Connecticut Solicitor Joshua Perry is an accomplished attorney and public defender, with decades of experience spanning from New Orleans criminal court rooms to the U.S. Supreme Court. Perry—a storyteller at heart who recently published a fictional novel titled Seraphim—believes that effective storytelling is important to effective legal practice.
As the Solicitor General of Connecticut, Perry is responsible for the state’s appellate litigation. He previously served as a public defender in New Orleans for 10 years post-Katrina.
Perry was invited by the George Barrett Social Justice Program—a program endowed in honor of nationally renowned civil rights leader and attorney George Barrett.
The Power of a Story
15 years ago, when Perry was just starting as a public defender in New Orleans, he defended a man who was charged with aggravated rape. Perry knew he had a daunting task at hand, but he also knew his client was innocent. At the time, Perry’s wife was nine-months pregnant, a fact he used to win over the jury. The attorney placed his phone down on the table and told the jury he would check it routinely, not out of boredom, but in case his wife called.
“I wanted [the jury] to know that this man who was sitting next to me, who was accused of raping a child, was someone who I believed in,” Perry said. “How could I, an expectant father to an infant daughter, align myself with a vicious rapist? It must be that I am credible and he, by association, is credible.”
Lawyers unavoidably find themselves on the center stage, according to Perry, and must act accordingly.
“We end up telling stories about ourselves as ways of telling stories about our clients,” Perry said.
Three aspects of storytelling
Perry broke storytelling into three different parts for the audience: listening, genre, and voice.
Listening is the first step in forming a story, according to Perry. “Nothing comes from nothing,” Perry said. “When we tell stories … where do the ideas come from?”
Perry recounted his time as a public defender in New Orleans, where the vast majority of his clientele were black children who were very different from Perry. The education on listening he received through his worked differed from his law school training.
“I (had) learned some interviewing skills, I didn’t really learn how to hear what other people are saying,” Perry said. “How was I supposed to accurately see the things that I was supposed to bear witness to?”
Perry recalled defending a 12-year-old, who he referred to as “Jacob,” that was charged in the armed robbery of an undocumented migrant worker. Jacob swore his innocence in the case, but there was little evidence to defend him, and Perry could not locate the victim. When the court date arrived, Perry had little hope, but he and Jacob were in for a surprise.
“The victim came in and said to his translator as he was walking up to the stand: ‘Aren’t they going to bring in the guy who robbed me?’” Perry said. “He sits on the stand and he says, not just that Jacob isn’t the guy who robbed me … but, ‘I never told them who the guy who robbed me is.’”
The officer who questioned the victim spoke no Spanish, while the victim spoke no English. The misunderstanding led Jacob to be charged and jailed for months—cut off from his family and out of school.
“My point here is that nobody heard what either Jacob had to say, or what the victim had to say,” Perry said. “Listening is hard, and it’s a skill that you have to cultivate; that starts with commitment.”
“Genre is a weird thing to talk to lawyers about, because legal writing doesn’t purport to have a genre,” Perry said. “It seems to me [that] what we write as lawyers and the stories we tell ourselves as lawyers … are all profoundly inflected by different kinds of genre.”
The Public Defender Service in Washington DC has a logo of a knight in shining armor, a representation of lawyers that bothers Perry.
“You will not always do heroic things. You’ll do morally compromised things. You’ll do difficult things that feel bad,” Perry said. “If your vision of yourself is that you’re a knight in shining armor, that can’t be who you are.” People do not generally consider narrative voice as a factor when reading legal writing, so Perry believes that it is useful to be aware that it can play a part.
“I think it’s actually a useful pretense in 99% of cases,” Perry said. “Lawyers don’t think that much about narrative voice … We think a little bit more about tone.”
Perry writes in a very different tone now as the Solicitor General than he did when he was the Civil Rights Council for Connecticut.
“There’s lots of kinds of advocacy where we can think about voice and narrative perspective,” Perry said. “I encourage you in your professional work to think about narrative perspective and tone.”
However, Perry believes people should consider these elements in their personal work, too. He encouraged the audience to ask themselves questions about their perspective and motivations to make their work more productive and meaningful.
