Seth Morris - Defending the Accused

Louis Goodman / Seth Morris - Transcript

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk with attorneys about their lives and career. I'm your host, Louis Goodman. Today we welcome Seth Morris to the podcast. Before entering private practice, Mr. Morris spent several years as a deputy public defender in Alameda County. He defended the rights of the accused against serious felony charges, such as murder and robbery. Following his years as a public defender, he took his skills to the legendary criminal defense firm, the Cooper Firm, and since then, he has left that firm and founded Morris Law in Berkeley, California. He recently obtained a not guilty verdict on a charge of second-degree murder based on self-defense. Seth and his team currently represent over a dozen clients facing life sentences throughout the Bay Area.

Seth Morris, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer. 

[00:01:01] Seth Morris: Thank you, Louis. I'm happy to be here. Thank you for hosting this wonderful podcast. I've enjoyed it over the years, and I'm very excited to be a guest on your show. 

[00:01:09] Louis Goodman: I'm very happy that you are a guest on the show. Tell me, where are you speaking to us from right now? 

[00:01:15] Seth Morris: I'm speaking to you from Morris Law, which is located on Rose Street in the city of Berkeley, right at the edge of UC, Berkeley's campus, sometimes called the Gourmet Ghetto.

I'm about a block from Chez Panis. 

[00:01:28] Louis Goodman: At least you have some place to go for lunch. 

[00:01:30] Seth Morris: Yeah, when I can afford it. 

[00:01:33] Louis Goodman: Can you tell us what kind of practice that you have? In your words, can you describe your practice? 

[00:01:39] Seth Morris: Yes. We have a practice where we defend people in state and federal court on all types of crimes from low level misdemeanors like DUI and domestic violence and bar fights to serious felonies all the way, including murder.

We do robbery cases, we do sex crimes, and we do federal cases. We represent just about everyone, just about everywhere in all nine Bay Area counties and in the northern district of California. 

[00:02:06] Louis Goodman: How long have you been practicing criminal defense? 

[00:02:11] Seth Morris: I joined the Alameda County Public Defender's Office in April of 2008, and I was there until 2016 when I left to join Colin and Kellen Cooper at Cooper Law Offices, where I was for five years before I founded this firm in 2021. Given that it's now 2025, it's been about 18 years. 

[00:02:32] Louis Goodman: Where are you from originally? 

[00:02:34] Seth Morris: I was born and raised in Los Angeles on the west side, near UCLA. I went to Harvard Westlake, which is a prep school in North Hollywood before I went to college in New York at Columbia.

[00:02:46] Louis Goodman: Now, that was a change going from. Los Angeles and some sunny skies and warm weather to Columbia where the weather can be a little difficult, New York City, what was that like? 

[00:02:58] Seth Morris: You know I have this internal contrast in myself because my mom is a dark skin, loud mouth New Yorker from the Bronx, and my dad is a blonde hair, blue-eyed surfer boy from LA and they met in Los Angeles, fell in love, got married, started a family.

But my mom, when she raised me, believed that you couldn't become a man unless you spent some time in New York City. And so when I was growing up, she wanted and expected me to go to New York to get finished, which meant to get some hard edges, I think, and it was a big contrast, but I'm really glad I did it.

I loved living in New York and I was also equally happy to get out of there and come back to California after four years. 

[00:03:42] Louis Goodman: When you graduated from college, you ultimately went to law school. Did you take some time off or did you go straight through? 

[00:03:48] Seth Morris: I did. I did a program called Teach for America, which is part of AmeriCorps and I taught third grade in Compton for two years through that program, which was an incredible experience, a really eye-opening experience.

And it actually shaped my life in a big way 'cause it really got me thinking about the relationship between race, class, criminal justice, and what role I could play in helping people through what can be a very difficult. Set up in society where people are sometimes deprived of opportunities and then expected to perform well once they become adults or once I become, they enter society.

[00:04:27] Louis Goodman: Where did you ultimately go to law school? 

[00:04:29] Seth Morris: I came to UC, Berkeley for law school. I went to Berkeley Law. I was there from 2003 and I graduated in 2006. 

