David Alvarez Nguyen

Before law school I spent a stretch apprenticing under a home remodeler, because I wanted to know what it was like to build something with my hands. Then my first daughter was born, and I went back to school. I chose Arizona State, where my parents had retired, so there would be family close by while I studied. It was there, in a criminal law classroom, that everything I had been chasing since Berkeley finally came together.

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When it came time to build a career, I looked up the best public defender offices in the country to train at. San Diego was near the top of every list — and it was where I was born. So I took a chance. I moved my pregnant wife and four-year-old daughter across the state for a temporary post-bar position with no guarantee it would become anything. That November, in a single week, I passed the bar, was offered a permanent job at the Public Defender's office, and welcomed my son into the world.

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I went to the Public Defender's office because it is where you go to actually learn how to do this — a real caseload, a courtroom every day, and cases nobody was ever going to write an article about. I spent eight of my eleven years there in the Alternate Public Defender's office, which takes the cases the primary Public Defender cannot. The conflict cases. The multi-defendant cases. The gang cases. The cases with five lawyers in the courtroom, each running a different theory, and a prosecution that has spent months turning one defendant against another.

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That work teaches you things nothing else will. It taught me how to cross-examine a man who has been promised his freedom in exchange for his testimony. It taught me how to take apart a gang expert who has been qualified so many times he has stopped expecting anyone to push back. It taught me that the government's case is almost never as solid as the government believes it is — but that nobody finds that out unless somebody makes them prove it.

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I have now tried 38 cases to verdict, and I want to be honest about something: I like it. I like trial. I like the moment a police officer takes the stand and I know this is where the case turns. Everything the prosecution has built rests on this witness. And I have the report. I have the body camera footage. And I have spent weeks preparing for this specific man on this specific afternoon. There is nothing else in this profession like it.

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And there are no better words in the English language than not guilty.

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I have never worked for the prosecution. Not one day. I have never asked a judge to lock a human being up, and I never will. If there were words to describe my approach to criminal defense, I would choose Eugene V. Debs', "[w]hile there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

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Anyone can end up on the wrong side of a police report. It usually starts with something small — a bad night, an argument in a parking lot, a neighbor who calls the police. What separates the people who survive it from the people who don't has very little to do with guilt or innocence and a great deal to do with who is standing next to them when it happens.

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Since 2020 I have also taught Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure as an adjunct professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. It keeps me sharp in a way that practice alone does not. When you have to explain the Fourth Amendment to a class of law students who will ask you why — and they always ask why — you cannot get lazy about it. You have to actually know it.

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If you hire me, I am your lawyer. Not an associate, not a junior attorney you meet for the first time at your sentencing. I will be the one who knows your case, argues your motions, and stands up when the jury comes back. I would be honored to be the person that stands between you and the government, but if you do not choose me, choose someone who takes this as seriously as your life deserves. Because that is what is on the table.