by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

June 25, 2009

We meet her first client just as Claudia Trupp returns to work from maternity leave after having her first child.

“Just what I needed to ease myself back from the world of Peter Rabbit and friends — a first-degree murder case with a client serving a life term,” Trupp writes in her book, Hard Time and Nursery Rhymes: A Mother’s Tales of Law and Disorder, published by Rodale Press earlier this year.

A criminal appeals attorney who works with the Office of the Appellate Advocate in New York City, Trupp reviews the trials of convicted felons, searching for reversible error. The book, says the South Orange resident, is in part an answer to the question on everyone’s mind: “What kind of woman leaves three young daughters at home to spend her time representing convicted murderers and rapists?”

Through the careful selection of six clients’ cases, Trupp offers a view into the life of a criminal defense attorney, from the crimes themselves to her own detective work in uncovering mistakes, to her visits to maximum security prisons.

It all reads like a fast-paced detective story as Trupp describes the “soul-crushing” bureaucracy confronting attorneys who try to visit their clients, the judges more colorful than those on Law and Order, and clients only a criminal defense attorney could love.

She juxtaposes her life as an attorney with moments from her life as mother: the moment that makes her stop weeping over every minor setback in a case as she comes to see the bigger picture, the moment that makes her bring Shabbat into her family’s life every week, the moment that reveals who she is as a woman.

Taken together, they offer a window into her values — which happen to reflect her deep connection to Judaism. She takes a full entire chapter to describe her relationship to God and the liberal Judaism she was raised with (she now belongs to Congregation Beth El in South Orange, where her children attend religious school).

“Sure I complained about Hebrew school because it was uncool to like it, but I never dreaded going,” she writes. “All my friends were Jewish, and we would gossip and pass notes during class. Judaism’s teachings resonated with me: the emphasis on performing acts of kindness, the command to try to heal the world, the attention to practical minutiae such as feeding your animals before you yourself eat, or paying a person his wages on the day he performs his labor.”

For Trupp, though, it all starts with an understanding of recent Jewish history. As she writes in the book, “There was also the long shadow of the Holocaust cast over my childhood.” Although her parents were not survivors, she said, “I can’t remember a time I didn’t know about the Holocaust. In my day, they taught kindergartners that six million Jews were killed. It was Sesame Street and Night together,” she said, juxtaposing the popular public TV show for children with Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir.

The legal profession, she writes, “is very much populated by Jewish people. I think it’s because they have a real sense that the knock on the door could be for you, unless you protect everyone…. [T]he legal system being manipulated is the first step to dehumanizing people. We must be vigilant about protecting people’s rights.

“That certainly played into my decision to become a criminal defense attorney.”

Trupp graduated from New York University Law School and worked for one year at the New Jersey law firm McCarter and English before moving to the Legal Aid Appellate Bureau.

In 1996 she returned to private practice, this time doing product liability defense work at Wilentz, Goldman and Spitzer. After having her first child, she went back to criminal defense work, where she has been since November 1997.

Trupp wrote Hard Time and Nursery Rhymes in bursts of adrenaline late at night after a mammogram triggered a false cancer scare.

If her clients are none too savory characters, her self-portrait makes her appealing in a zealous, Nancy Drew-like way. She’s not above using charm to get what she needs, nor is she afraid to reveal her weepy side or her maternal instinct — and the book is at least in part about navigating the world of criminal defense as a woman.

Dispassionate approach

But she takes a dispassionate approach to the facts of a case, and won’t let you forget that she’s also smart enough to find the footnote everyone else has missed, tough enough to take on court officers, and successful enough to be the lead attorney in a case splashed across the tabloids (she uses pseudonyms in referring to clients, cases, and other figures in the book).

Trupp captures the radical differences between the worlds she inhabits when she describes her discovery that she has inadvertently brought one of her baby’s picture books into a maximum security prison. Told to leave the book in a locker, she writes, “I could not bring myself to abandon it there. Some part of me feared that molecules of misery might settle on the glossy pictures of Jemima Puddle-Duck and Samuel Whiskers, diminishing the delight they brought their rightful owner and somehow contaminating my home. I closed the locker and left the reception center to walk the book out to my car.”

There are other times when the clash of worlds gets personal, and friends and acquaintances demand to know how she can defend those from society’s underbelly. Trupp might answer with a flip “It keeps me off the streets,” although her loyal husband has been known to say things like, “Her job is to make sure people aren’t f——d over just for being poor.”

Trupp takes a world of dusty cases, skeptical judges, brutal crimes, and an apathetic society and transforms it into a place where ardent attorneys driven by high-minded idealism and toughened by reality show their clients the kind of compassion usually reserved only for their children. In return, they go to sleep at night believing they make the world a better place, one good deed at a time.

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