#007: Zarena Sita - Assistant State's Attorney

This transcript was generated by AI.

Zarena Sita [00:00:00]:

Being a prosecutor is a very, very serious position to be in, and it's a position that good prosecutors do not take lightly. It is important for me, because of where I got into this legal profession, that there are good prosecutors everywhere, because our criminal justice system has many, many flaws. But if you put somebody in a position to do the right thing by all the parties involved, including the defendant, it just makes it a little bit stronger.

Jonah Perlin [00:00:32]:

Welcome to How I Lawyer, a podcast where I talk to attorneys from throughout the profession about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it well. I'm your host, Jonah Perlin, a law professor in Washington, DC. Now let's get started. Hello and welcome back. I'm so glad you are here for today's episode, where I speak with Serena Sita, who is an Assistant State's Attorney in Baltimore County. Serena is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Go, Spartans. And the University of Baltimore School of Law. Go, Bees. At the University of Baltimore. Zarena was the captain of the Criminal Procedure Moot court team as well as a member of Balsa, the Black Students Association and the Criminal Law Association. Prior to joining the State's Attorney's office as Zarena clerk on the Baltimore County Circuit Court, in our conversation, we talk about what a prosecutor does and how Zarina reviews a file, makes plea offers, and prepares her opening statements for trial. We also talk about some of her craziest moments in the courtroom and the importance of diversity in prosecutors'offices. We began our conversation by discussing her path to becoming a prosecutor, which, like the career of so many others already featured on this podcast, seems more clear today than it did when she started law school a decade ago. Here is Irina.

Zarena Sita [00:01:44]:

When I was in undergrad, I wanted to be an FBI agent, and I saw that a lot of FBI agents have JDS. So I was like, all right, fine, I'll go to law school.

Jonah Perlin [00:01:57]:

What was so exciting to you about being an FBI agent?

Zarena Sita [00:01:59]:

Looking back on it now, I have no idea. I don't even know why that was attractive to mean. I was pre law and undergrad, and then I went to law school, and then it turned out that I really, really liked the law school stuff. So I chucked the FBI idea and then decided that I was going full force in the legal world. And when I was still in undergrad, I did an internship in Prague. It was a Wrongful convictions, miscarriages of justice internship in Prague. That was incredible. And from that point, all I wanted to do was wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice. So it's probably February or March of my one L year, and the internship that you get, one all year is so incredibly important. So I'm just like, I need to work for the Innocence Project. This is going to set me up for life, and I didn't get the job. So I go running to the legal profession advisor at UB, where I went to school, and it was like, I just don't know what to do. They didn't give me a job. I feel like I need to rethink my entire career path. Like, I'm useless. And she was like, well, why not prevent wrongful convictions from happening in the first place? And I was, huh? Okay. So I interned at the Montgomery County State's Attorney's office and just fell in love with it. So then from that point on, that was going to be what I wanted.

Jonah Perlin [00:03:24]:

To do, and I guess the rest is history, right? Can you tell me a little bit more about what you do now?

Zarena Sita [00:03:29]:

I am in circuit court on the felony trial team. So all the cases that I get, I have in advance. When I get the case, the case has already been indicted. I get the file. I go through the file. I do my work up. I send discovery. I use my workup and whatever video surveillance or DNA or fingerprints or whatever evidence that I have to make an offer. We make an offer in every single case. So I will send either a plea offer letter, or I'll just pick up the phone and call the defense attorney, make them the offer, it's open. And if they say, we definitely want to take that offer, let's do it now, then we can pull a case from trial and bring in it on a plea docket in advance. What happens most of the time is that they're like, I haven't spoken with my client. We'll see. So then we get to the trial date in those cases, and that's probably like 80% of the cases. You just have no idea what you're walking into that day, either going to postpone it, plea it, or have a trial.

Jonah Perlin [00:04:30]:

When you do your workup, what's your process for that? How do you turn a file of information into something you can use to make strategic decisions?

