As a public defender in Marin, Michael Coffino might be the best local attorney money can’t buy.
Coffino, working in relative obscurity for people who can’t afford to hire a lawyer, has quietly built a reputation as an attorney who grinds his way to results that are better than might be expected. Among his recent clients were a Dillon Beach murder suspect who was acquitted at trial, the partial acquittal of a Mill Valley merchant who sold fake meth from his novelty shop; and the dismissal of charges against a Marin City man shot by a sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.
Coffino, 47, is a Tamalpais High School graduate whose sports career, particularly as a discus thrower, led to his induction into the Marin Athletic Foundation Hall of Fame. He went to the University of Oregon, where he was a philosophy major, and the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Q: If you could fix one thing about the U.S. legal system, what would it be?
A: Felony sentences are too long and the manner in which they are served is inhumane. What moral right do we have to physically confine a person in a tiny space? … At San Quentin the cells are 4-by- feet for two people. One client described it as living in a bathroom. Even inmates in Marin County jail spend 23 hours a day in their cells. I favor a penal colony model where the colony itself is socially isolated but the inmates are not.
Q: Which Supreme Court justice, living or dead, do you most respect, and why?
A: Oliver Wendell Holmes was an incredible writer and a bold and radical thinker. He had the incisive mind of a philosopher and social critic but his opinions don’t resist the emotional heights that a poet might aspire to.
Q: What’s one thing you wish they taught you in law school that they didn’t?
A: You’re talking to someone who wrote his law review article on Bob Dylan. I treated law school as an extension of a liberal arts education, so I can’t complain that they didn’t teach me anything practical.
Q: How would you define a nightmare client?
A: Historically it’s the “nightmare” clients who have brought about social change. Think of Earl Gideon. Like Socrates he was a curmudgeonly pain in everyone’s butt because he wouldn’t accept the status quo. Now his crazy request for a free lawyer is accepted as a constitutional right. Socrates had to represent himself at his death penalty trial — and lost.
Q: Who would you rather have as a law partner, Saul Goodman or Atticus Finch?
A: I would take an amoral pragmatist over a sanctimonious do-gooder any day. Actually, both these characters strike me as committed solo practitioners. I doubt they’re looking for law partners. But it was gratifying to learn that Goodman started his career as a public defender.
Q: Is life in the United States too harsh, or are people insufficiently self-disciplined?
A: “On the Run,” Alice Goffman’s recent memoir about being a white girl in a black Philadelphia ghetto, tells us more about how the criminal justice system wrecks lives than anything I’ve read. It was an inspiring ethnography of the class of people that public defenders devote their careers to helping.