[00:04:36] Louis Goodman: Do you think having taken some time off between college and law school, and then working as a teacher and working in fairly impoverished community, do you think that gave you some focus about what you wanted to do in law school?

[00:04:54] Seth Morris: Absolutely, it did, and I think it's really valuable to work before law school. I think there's a big difference between the students at a law school, between those who've had some experience in the real world and those who come straight from college. Funny thing is my mom was upset that I wanted to go do Teach for America.

She thought I would get off track. She was worried I would become a hippie to get a backpack and go to Europe and never come home. And so we had this, what ended up being one of our big fights of my life as I came out of college and said, this is something I want to do. And I said, I'm still gonna go to law school mom, but I want to go do this first.

And, and she would come down to the classrooms. I lived in LA so we had never been to Compton growing up, but she came to Compton. Did some model lessons, taught some art, taught some music, and she pulled me aside and said, this is unbelievable what you're doing and I think this is gonna be make a big impact on your life.

And when I went to applied to law school, I wrote out my application. I want to help people who are struggling. I wanna do poverty law. I didn't really know that I wanted to do criminal law. I hadn't had the thought yet, but I knew I wanted to help impact communities that needed me most. 

[00:06:01] Louis Goodman: This is a two part question. When did you first realize that you wanted to be a lawyer? And then when did you decide, okay, I'm really gonna fill out the applications and take the lsat, spend the money, and actually apply? 

[00:06:18] Seth Morris: So I, as I mentioned, I grew up in a Jewish household where I only had two choices to be a lawyer or a doctor. And, but I was always arguing with everyone at the dinner table and it became nine years old, 10 years old, the impact of a parent or parent saying you'd be a great lawyer with all that, with your mouth.

And so I had this idea when I was really young and at bar mitzvah age that I was gonna go be a lawyer. I didn't, probably didn't know what it meant to be a lawyer other than what I saw on television. But I, when I, before I started college, I thought I'd probably go to law school. When I was in college, I thought I'd probably go to law school.

When I was a school teacher, I thought I'd probably go to law school and then I did. So it's been something that's been, it formed in me very early and I credit my mom for influencing me in that direction. That just happened to work for me and it's been a good fit for me. It's been a great career and something I've enjoyed very much.

[00:07:09] Louis Goodman: So when did you decide to actually apply to law school? 

[00:07:13] Seth Morris: I applied to law school from Teach for America second year as a teacher. It's a two year program you can stay on and continue to teach. Truthfully, I thought it was just too hard. I thought being a school teacher was incredibly difficult. You're basically a social worker, a disciplinarian.

You're a coparent, and trying to be responsible for kids' lives and moving them forward in a place where maybe their parents were distracted and overwhelmed. City didn't have a lot of help to offer them. It was, I felt like man, being a lawyer would be a lot easier than this. And the funny thing was when I got to my first year of law school, it was like a break for me.

Like one L year. I was like, oh, you guys can't imagine what was happening last year in third grade at Compton. It was a lot harder than my first year of law, first year of law school. So while I was teaching that, I decided to fill out the application. 

[00:08:01] Louis Goodman: You said that certain TV shows influenced you to think about law. What was your legal TV show? 

[00:08:09] Seth Morris: Probably Law and Order. It's so ubiquitous on TV growing up. It still is. So many people in America watch Law and Order as a foundational education for the legal system. I hadn't actually reflected on, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, Louis, what defense lawyers look like in Law and Order. It's like universally, they're like a bumbling, poorly dressed person who kind of flop flops into court and flops their files on the floor, whereas the prosecutors are polished and ready to go. I probably didn't know what impact that would later have on me.

But the, there's nothing like a story of someone catching the bad guy and then taking him to court and trying to bring in the witnesses, and then something goes sideways and it all happens an hour. How awesome is that? I always loved that show, and I think it was a, it was my, for my brain, it was a way to understand what was happening when the police were pulling over someone or doing an investigation. 

[00:09:05] Louis Goodman: And yet you decided to go to the defense side rather than the prosecution side? 