Zarena Sita [00:04:37]:

So I will review all the reports, so the police report, the statement of probable cause. I'll review the medical reports if there are any. So the EMS reports from the ambo ride or the hospital reports when there are injuries. I will review the video surveillance, the interview of the defendant, if there is one. I'll watch all the body camera, which should have the interviews of all of the witnesses, and then I'll call those witnesses, talk to them. After a combination of all of that information, I write down the statement as I see it. And so that statement is the statement that I would read in court. Sometimes things get lost in translation. When there are multiple police officers working on a case, one officer will talk to one witness and a different officer will talk to the victim. And then it's just that first one that's writing the statement of charges. So I will put it all together, including what I'm seeing on the video surveillance, which is never in police reports, and then make my statement. And then based on that, I will determine what I'm willing to offer, what count I'm willing to go on, and what my recommendation would be.

Jonah Perlin [00:05:48]:

What do you mean by when you say offer?

Zarena Sita [00:05:49]:

So when I say offer, I mean so there's two parts of the offer, the count that I'm going to call, and the recommendation. So in an assault case, if it's gotten to me, it is probably a first degree assault, but every first degree assault also has a second degree assault because it's a lesser included. So if the assault is kind of de minimis, then I might offer a second degree assault. If it's an amputation or something, I'm going to offer first degree assault. And then based on the witnesses testimony and their credibility, the defendant's record and the crime itself, I will make my determination of what my recommendation is going to be. And that is either jail and if so, how much, or no jail or PBJ, which is a probation before judgment, a tool in Maryland that we use so that a defendant can say, I haven't actually been convicted of anything because I got a probation before judgment. But you're still on probation.

Jonah Perlin [00:06:48]:

So it's basically if you don't do anything wrong during your probationary period, it becomes as if you were never charged with the crime.

Zarena Sita [00:06:55]:

Yeah. So from the second you get a PBJ, you do not have a conviction.

Jonah Perlin [00:07:01]:

That's probably a powerful tool for you to have in your toolbox.

Zarena Sita [00:07:04]:

Yeah, definitely. There are many cases where somebody will be charged with something and we will speak with the victims and the victim will say they don't want to go forward. And we can either dismiss the case at that point. If there is another way to prove the case, and it is a case that we feel needs to go forward regardless of the victim's participation, and we're able to do so because we can prove it, then we can either make another offer I mean, that case will likely be a trial. We can make another offer or we can STET it. In Maryland, STET is another good tool that we use because it is not a conviction, it's not a dismissal. It's just putting a case up on a shelf for three years, essentially, and it is on an inactive docket. In the event that the defendant completes whatever conditions we wanted to impose on the STET, then the case goes away. If they didn't, then we could reopen that STET, but all that does is set it all back in for trial.

Jonah Perlin [00:08:04]:

That seems like a great deal of power. How do you come up with that.

Zarena Sita [00:08:06]:

Recommendation where you put in the defendant's record so whether or not he has a minor, moderate or major record, the injury to a victim if it's a victim crime and then the category of charge that they would be pleading guilty to, and that generates a number or a range.

Jonah Perlin [00:08:27]:

And is that like the federal system where the range is advisory, not mandatory?

Zarena Sita [00:08:31]:

We don't have to make a recommendation within that. In fact, frequently we make recommendations below guidelines, or sometimes if it's a murder and it's somebody who doesn't have any priors, we're probably going above guidelines.

Jonah Perlin [00:08:45]:

So it's a starting place.

Zarena Sita [00:08:47]:

It's a starting place. So it gives you an idea of what kind of recommendation you should be making an idea of it. And the courts don't have to abide by the guidelines either. It's just on record. This is what the guidelines were. We either went below it for this reason or above it for this reason.

Jonah Perlin [00:09:04]:

Got it. And when you're making that recommendation, is that going through someone else?

