Six come aboard staff at public defender’s office

After living on the West Coast supporting himself as a musician, Memphis, Tenn., native Andy Cohen decided he wanted to practice law.

Cohen is one of five new attorneys in the public defender’s office that serves Whitfield and Murray counties. Four, including Cohen, are waiting to see if they passed the bar.

Cohen said he has lived all around the country, including California and Seattle, Wash.

“I was a musician for a long time (playing) all kinds of music,” he said. “I was a guitar player and a singer. I had a lot of fun.

“I played a lot of rock, blues, country — I did pretty much everything except rap music,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of need for guitar in rap.”

After considering using his background as an English major to break into journalism, he decided to pursue law school instead.

So far Cohen has been helping out with bond hearings, probation revocations and other smaller issues. The Mercer Law School graduate is anxious to get into the courtroom.

“I’m real interested in criminal law and I’m interested in just getting to try a case, period,” he said.

Being a defense attorney is all he wants to do.

“I have no interest in suing anyone,” Cohen said. “It just does not appeal to me.”

The public defender’s office saw an exodus of attorneys earlier this year when Mike McCarthy, who has been with the office since it opened in January 2005, moved up to chief public defender from interim public defender to replace Bentley Adams, who took a job in Atlanta. The new attorneys are replacements, not additional attorneys in the office. Nine attorneys provide defense for indigent clients in Whitfield and Murray counties.

“They were filling vacancies,” McCarthy said. “We had five (attorneys) leave between January and June. It’s been a rough several months.”

Elsa Cervantes isn’t an attorney, but her role as administrative assistant makes her one of the first faces people see in the office.

Cervantes, a Dalton native and graduate of Southeast High School, makes two or three trips a day to the Whitfield County jail, and visits the Murray County jail three days a week, to ensure inmates are provided an attorney if they can’t afford one.

Cervantes started working with McCarthy about three months ago.

“I was a case manager at a private probation office for almost five years and I decided to try the other side, defense,” Cervantes said. “I just wanted to try something different.”

Melissa Arcila, a native of Colombia, said she fled that country with her family when her attorney father faced possible assassination.

It wasn’t her father’s background that aroused Arcila’s interest in law, however. She said it developed while she studied sociology at the University of Georgia.

“I figured out that criminal defense was where I wanted to do my work,” she said. “I like to advocate on behalf of the underdog.”

After working with many crack cocaine cases at a clinic in Athens, Arcila said she is trying to use that experience to help with the methamphetamine abuse that is rampant in Northwest Georgia.

Arcila said she also helped with felony cases in DeKalb County Superior Court while in law school.

Betsey Flack grew up in Asheville, N.C., and majored in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“I got real interested in criminal defense work working in Atlanta at the Georgia Justice Project,” Flack said. “It’s a nonprofit group that provides indigent criminal defense. They’re not a part of the (state’s) public defender system. They’re privately funded. They also provide social services for their clients.”

That work as a legal intern clinched Flack’s interest in the law.

“I had an interest in it before but I didn’t have any experience, so I thought, ‘I’ll try this and see if I like it,’ and I loved it,” she said.

Flack said she is working with Juvenile Court and hopes to make a difference in young people’s lives.

“You just really want to try to fight for those kids so they don’t just get locked up and forgotten about,” she said. “I hope to be able to help some of these people who have gotten themselves into a bad situation or who have found themselves in bad situations one way or another.”

Ben Goldberg grew up in Atlanta and went to Northeastern University in Boston to study criminology.

“I’ve known since before law school that this was the only kind of law I was interested in,” Goldberg said. “I think I knew for a long time that I was interested in crime. I really like the sociology of crime.”

He returned to Atlanta for law school at Georgia State University and went to work with the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council and the Georgia Innocence Project.

The Innocence Project is “an organization that works to exonerate convicted people that are innocent,” Goldberg said. “They do it through DNA testing.”

Working with the indigent was something that appealed to Goldberg.

“It’s the poor people that get (abused) by the system more than anybody else,” he said.

Goldberg said he is interested in working with the appellate courts.

“The job of the appeals court is to interpret the law, so it’s up to them to determine what kinds of things are unconstitutional and to clarify ambiguities in the statutes,” he said. “I feel like that’s really the best way for me to learn the law and to help change the law in Georgia.”

Anna Johnson brings some experience to the group of new lawyers. She started out in 1998 in the district attorney’s office in Fulton County and practiced law at the Tulsa Public Defender’s Office in Oklahoma.

Johnson said she prefers defense work to prosecution.

“I actually get to talk to the people,” she said. “When I was a prosecutor I was just tunnel visioned where you try to help the victims, and a lot of the victims don’t want you to help them. As a defense attorney you have people who have had rough times and made mistakes and you’re able to touch their lives.

“I’m a Christian and so I do try to do more than fix the case,” Johnson said. “I try to talk to my people about the rest of their life.”

Johnson said public defenders collectively get “a bad rap.”

“I’ve heard them called public pretenders, public offenders, public everything,” she said. “I am just trying to change the image.”

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Six come aboard staff at public defender’s office

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