[00:09:09] Seth Morris: I did, but not immediately. When I was in law school, I interned actually in college, I interned at the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in the Litigation Support Unit, we were making exhibits for the mafia trials, like cutouts of bodies and maps and stuff.

I interned at the LA City Attorney's Office, which is an office that does misdemeanor prosecutions in LA in like West LA and I always thought I'd probably be a prosecutor. I thought that made more sense to me. It was what I saw and understood. So I had two experiences at prosecution offices when I applied for the Public Defender's office, and they were both called out in that interview, by the way. Definitely. I had to explain myself. 

[00:09:52] Louis Goodman: How did you explain that? 

[00:09:54] Seth Morris: I had an experience that really formed me, which was teaching at Compton and spending a lot of time in a really poor community. And I took, the way we were taught and Teach for America was, you do home visits, you go to the family, you like, do you have, you ask the child, where do you do your homework?

Do you have a quiet place where you can learn? Show me your books because you gotta get the parents involved in trying to show them the importance of education and spending time in a really poor community made me think a lot about society and how it's set up. And the other thing was after law school, I joined a law firm.

I went to Latham and Watkins 'cause I thought that was what you do to be successful. Coming out of a big, a good law school, you go to a good law firm. And at Latham and Watkins, they offered an opportunity to get as many hours as you wanted if you did pro bono. So any pro bono hours counted towards your annual hours requirement of work.

And I did a lot of pro bono at Latham and Watkins, and one of the things I did was we did the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, which is a nonprofit in San Francisco, takes firm lawyers and brings them into traffic court in San Francisco to defend homeless people against quality of life prosecutions.

It was unbelievable. So I would get a couple cases assigned to me for a guy sleeping on the sidewalk, and I was at my desk at Latham and Watkins. I wasn't particularly inspired by the doc review that I was doing there, and I would take measurements and draw maps and look at the law and look at the legislative history and try to read the case law.

And I'd go to traffic court in San Francisco and I'd just cross these cops. It was the best part of my day, best part of my week. And I would just look for my calendar when I could go back to court and cross examine someone. And then while I was at Latham and Watkins, I had a friend there. Her name was Emily Dom, who I know, and Emily Dom and I were associates together, and she left and she went to the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, and I watched her first trial.

I went to a DUI trial that she did, and I couldn't believe that you could have a job where you could have that much fun. I absolutely loved it and I called her afterwards. I said, I'm doing, I don't know how I'm gonna get there, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this too. This looks super fun. 

[00:12:06] Louis Goodman: What is it that you really like about practicing law? You've been doing it for a while, you're obviously a bright guy. You could do all kinds of things with your life and with your career, but you've chosen to be a lawyer, and what is it that you like about it? What keeps you as an attorney? 

[00:12:23] Seth Morris: Yeah, it's an interesting idea to, now that we have, I think young people have so many options to have financially successful lives. It seems to me that there you have, when I was a kid, it was what profession were you going to have? And so you could be an engineer, you could be an architect, you could be a lawyer, you could be a doctor. But the idea of being a, like a tech guy or starting a company was seemed like a really difficult thing to jump into.

Being a lawyer for me meant I had a, I was defined by something I had, I knew what I was joining a group or a club, a profession, and I would be that thing forever. And so I like that idea because even when you're in between jobs or not sure what you're gonna do next, you're still a lawyer. And even when you're, you quit a job where you're, have a law firm and still, and be a lawyer just walking down the street unemployed because I'm a lawyer, I think that's a, it's a helpful frame for your life.

Then you can apply that skillset to whatever you want. And you could do, you could fight for the environment, you could fight war crimes, you could prosecute people, you could defend people, you could write contracts. It's so expansive. So for me, there was some comfort in joining a profession. And then once I was in the profession, I could try to figure out what worked for me.

But I felt some comfort in the safety of being a professional person with a professional title. 

[00:13:44] Louis Goodman: So if a young person were just coming outta college, thinking about a career, would recommend the law. 

[00:13:49] Seth Morris: I've had a great career. I've really enjoyed it. And I would, I think it's, I think that there's a lot of, because you can do so many different things and because you're, it is challenging.