Zarena Sita [00:09:09]:

One of the things that I love so much about my office is that we have incredible discretion, and that can be good or it could be bad. I think on TV you see a lot of prosecutors have these conviction rates or whatever, and that's just not a thing, at least in my office. I'm sure there are prosecutorial offices around the country that keep track of that kind of thing, but we don't. And it just gives you this kind of freedom to do exactly what you think is right without fear that you're going to have some kind of negative consequence because of it.

Jonah Perlin [00:09:46]:

That gives you a lot of power, but also a lot of power to do what you think is right and what you think is just based on your professional judgment. How did you build that professional judgment? I mean, I'm sure the first time you had to do this, it was super scary. Tell me a little bit about that.

Zarena Sita [00:10:02]:

The reason this discretion is so important to me is because if I do not think that somebody committed a crime, I just dismiss it. If I think that charges that were brought against somebody were retaliatory because the victim was actually the aggressor, then I just dismiss it. It is incredibly important to me to prevent wrongful convictions. The worst feeling that you can have as a prosecutor is convicting someone that didn't do it. If you even get an inkling that somebody afterwards didn't do it, it just makes your skin crawl. I mean, it's disgusting. So it is great from my perspective to have that kind of ability to go forward on the case or not.

Jonah Perlin [00:10:50]:

How are you trained on the job?

Zarena Sita [00:10:52]:

So I spent just about three years in district court in our office. You do district court and then juvenile and then circuit court. When you first get to district court, you're in training for two months. So you start by watching other people's dockets, and then you graduate to calling some dismissals, which you literally cannot mess up, and then you're calling postponements, and then you're calling pleas, and then eventually you start doing trials, and this is all in training. And then once your two months is over, you're kind of on your own. You're handling all the misdemeanors. You're in trial all the time. District court dockets are between probably 40 and 70 cases each docket, and you have two dockets a week, and they're only bench trials in district court. So all of your trials happen in front of the district court judge. One of my colleagues had seven trials in a day.

Jonah Perlin [00:11:49]:

Seven trials in a day.

Zarena Sita [00:11:50]:

Have those seven trials, and you still have the other 35 that need to get resolved in some way. They either get moved to another courtroom or you're just staying there until eight that night trying all these cases. There's a lot of learning on the job. You get your docket about a week before, but you're in court for your other docket. So you have pretty much two days to read all the files, call all the witnesses, make an offer for each docket. So district court, things are ridiculously quick. They are just rough. You end up just flying by the seat of your pants a lot, and so there's a lot of learning on the job there. So you find out real quick in disrecord if the offer that you made was unreasonable because you end up in trial.

Jonah Perlin [00:12:39]:

The feedback loop tells you immediately if it was not working right.

Zarena Sita [00:12:43]:

If I offer top count in jail on somebody who doesn't deserve top count in jail, you will find out immediately, because you're going to end up in trial. And if it's not a not guilty, then you'll get a guilty, and then he'll get a PBJ anyway. Why did I just waste all that time? That's just foolish. And the judges will tell you if your offers are foolish, if you are going rogue, if you're being outlandish, they will tell you. So in district court, you spend a lot of time learning what a case is worth once you get through district court, where you're doing only bench trials. So you're honing in on your trial skills. You're learning the rules of evidence. You're learning how to get things into evidence, what is admissible and what is not admissible. You're learning how to judge witness credibility.

Jonah Perlin [00:13:31]:

And what classes would you recommend someone take in law school who aspires to.

Zarena Sita [00:13:34]:

Become a prosecutor coming into a prosecutor's office, you need to know. Crimpro definitely crim law, definitely evidence. Trial advocacy was another course that was offered at UB that you need to take. We had clinics, and I actually was able to do a criminal law clinic, so that was incredibly helpful. I was temporarily sworn into Maryland barr and be a student prosecutor under an actual prosecutor, and that was incredibly helpful for me because it just gives you an idea of what you're getting into. I mean, I just can't imagine starting it without knowing anything.

Jonah Perlin [00:14:14]:

And what if you're not yet in law school or you just don't have a clue?

