignited conversations about the violence of criminal punishment in all forms, including at the hands of local judges and prosecutors. I thought on this occasion that I would try to bring a few of these strands together in a thousand words or so.

As I sit down to write one whole year later, though, all I find is that I’m still very angry and sad about what happened. Some days I think in fact I am only angry and sad about it, and I wonder what, if anything, it taught me except to hate the county executive, its power and its cravenness, and the great lengths to which that power will go to continue denying the very suffering that it wreaks. Keisha and Dean were my supervisors, and, I am fortunate to say, my mentors. Like a lot of people before me, I learned from them how to agitate for justice strategically, within the available channels and with the available means. And yet that example they set is exactly what cost them their jobs. They made a principled critique of the county’s excessive and torturous cash bail practices, advocating for a better, fairer way, and for that they were unceremonially pushed out.

For this week’s newsletter, I’m going to reprint a short essay I wrote in the aftermath of the firings, adapted from comments I gave at a meeting of the Montgomery County Commissioners where many of us—public defenders, law students, local activists and county residents—convened to condemn the County’s ill-considered decision.

Reading over this piece I wrote a year ago, I am struck by its anger; not because that anger feels alien to me now, but because I realize I haven’t ever let it go. The struggle of this past year really has been finding the political lesson in all of this, a way out of personal grief and grievance and towards something that can be recognized and acted upon, that wrings out of the old and dying world a new, more capaciously alive one—a politics, for short. I can’t say that I’ve settled on anything worthwhile, but what I have been thinking about this week is that (1) the entire concept of collegiality in the criminal punishment system can go to hell and (2) it might be time to think beyond the role of the Public Defender, even the politically independent Public Defender, to force systemic change. Maybe what we need are more radical forms of direct action against the court system to make these urgent and necessary demands like cash bail reform seem more reasonable to those in power.

I don’t know! I really don’t know. But on the anniversary of an event that was, for many of us, both intensely personal and politically consequential, here’s what I can say: that I am happy beyond measure for Keisha and Dean, who have found great new jobs at The Appeal and the Homeless Advocacy Project respectively; that I am angry at the County, which has not satisfactorily reckoned with what it’s done; and above all, that I am hopeful about the movement to dismantle injustice in whatever form it takes today, one careful agitation at a time.

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March 5, 2020

One thing that is at issue today is the question of the Public Defender’s independence. A number of my fellow speakers have emphasized the crucial importance of independence to the function of the Public Defender. I wholeheartedly concur with that position, and I reiterate the call for the full and immediate reinstatement of Keisha Hudson and Dean Beer.

Right now I want to speak, if I can, about the other side of this question of independence: namely, the collegiality of the Public Defender. In particular, I want to speak about something that Lee Soltysiak [Montgomery County COO] mentions in his February 20 letter to Dean Beer. Mr. Soltysiak claims, among other things, that Dean acted in an “inappropriate” and “adversarial” manner with respect to a certain matter concerning phone rates at the county youth detention center. I am in an interesting position to evaluate this claim because I was directly involved in the situation it refers to.

I am troubled by the COO’s claim that Dean was insufficiently collaborative here first of all because, as my fellow speakers have already well pointed out, it just isn’t the duty of the Public Defender to collaborate with the executive. I am also troubled by his claim, though, because it simply isn’t true; what Mr. Soltysiak describes in his letter to Dean is not at all what happened.

I discovered in my research some time ago that children incarcerated at the Montgomery County Youth Center were required to pay an egregious rate to call their loved ones on the phone. In 2018, this rate was $3.37 for the first minute and $0.37 for every minute after that—compared with a flat $0.21 per minute rate for adults in the adult correctional facility.

You don’t have to do the math to call that what it is: a shakedown. It’s an inhumane and thoughtless policy, and one that the County claims to have never known about, since they see none of the revenue from phone usage in the correctional facilities. The money goes, instead, directly from the incarcerated and their families to GTL, an enormous carceral communications firm that the County has contracted with since 2002.

Mr. Soltysiak claims that the Public Defender didn’t approach the County about the phone problem until January of this year [2020], and that the way we went about it—by filing an Open Records request for information about phone usage in the Youth Center—reflected an unprofessional and uncooperative attitude. The implication, I guess, is that we were going behind their backs, rather than stating clearly that we had a problem.

But let’s be clear: everything the COO says about our conduct in this situation is either a lazy misjudgment or a face-saving lie. Mr. Soltysiak can account for his own inaccuracies if he sees fit to do so—what I can tell you now, with confidence, is that the County only responded to our concerns about the Youth Center when they were required by law to respond. I submitted an Open Records request on January 14 after trying for two months to get the attention of the County.

On November 12, 2019, I reached out directly to Joseph Viti, Executive Director of the Youth Center, to ask if he could explain the phone rates. He could not, so he referred my question to the Solicitor’s Office on November 18—the same office that, according to Mr. Soltysiak, didn’t hear from us until January—and assured me that Brian Phillips, one of the solicitors, would follow up with me directly. He never did. I reached out to him two more times after that, once on November 20 and again on December 2, to no reply. On December 17, I reached out to yet another solicitor, Christina Terebelo, who is also on the Board of Managers for the Youth Center, with the same request for information. Again, no reply.

When the Solicitor, Joshua Stein, received my Open Records request, he called Dean directly to ask that I withdraw it, firstly because of the “sizable information” requested, and secondly because he wanted to resolve the issue quickly. Mr. Stein, to his credit, moved quickly to amend the contract, so that children imprisoned by the County now pay $0.17 per minute to use the phone.

All that notwithstanding, I cannot imagine the hubris, let alone the fundamental confusion about what a Public Defender is and does, that would compel Mr. Soltysiak to say that we ought to have gone directly to him about this matter. At the very least—and I cannot emphasize enough how low the bar is, here—my repeated attempts to get in contact with the Solicitor’s Office should have registered with someone. Anyone! You’d think that the very content of my request would raise the alarm somewhere. But no; it was our perceived slight and incivility that got their attention.

I don’t think Montgomery County is as eager for justice reform as they say they are—at least not without the zealous and, yes, sometimes adversarial efforts of the Public Defender. I think that what the County wants is the opportnity to look good while doing the least. I think that the County Commission wants a world free of gadflies, where all the rotting parts of the system are repaired on the quiet and low, if they are repaired at all; a world where there is nevery any complaint, and never blame.

But, hey, for eighteen years of ransoming children, acting as handmaiden to the private industry of punishment; for imposing bail on the poorest with impunity, without even a lawyer present; for brusquely firing the brave ones who stand up to these abuses, for not even bothering to get the facts right—for all that and more, maybe it is appropriate that they hang their heads a while.

Mr. Soltysiak’s claim that Keisha and Dean “go it alone” in their advocacy is, I suspect, something of a projection. More importantly, it is about as far from the truth as you could go. I have known Keisha and Dean only seven months or so, but there is one thing that I have been certain of in that time: that no one does it in the name of community, care, and love like them.

When Dean cleaned out his office, I was gone; I had left for the day. I came in the next morning to find on my desk the photo of Dorothy Day that he had kept hanging on the wall of his office. We share a love of the Catholic Worker—and I cried when I saw it, that Dean would think of me even then. I’m reminded now of one of the tenets of the Catholic Worker, something Dean is always quoting to me: you’ve got to make it easy for others to do good. Keisha Hudson and Dean Beer work tirelessly, with endless reserves of love, to make it easy to do good—they make it so easy to do good. The very least Montgomery County could do is accept their invitation.