It was an easy news item to overlook. A criminal was granted an appeal of his conviction. Just another day in the justice system.
Perhaps it was a piece of information in the headline—namely, that his conviction was for killing a 13-month-old girl—that caught my attention. But you would think I might have stopped reading at the first paragraph, where it said that this the death was related to a DUI hit-and-run. Tragic, to be sure, but such tragedy is almost too common to be especially newsworthy.
But I read on, and the devil was in the details. With a blood-alcohol level at two-and-a-half times the legal limit, Neely Dinkins drove his Dodge Durango through a crosswalk at Redondo Ave. and 10th St.., striking a Radio Flyer wagon being pulled by the father of the two toddlers, Kaylee and Oscar, riding inside.
“The wagon wedged under the SUV, which dragged it about a half block,” said the article. “A bystander grabbed Oscar, and Dinkins kept going, dragging the girl about a mile to a girlfriend’s home. […] Dinkins was convicted in February 2011 of second-degree murder, gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, DUI causing injury, driving with a blood-alcohol concentration of more than 0.08 percent with injury and leaving the scene of an accident.” He was given a prison sentence of 36 years to life.
Reading up on the case, the heinous facts of the case did not seem to be in dispute. So why, I wondered, was his conviction being appealed? To find out, I contacted Thomas Ono, the attorney handling Dinkins’s appeal. As Ono patiently explained to me the legal issues in question (which range from whether the “implied malice” standard for a second-degree-murder conviction had been to Miranda questions to a question of juror misconduct), I became interested in what it was like for someone like Ono, the attorney assigned this appeal through the California Appellate Project.
“All my cases are homicide cases,” Ono said. “They’re very difficult cases. They [i.e., the defendants] have all been convicted by the time I get them. And many of them are very young. I’ve got 17-year-olds that are going to be in prison for the rest of their lives. So these are very horrendous situations. But I don’t sit in judgment one way or the other; what I try to do is be as objective as I can, and as an advocate figure out whether they got a fair trial or not.”
Ono says he fully understand the knee-jerk reaction many people have to look down upon attorneys who take the part of a convict such as Dinkins.
“Sure [I understand negative reactions],” Ono says. “I’m a father, I have kids. […] The facts are horrendous, there’s no doubt about that. […] It’s very tragic. I’m sure the trial was very [emotionally charged].”
Ono also confirm that horrific details make appeals that much harder to win.
“Of course, you know? There’s a human aspect; the judges are all human, the lawyers are very human,” Ono says. This is a real tragedy, there’s no doubt. [… Kaylee’s killing] was horrendous. But that is one aspect of the case itself; the other aspect is to look at whether due process was rendered. And that’s the whole issue on appeal: Did [Dinkins] get a fair trial? If he got a fair trial, then yeah, he deserves to be locked up.”
Ono was nonplused that during our conversation my interest shifted from legal details of the appeal to Ono’s experience handling it. But as we spoke I realized that I—as I imagine is the case with most of us—had spent a lot of time feeling vague disgust with the money and time spent on appeals for people probably best left behind bars, but very little considering about what it was like for the run-of-the-mill attorneys (i.e., unlike despicable fame-seekers à la Johnnie Cochran) entrusted with such thankless work.
And Ono’s last words to me gave me a glimpse into why perfectly decent people accept the role of representing the worst among us.
“I think that’s something about our country that is so, so great: everyone is entitled to due process,” he said. “Everyone. Even if you think that they’re guilty, they still have the right to due process. […] We’re very lucky to have our system.”