A Q&A with Kenton County's top public defender on what it takes to represent the accused

As a result of pop culture's fascination with crime, even the most casual viewer is exposed to myriad dramas, podcasts and documentaries dealing with murder mysteries and usually ending with someone in handcuffs.

For the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy's attorneys in Kenton County, their work is only just beginning once someone is charged with a crime.

Each of the nearly dozen public defenders working in the department’s Covington trial office handles hundreds of felony cases each year in the course of advocating for clients who can’t afford legal representation.

Kenton County Circuit Court averages around 1,500 criminal cases filed each year ranging from drug possession to murder, state court data show . And unlike in television courtroom procedurals, these cases take months or even years to resolve.

To shed more light on a public defender’s role, The Enquirer interviewed Tatum Goetz-Isaacs, who was promoted in January to lead the department's Covington trial office.

Here’s what Goetz-Isaacs had to say about what it takes to defend someone charged with a serious crime. Her responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why did you want to become a public defender?

A: So, I got super lucky in college. I just kind of stumbled into an internship, and at the time I was down in Lexington, and so I worked with the Lexington office, their south office, and I just fell in love with it.

The people were very fierce advocates for their clients. They were smart, they were put together, they were fun to be around. I mean, I just felt like it was this culture that I had never seen before and I really wanted to be a part of.

Q: How long have you been doing this work?

A: I’ve been here for about five and a half years. From graduating law school I worked here. I started in August 2018 as a law clerk, so that was before I was licensed, but I became licensed in October (2018). So in those first months, it’s like doing a lot of legal research, helping out with the things you can … and then carrying a full caseload by October.

Q : What were your first cases?

A: When you start out, you take misdemeanors and child support cases and juveniles as well. So it started with a full caseload of all of that but primarily adult misdemeanor cases.

Q: What are some of the most challenging parts of the job?

A: First and foremost is caseload. We do have large caseloads – that’s inherent to the public defense system at large, so that’s not happening just here but we do certainly see that. It can be challenging. You’re in court all of the time, you have lots of clients. It’s not unusual for our attorneys to carry a caseload over 100 people at a time. Of course, that cycles through a few times a year, so most people are handling over 300 within a year and that can include just felony caseload. It’s a massive caseload. That leads to burnout, that leads to fatigue.

Public perception can be a big challenge. I think a lot of people think that because we work within a state agency, we're paid by the state, that we're in it for the conviction too and that we're all kind of in cahoots with each other. There's a kind of a stereotype out there of the public pretender.

I guess the third thing is you often have to go in and advocate for an unpopular position, and oftentimes you will get some pushback from the judges or the prosecutors that are there in the courtroom with you. That’s not always easy, but you do have to stand firm in that and make sure that your client is being represented in the way that they should.

Q: What are the rewarding aspects of your job?

A: The one that comes to mind is client relationships. Getting to work with people who are looked down on I think by everybody going through this system, and getting to build trust and be somebody who treats them with some dignity, I think, is the most rewarding thing that we get to do.

We don't always get to tell them good news, we don't always get to get them good outcomes or outcomes that they're happy with, but getting to see the humanity in them and let them know that we see that I think is the best part of the job and really what keeps me going every day.

Q: What is your office’s philosophy? How do you want to lead that mission going forward?

A: I see this office as an office that works very hard for our clients, that fights for people, that doesn't give up and that gives it our all, even on days when it's really challenging. My hope is that people feel inspired to do that because they see it happening around them and I think we largely do. I want people to provide really excellent legal representation to the people that they get to work with because we often are expected not to as public defenders.

I’m excited to see the potential of this office bear out because I think it has a lot of potential to be a very, very great trial office in Kentucky.

Q: How do you approach highly publicized cases?

A: I think we really try to talk with each other about cases as much as possible, especially the bigger cases because you do need to sometimes get out of your own head and try to think through your case the way that somebody who doesn’t know your perspective is going to see it.

We do try to keep an eye on what’s being put out there in the news so that we have an idea of what’s getting into people’s hands about it. But you know, ideally, people who have that level of familiarity with it are disclosing that and not even ending up on a jury.

Q: How do you deal with people’s preconceived ideas of the justice system and what it means to be accused of a crime?

A: I think very often the question that we get asked by family members or friends or just acquaintances even, is, "How could you defend those people?" Or, "How could you defend guilty people?" You try to help people understand that it's so much bigger than that. Our job isn't just to get people acquitted, because that's not realistic in most cases.

So, it goes so much outside of just the question of whether somebody’s guilty or not guilty and you try your best to help people see that. But I think it’s really hard to do where there’s such a fascination with crime, and just the facts of the case especially, that you really have to work hard, I think, to open people’s eyes up to the scope outside of that. Because at the end of the day, these are human beings with whole lives that they’ve lived. They’ve got families, they’ve got loved ones, they’ve got circumstances that many of us can’t even begin to relate to and so you try your best to make that stuff seen.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: A Q&A with Kenton County's top public defender on what it takes to represent the accused