My friend the alleged murder- update.

This Sunday, I went with my friend Jose to visit another friend, lets call him Ed, who is being held on charges of having murdered the mother of his child. It felt surreal to be visiting a friend behind bars. Ed wasn't my closest friend, but he was a part of the group of friends that used to hang out frequently before I went to work as a lawyer. We called the group: "the zoo crew." He used to get together frequently for carne asadas, expeditions to Baja and sometimes just for a beer or two. Sometimes we would all laugh so much that our stomachs hurt too much to eat.

Now one of us was incarcerated, perhaps for life, and would probably never hang out with the guys again.

Ed was always the type of friend that was extremely easy going. The first time that I met him was when I was an undergrad back home on vacation. Ed had joined a group of us on a day trip to TJ. On our way back home, we decided to stop off to eat, but Ed offered to cook lasagna for all of us. He claimed to have a recipe for microwave lasagna that would take 10 minutes. It turned out to be disastrous, but E's response was just to laugh and laugh.

I wondered how often E would laugh in jail.

The visit took most of a day of waiting to see Ed for a half hour. when we got in to see him, he looked truly happy to see us. We took turns talking to him on a phone and he seemed in good spirits, everything considered. He asked me to tell him some jokes and I obliged- (why did the blonde get fired from the M & M factory? She kept throwing away the W's...).

We almost forgot that we were talking in a jail.

I wanted to ask him about the alleged crime, but I didn't want him to say anything incriminating. The conversations in jail are monitored and since I was there with a friend- there was no attorney client privilege.

So, I just asked how he was doing. His eyes turned sad and he asked me if I could defend him- but I knew that I couldn't. As part of a partenership- it wouldn't be fair to my law partner to have me take on a pro-bono murder defense. Instead, I offered him advice on how to best work with his public defender.

But I felt awful about it.