Zarena Sita [00:14:17]:

It sounds really lame, but I would 100% recommend just going and watching a docket, just sitting there. And if nothing else, it's interesting. I mean, the stories that come out during these dockets, the facts, they're all crazy and it might either turn you off to the idea or spark a flame that you didn't know was there.

Jonah Perlin [00:14:37]:

Are there any particular skills that make people particularly suited to being a prosecutor, particularly in a state court like you?

Zarena Sita [00:14:43]:

I think being able to advocate and think on your feet is incredibly important and that is something that if you don't have coming into a prosecutor position, it's just not going to work out for you. I'm one of those people that after I've made an argument that night at home when I'm in the shower, I think like, oh, man, there's definitely something else that I could have said. And so I'm constantly writing things down to keep in my mind when I have a similar argument. Just the nature of the volume that we do is that you see things, similar things, over and over again.

Jonah Perlin [00:15:16]:

So tell me a little bit about your prep. You know you're going to go to trial, what does your prep routine look like?

Zarena Sita [00:15:21]:

So the very first thing I do is go through all of the evidence. So we will get some binders of information from the detectives. It will include all of the interviews of all of the witnesses, the interview, the defendant, any video surveillance that there is, any DNA. We will, at a later point in time, get the medical examiner's report. We will get any kind of tangible evidence that there is from any search warrants or anything like that. So I go through all of that and just write notes. When I see something that's mentioned in a police report, I write it down as something that might be something that we're going to be using at trial. So, a piece of evidence. I listen through all of the interviews. I usually transcribe the defendant's interviews because I'm a little bit anal and also because it helps me at least to understand exactly what he said. And it just sticks in my head a little more if I'm writing it down. His words. And frequently in the event that he or she says something that is going to be admissible at trial and is incriminating, I will use his or her words in trial, in opening or in closing, and that can be powerful. So after going through all of that, we will set up a time to interview all of the witnesses ourselves. So we talk to all the witnesses, because the worst thing that you could do is have a trial without having spoken to someone first. Why is that one? If they actually say on the stand, never mind, none of this ever happened, then maybe you shouldn't have been going to trial in the first place, right? Or two. If they get on the stand and say something completely different, it completely changes your trial strategy and how you go forward.

Jonah Perlin [00:17:16]:

And are you doing this from the beginning? In every trial, especially big trials like.

Zarena Sita [00:17:19]:

A murder case, you can't spend the amount of time that you're spending on a murder on your district court cases because it's just not feasible. But you're learning to make an inventory of discovery, making sure that everything gets sent to the defense attorney. You're learning about simple things like how to get an autopsy into evidence, which you would have no reason to know in district court because you don't deal with autopsies there, right? You're learning about fingerprints, which you don't see in district court, not often. DNA you almost never see in district court. All these things that get devoted to the more serious crimes that you are just unaware of. The first chair and second chair kind of work together. You split up witnesses. One person calls these witnesses, the other person calls other witnesses. Typically, somebody will do opening and somebody else will do closing and then rebuttal close.

Jonah Perlin [00:18:13]:

Do you memorize your openings and closings, or are you a go from your feet kind of speaker?

Zarena Sita [00:18:18]:

So openings I do memorize. And to take it one step further, I walk the same path in my house so that when I'm in court, I just think about where I would have been standing when I was doing it at home. And then it comes back to me.

Jonah Perlin [00:18:35]:

It's kind of like that classic memory palace. I don't know if you're familiar with that, this idea that if you associate words with objects or places, they're so much easier to remember.

Zarena Sita [00:18:45]:

Exactly. So I give my opening statement hundreds of times. I give my opening statement not only to the first chair and my colleagues, but I also give it to laypeople to non lawyers because ultimately we are going to be giving this to a jury. And if it doesn't make sense to them, then I know that I need to say it differently because the people that I'm going to be giving it to by and large, are not going to be lawyers. I mean, it's nice when you have a lawyer on your jury, but if you don't, then you really need to give them the information in a cohesive way.

