As I mentioned, I was a supervisor, but I did not supervise the lawyer I am about to describe. I will call him Paul. He was a white man in his late forties or early fifties--a career public defender. He was back in the lockup talking to a client, as was I. Behind every courtroom in the criminal courts are lockups where pretrial detainees wait until their cases are called. This particular lockup is about fifty by twenty feet, with open bars so you could approach your client and speak to him through the bars with no obstruction. There is a "privacy panel" with a toilet toward the back. It isn't very private, and you learn to ignore it and not "see" it.

On this day, I was trying to speak to my client again about the motions we were filing and reporting to him about an investigation. Since these lockups are not very private--there can be as many as thirty or forty men back there (usually all are men of color)--I told my client that we would discuss everything more when I came to see him at the jail later that week. But I could hardly even say that much because Paul was yelling at his client nearby. From what I could gather, this client had been arrested later than his codefendant. Paul had worked out what he believed was an advantageous plea for the codefendant. I am sure it was a good plea deal, but he was meeting this client for the first time and was trying to strong-arm him into taking the deal, as it was apparently a package for either both codefendants or neither. Paul called him stupid. He used pejorative terms such as "mope" and "ignorant gangbanger." He  [*757]  told the client that he--the client--could "do six [years] standing on his head." And worse.

I was pretty sure that Paul would never have spoken to a white eighteen- or nineteen-year-old young man in the same demeaning way. They were both yelling at each other, and the entire lockup was listening. I doubt that the interaction was a product of Paul's conscious thought, but it is this unconscious bias that is so difficult to address and therefore is the focus of this Article.