“Over the years I’ve learned the difference between stupidity and meanness”

Every day of my internship so far, I have been surrounded by either lawyers, judges, clients, or all of them at the same time. Working in the field of law requires a specific set of characteristics. Many of the folks that lawyers and judges come into contact with are either downright mean and have a short fuse or are incredibly stupid and do not know how to live life without some kind of assistance and that’s what gets them into trouble in the first place.  I have a small amount of interaction with these clients, but mostly I watch the interactions between them and the lawyers and judges. Lawyers must possess a certain amount of emotional intelligence when dealing with these clients. While observing my supervisor deal with a particularly irate client, I noticed how he was able to read the clients body language and change his tone to calm him down. The client was dealing with sensitive custody issues and was a “recovering” drug addict, so his fragile mental state was quite understandable. At the end of the day both parties were able to come up with an agreement, mostly due to my supervisor’s ability to read their emotional state and provide options for them that calmed them down and made them more agreeable. Emotional intelligence isn’t just the ability to read someone’s current emotional state, but the ability to figure out how someone thinks and how they behave. Judges are tasked with determining the punishment of an individual based on the nature of their crime, their past criminal convictions, and how the judge interprets their behavior. I was able to observe a district court trial of a man who was accused of assaulting his girlfriend. The man had no prior convictions, but had a string of, well let’s just say stupidity. The crimes he was accused of could easily have been interpreted as mean and aggressive on paper, but the problem was that the one he was accused to have beaten was not the one who called the police. His girlfriend testified in court that she did not want to press charges and that she was not hurt at all, and that the neighbors just overheard arguing and called the police. The judge gave the man a break and a good deal, after stating “ Over the years, I have learned the difference between stupidity and meanness. You sir are not mean, just stupid, and I am going to punish you appropriately to stupidity.”