Jonah Perlin [00:19:19]:

One of the things that I hear from my students all the time is, I'm so afraid that the law doesn't work for me. And so they just want to talk about the story the whole time. How do you balance the law and the facts depending on what works best for your theory of the case?

Zarena Sita [00:19:36]:

So what they typically say is if the law is on your side, argue the law. If the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If your facts are particularly gruesome or tug on your heartstrings, then, yeah, harp on that. If the law is convoluted, if it is difficult to understand and to connect, if you're doing some kind of like accomplice liability, if you are doing felony murder, you just get the facts out there. And an opening is so much more about just laying out what you're going to be producing at trial. You're not spending a ton of time on the law there for openings. You just paint them a word picture, right? You're just creating a story so that they know what's going to be coming, what they're going to be hearing. And sometimes trials just get very difficult to follow when you're calling experts who, before they get into their testimony of the actual case, they spend 20 minutes talking about their credentials and what the technology is and how you compare fingerprints and what DNA strands look like. And by then, you've lost 90% of your jury because they're bored and have no idea what was just happening. So in your opening, if you tell them a story before that testimony even starts, they know what you expect to elicit in the testimony. So even if it doesn't, you lose them in the beginning. Once that testimony of the fact starts, they'll hearken back to what you said in opening, and then they'll be able to follow it a little bit better.

Jonah Perlin [00:21:16]:

I'm sure you've had many memorable trials, any trial war stories?

Zarena Sita [00:21:21]:

I think it was my second trial in district court was an indecent exposure, and it was a neighbor dispute, and one of the neighbors essentially mooned the other neighbor and would do it every day at 1030 in the morning. When you first get to district court, everything seems incredibly serious. So I think I offered a set in that case, and I thought, just don't have any more contact with the neighbors and we can just move on. This is ridiculous. And it was rejected. And I just knew going in that it was going to be accepted. So the prep that I did for that was not nearly as much as the prep that I did for a DUI case, which I thought was going to be a trial. And that case pled in this case was a trial. So I called the case for trial. We start going through the whole thing. I elicited the testimony from the victim. She says she saw the defendant's backside. It was every day at 1030. And the defense attorney gets up in her case and produces this pair of bikini bottoms, and they are like peach, like opaque. She asks the defendant, who takes the sand, and the defendant says, these are my gardening bikinis. And every day at 1030 I wear these, and they're flesh colored. So she says I wasn't mooning her, I was wearing my gardening bikinis. And the statute for indecent exposure very clearly says that you need to see actual genitalia or a buttocks or whatever. And if she's wearing the flesh colored bikinis, then how would the victim across the street have been able to tell? And she brings them into trial, and she's like, counsel, do you want to see anyone? So then the defense attorney says in her closing statements, judge, if you don't see the crack, send those charges back. That is what this case is about. You were not able to see the definition between her butt cheeks, so it was not an indecent exposure. If you don't see the crack, send those charges back. And I'm sitting there like, man, that was really catchy. And the judge was like, I mean, I agree. I didn't see any definition between her butt cheeks, so I don't think that this was an indecent exposure. So was a not guilty. And I was just like, what just happened? I just tried a case. Some gardening bikinis. I mean, ridiculous.

Jonah Perlin [00:23:52]:

What lesson did you learn from that case?

Zarena Sita [00:23:54]:

I guess a couple of things. It helped me to just realize that things happen in trial that you will never be able to prepare for. Never in my life would I have expected she was going to produce some bikini bottoms that were the same color as the defendant's flesh. The defendant never said that in her statement to the police. The defense attorney never gave me a heads up that this was going to be a defense. There was none of that. She didn't give an opening statement. So it's not like I knew in advance that this was going to happen. And that's kind of just what happens at trial. So the state has to provide everything that we're going to be doing prior to trial. The rules are not the same for defense, so we just encounter random things during trial that you just have to be able to combat or just kind of laugh at. And that's what it was. That was my very first hall of fame trial as a baby.

