“A man goes far to find out what he is—“

                                                 Theodore Roethke

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I grew up in Romania, a place that geographically lies only half a world away, but whose idiosyncratic mores amplify the distance between to something like halfway to the moon. I had more friends than I had things, more experiences than aspirations. I was free in ways which are almost incomprehensible to me today, and yet which, paradoxically, illuminate a great deal of what I do, and what I am, now. 

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I practice criminal defense exclusively because, having journeyed to this place and time in my life on pathways that were sometimes pointed, but mostly meandering, I find that one’s freedom to walk under an open sky is paramount to all. To those who are accused of a crime, the process can sound complicated, but its goal is as rudimentary as it is unforgiving: a government with a lot more money, power, and resources that any one person, celebrity or pauper, can ever possess aims to take some degree of that freedom away. 

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I practice criminal defense because each time my client and I win a case, each and every single time, it means nothing less than we have wrestled that paramount freedom back from an adversary who is always bigger and better equipped, and who always proclaims that it cannot lose.  And at the end of the trial when we walk out of the courthouse, my client free under the open sky, I know then what I am: a criminal defense lawyer.