Books, Crime, Legal Ethics

When A Lawyer Becomes A Criminal

A lawyer falls in love with her famous client and slips him drugs in prison. But that's not the end of her story.

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Last night I went drinking with a criminal. As a lawyer that itself wasn’t a first, but it was the first time I sat across an attorney turned criminal and a criminal whose transgressions were so sensationalized as to make headlines across the world. I sat down with her to discuss her new book and also to find some answers of my own.

Because while she was busy committing her crimes, I sat in the next office over. A colleague and friend entirely in the dark and blindsided when the federal government dropped a criminal case in her lap.

You’ve probably heard the tale of Jennifer Ridha. The former defense attorney who fell for her client, Cameron Douglas — son of Michael and grandson of Kirk — and passed him drugs in her bra during attorney visits. Some of that story is true. Some of it’s bulls**t — specifically the brassiere-carrying case and the implication she passed him anything more potent than anti-anxiety pills he’d already been prescribed. But the nut of the story is true: lawyer becomes a criminal.

In Criminal That I Am (affiliate link), released today, Ridha recounts her experiences on the wrong side of the criminal justice system and how a charming celebrity client and terrible judgment put her there. Today, Ridha is seeking a doctoral degree in legal anthropology, urban studies, and criminal justice. She wrote the book not to “clear” her name but to walk through her progress from, as she put it, a “domino effect of unending s**t” of her own making to finally accepting exactly what she did.

Even though the account is punctuated with understated humor to keep the reader’s spirits up, the narrative nonetheless reads like a slow-motion train wreck, where I found myself audibly cry out “no” as Ridha epically botches every critical decision point. And this is no accident — while writing each small step of her account, Ridha says she urged her past self “don’t do it, don’t do it,” but, as she admits “I already knew the ending.”

Ridha’s crime, smuggling Xanax to Douglas while he suffered a nervous breakdown during the run-up to his sentencing, is tragic because it was so easily avoided. Not just by smarter decisions — though she won’t deny that — but by someone, anyone cracking down on the lawlessness of the Bureau of Prisons. Glossed over by the sensationalists at the New York Post is the fact that Douglas had a prescription for anti-anxiety medicine and an order, signed by a federal judge, commanding the BOP to administer the medication. The BOP’s response to this order was, “Meh.” From my time at the firm I remember the frustrating calls to the BOP coming from the next office. If a federal judge can’t sway the BOP, then who exactly can?

Before breaking down her crime, the book actually opens with an account of July 26, 2010, the day federal agents banged on her door at the crack of dawn to deliver their target letter. It’s an eerie chapter for me, since I last saw my friend on July 16, 2010, the day we went for drinks at the Royalton Hotel bar to celebrate her leaving the firm for the law professor gig she coveted — teaching criminal law, no less. Even though nearly 5 years have passed, I peered vividly through a window at someone just days after we’d last spoke.

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Bringing me into the present, when she arrived at the bar to discuss her book. For someone wrung through the criminal justice system (even if she avoided prison time), trashed in the court of public opinion, and going through a prolonged period as a recluse, she looked exactly like she did 5 years ago. You heard it here: federal misdemeanors are the Fountain of Youth.

I asked Ridha about a theme she touches on throughout the book, the triple-standard of criminal prosecution. A lot of ink has been spilled — including on ATL’s pages — on the double-standard that harshly penalizes poor minorities while delivering a slap on the wrist to the middle class and wealthy. But Cameron Douglas, and by extension Ridha, presents a “third way,” for the minuscule population of celebrity criminals targeted for harsher punishment solely by virtue of their celebrity status.

Not that it doesn’t help to be wealthy, but she posits that the government pursues celebrities with a persistence beyond that of another wealthy or middle class defendant to make an example out of them — and to try and justify the inherent injustice of the system.

“Criminal justice takes on a different element when people are looking as opposed to when they’re not looking,” Ridha explained. “But then there’s this sort of third category. Because people know there’s this huge difference between how socio-economic classes are treated by this system and when people are looking that’s when the government says, ‘Now we’re going to get harsh.'”

That said, while the government refused to drop the case of the celebrity scion’s lawyer, Ridha received a non-prosecution agreement from the government, a decidedly light sentence in light of what she could have received. Ridha credits her lawyer — who she leaves unnamed in the book, but who I can attest is a luminary in criminal defense — with bringing the government to this result. But in talking with Ridha, she does not shy away from the effect having such highly respected counsel had on the government. Not just because he’s good at his job, but because she felt the government gave him the benefit of the doubt on a number of occasions out of respect.

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It brought to mind Michael Downey’s recent assessment of the legal landscape in Ferguson, where he points to the “old boys’ club” atmosphere where prosecutors bent over backward to assist defendants represented by fellow lawyers, while dropping the hammer on the unrepresented. Ridha echoes these sentiments when she told me that, even as a beneficiary of the system, she recognizes, “that’s not really justice… who you hire makes all the difference.” Even if the stature of celebrities get the attention of the government, this measure of privilege will always serve celebrities in the long-run.

And the stature of the people involved also contributed to the media firestorm around the case. Most folks learned of Ridha as the woman passing drugs in her bra. A salacious detail spilled by Douglas as he testified as a cooperator in the criminal trial of his former drug-dealing colleagues. Unfortunately, Ridha says it wasn’t true. In a chapter entertainingly titled, “Persona Non Bra-ta,” she says her bra would be the absolute worst place to store contraband because it always earned her extra scrutiny because her underwire set off the detectors.

Rather, she hid the pills in her pocket. Given that she was smuggling reasonably common prescription meds, she reasoned that if she got caught she could easily tell the guard the pill was for herself and she forgot about putting it in her pocket. At least until she started smuggling larger quantities.

But as frustrated as she was that her undergarments became the subject of Internet speculation, her biggest complaint with the coverage — mostly cribbing off the Post — concerned the deft crafting of the story to avoid noting that Ridha brought her client prescription medication as opposed to another dose of heroin. As upfront as Ridha is in taking responsibility for her crime in this book, it still clearly stings that the media took the worst mistake of her life… and made it worse.

After all this time, it was good to see my friend again. As one would expect, I’d cut off all communication with Ridha after she became the target of an investigation. Not that I don’t love having my phone conversations heard by the FBI, but as a close friend, I was a potential witness in any criminal trial that may have happened. I’d always been left to wonder how the timeline of her criminal actions matched up with our conversations at work. To wonder if I should have figured out what was going on. Maybe even intervened.

Well, actually I guess I kind of figured out what was going on. Obviously not the “contraband smuggling” part. When I first learned of this book, I expected to be a character myself. While she found herself falling in love with Cameron Douglas while denying it to herself, I more or less expected to be introduced as “Condescending Jerk Colleague” who almost daily walked into her office calling Douglas “her little boyfriend” before she’d throw something heavy my way. But I managed to avoid her pages; though my instincts were not as far off as I’d expected, apparently I was almost there.

She told me she nearly introduced me as a character because of something I used to tell her about finding a new career. “There’s a big difference between what you can do and what you want to do,” I said.

It’s too bad she limited my line to her career, because if she’d taken that a little more generally, she probably would never have gotten into this mess.

Criminal That I Am (affiliate link) [Amazon]

Earlier: How Responsible Are Lawyers For Injustice In Ferguson?

 

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