Jonah Perlin [00:24:54]:

Prosecutor, you started your career as a judicial law clerk. Can you tell me a little bit more about that, specifically how you got your state court clerkship and what the clerkship was like?

Zarena Sita [00:25:03]:

When I was in law school, I didn't want to be a judicial law clerk. Nobody had really explained what a law clerk did. And for some reason, in my mind, I just didn't think that it was going to be something that I would want to do. But I was in Balsa, the black law students association, and a judge reached out to Balsa saying that he wanted some resumes and applications. So I applied, thinking it's very early on, I don't need to worry about a job for after graduation right now, but I'll just apply so that I get some experience with interviewing and all of that, because I hadn't done real legal interviews. And then I ended up getting the clerkship. The judge that I clerked for was perfect for me because I knew I wanted to go into criminal law. But he also did a stint in family law, which was perfect for me because it solidified the idea that I did not want to go into family law.

Jonah Perlin [00:26:00]:

Sometimes clerkships tell you both what you want to do, but what you also don't.

Zarena Sita [00:26:04]:

Well, right. And sometimes they tell you what you should do as a lawyer and what you shouldn't do as a lawyer. Because every single day you saw lawyers in the courtroom that did something crazy or something that was just ineffective or were just wrong, and those lessons were better than the lawyers that did things well. Because you can almost never duplicate what another lawyer does that you see that you like, but you can very easily steer clear of what they do wrong.

Jonah Perlin [00:26:35]:

Absolutely. I had the exact same experience from my clerkship. It was learning what not to do, which was the most valuable part of, oh, yeah, absolutely.

Zarena Sita [00:26:42]:

They call judicial law clerks like baby judges because you're just back there, you and your judge are talking through cases, you're bouncing ideas off one another. You're getting to see their thought process on how decisions get made and what they are seeing. If you are able to watch trials, then you're able to see what a credible witness looks like on the stand. If your judge has been a judge for a while, then you can understand their procedure in determining what makes a witness credible, what they see when they see someone who is blatantly lying through their teeth. And truthfully, it just gets you very comfortable in the courtroom. And that is huge. You can very easily tell from a prosecutor standpoint what a prosecutor that has had a clerkship looks like and what a prosecutor that is not.

Jonah Perlin [00:27:35]:

What do you mean by that?

Zarena Sita [00:27:36]:

One of the judges would say, it's our party. The judges just sent out the invitations. So we literally are structuring that docket and how we want to call the cases. And if you are not comfortable in the courtroom, if you're not comfortable moving around or speaking with the court or the bailiffs or whatever, it makes your docket that much more difficult. And you get that kind of familiarity by being a judicial law clerk. You start to learn that judges are just humans. They are humans, just like us. And sometimes the same way our three L class seemed like it was just a high school class of kids, sometimes the judges are the same way. It brings them down a little bit to a level that you can approach. Obviously, the deference is still required. They are the courts, so you still feel a level of respect for them, and you should give them respect. But it's nice to make it seem like they are just humans. And I got that from my clerkship. I'm sure you got that from you.

Jonah Perlin [00:28:41]:

Absolutely. My last question is what. Would you tell people who are thinking about going into this profession, what are the best parts about being a prosecutor and what are the most challenging?

Zarena Sita [00:28:51]:

So I would say that from my perspective, if you want to be a prosecutor because of the power that we yield, then you should not be a prosecutor. I'm sure it could be easy to use that power for evil. And that is not what we need. That is not what the world needs. It's not what victims or defendants need. The thing about being a prosecutor is that we represent the citizens of the county. Citizen little C, not Big C. That includes the defendants. So what kind of gripes me the most is when people think getting the highest sentence is what we should be doing, because it's just not. Our job is to protect the rights of the victims, of the witnesses, and of the defendants. We have a great deal of power. Using it appropriately is the best way to do this job and to do this job well. Now nobody is going to be happy with an outcome of a case. It's incredibly rare that a victim is happy with the outcome of a case because the crime still happened to them. The defendant is not going to be happy because they had to deal with this. Even if there's no level of punishment as a part of their sentence or outcome of a case, they still had to take time off from work and come into court. They still had to stand in front of a judge. And for a lot of defendants, standing in front of a judge and talking to them and hearing a prosecutor read out a statement of facts is terrifying. It's something that no one wants to go through, no one's family wants to go through. It's not a place where anybody wants to be. And that's a great segue, is that you kind of have to have a very thick skin, because it's very easy to take all the stuff that we see and bring it home. We see a lot of really terrible things and we interact with people on or about the worst day of their lives. So there's not a great deal of happiness in it. So if that kind of thing stays with you, then perhaps you should not be going into this.

Jonah Perlin [00:30:57]:

The follow up to that is how do you leave it at the office?

Zarena Sita [00:31:00]:

I used to love watching shows like Law and Order SVU. I used to read a lot of murder mysteries. I don't do any of that anymore because I just see it too much in my day to day life that when I am at home, I am watching foolish shows, right? Taking a break from work and watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Or I am watching old Disney movies on Disney Plus. With the exception of Scandal and how to Get Away with Murder, both of which I really liked watching.

Jonah Perlin [00:31:31]:

And what about your family?

Zarena Sita [00:31:33]:

My husband makes fun of me because I make decisions for a living. But every night when he's like, what do you want for dinner? I'm like, I don't know. And in addition to I don't know, I don't want to make that decision because I'm all decisiond out. So we made a game show board that you just spin, and whatever it lands on is what we're ending up having for dinner.

Jonah Perlin [00:31:55]:

We should try that. That's brilliant.

Zarena Sita [00:31:58]:

It was working out until I didn't like what it landed on, so then I would have to spin again.

Jonah Perlin [00:32:03]:

Zarina, thank you so much. Do you have any parting words just.

Zarena Sita [00:32:06]:

To take a little step back? Being a prosecutor is a very, very serious position to be in, and it's a position that good prosecutors do not take lightly. It is important for me, because of where I got into this legal profession, that there are good prosecutors everywhere, because our criminal justice system has many, many flaws. But if you put somebody in a position to do the right thing by all the parties involved, including the defendant, it just makes it a little bit stronger. It gives people a little more confidence in that office, in that entity. And so if you are thinking about being a prosecutor, then talk to somebody about it. Try it out. I love seeing more people of color as prosecutors because we need a seat at the table. So if you look across the aisle and you see somebody of color as a prosecutor, I mean, they're not going to do you favors simply because they're a person of color. But at the very least, they have a different set of culture norms that they come into it with. So things that somebody might not understand, you will understand. It's important to me that prosecutors offices reflect what the community looks like. There shouldn't be 100 white prosecutors in a county where the white population is only 2%, right? There shouldn't be 100 black prosecutors in a city or a county where the population is by and large, Native American and Asian. It is good to reflect so that we're just able to understand things that are unwritten, things that you can't learn, things that you just know. Growing up as who you are, diversity is incredibly important. And if you are thinking about it, then just reach out to somebody, talk to somebody, go watch a docket, whatever it is. But prosecutors are not all the bad people. We have feelings. Too many of us are trying to do the right thing and dedicate our lives to trying to do the right thing. And there are, without a doubt, bad apples out there, and hopefully we can weed them all out and replace them with some of your students.

Jonah Perlin [00:34:28]:

Again, that was Serena Sita, Assistant State's Attorney, who I want to thank so much for being on the podcast. I'm so grateful for Serena's Candid discussion of how she became a prosecutor, why she practices in this area of criminal law, and some of the techniques she uses to do it so well. I learned so much from our conversation, and I hope you did too. I also want to thank you, as always, for listening. If you're interested in learning about past and future episodes, please sign up for the email list@howielawyer.com or subscribe. Wherever you get your podcasts, you can always reach me at lawyer at or at jonah perlin on Twitter. Thanks once again to Zarena. Thanks for listening and have a great week.