It could be hard. I would recommend to my own children or to people coming outta school to think about being a, going to law school. And then, and it's almost like in my own lifetime, it seems like people are less and less inclined to recommend it because it's hard and because maybe the pay is not as good as it used to be, or maybe because so many people want to go into business.

But, but I've had a great career and I really enjoyed it. I like the challenge of trying to solve puzzles, trying to apply the law and a rubric to different sets of facts. Every day is a new day. Every day is a fun experience. 

[00:14:33] Louis Goodman: What about the business of practicing law for those of us who have come out of public offices.

You came out of the Alameda County Public Defender's Office. I came out of the Alameda County District Attorney's Office and then went into some sort of private practice. And I'm wondering what the business has been like because for all attorneys, unless you're a Public Defender or a DA, there's a certain business aspect to being a lawyer and being part of a law firm or running a law firm or running a solo practice.

And I'm just wondering how that. Business has gone for you. 

[00:15:09] Seth Morris: Yeah, it's, it's a totally new challenge, which has been actually pretty exciting. And I'm lucky to be navigated well and been reasonably successful, but I had great mentorship. I could not have, I could not be where I am now without Colin and Kellen Cooper and Penny Cooper, and I needed a landing spot to leave the Public Defender's office.

The reason really I left was because I wanted to see what else was out there. So one of the things that happens inside Public Defender offices and DA's offices, which I'm sure you've experienced, is you just grow together. You're, you become a start as a baby public defender, and then you fight with the same people and you fight with the same people, and you fight with the same people, and then you're old and you're looking at each other.

We've been doing this for 25, 30 years and I was excited to maybe see what's happening at the county next door and, but I didn't know anything about the business, and so Colin and Kellen and Penny taught me what it meant to be private practitioners. And also I spent a long time with them before I left to make sure I was comfortable because when you're a Public Defender, you have often really negative feelings about the private bar.

They're taking family's money and they're not doing a good job, and I didn't want to be a part of that. I don't wanna be anywhere near that. And so I had to feel fully confident that the level of care and love and compassion and fight was gonna be there. And I a hundred percent found it with them. They were people who wanted to fight and would do anything for their clients and treated their clients like extensions of their own family.

And they taught me that and that they taught me was that if you treat clients like family and they know that you're gonna fight for them just like you would for your own family members. The money will come, they will hire you. You just have to make that connection and you have to be able to be consistent for everyone, not this client.

We're not gonna fight hard. The next client will fight harder. Everyone has to get the fight. When you and you do that for enough years, you get a reputation and when someone gets in trouble, they want someone who's going to fight for them no matter what. 

[00:17:15] Louis Goodman: Is there anything that you know now that you really wished you'd known either before you got into law at all or before you left the Public Defender's office and went into private practice, or before you left Cooper and opened your own firm, is there any anything that you wish you'd known that then that you know now? 

[00:17:34] Seth Morris: I think it's one of the things I loved about being a Public Defender is that there's zero profit motive.

So it's a pure practice. You're there to help people and you're not gonna get more money if you could help someone better than the other guy. So you really are focused a hundred percent on craft of defending someone, there can be really hard corrosive effects of money into that practice and I think it's really important to think about that and the relationship between what happens when you're, when people are paying for a service and what they expect to get in return.

The sad thing about our system, I think, is that public defenders are often fantastic and clients are don't appreciate them, and sometimes clients appreciate private attorneys who are no good because they've paid them money. 

[00:18:23] Louis Goodman: Yeah. 

[00:18:24] Seth Morris: And so that's been something that I think about every day. And I think about when a client comes in and says, oh, my public defender's not fighting for me.

I stop them immediately. I say, what are you talking? Let's actually talk about what's happening. Maybe you don't feel like they're fighting for you. Maybe you can't see. And what I've, what I learned in a lot of those encounters is that it's really often about communication that the, that they don't understand what the public defender's doing for them and they can't appreciate it, or they just absolutely do not buy the idea that if you don't pay someone that they'll still fight for you hard. And some people are gonna just pay a lawyer because they just don't believe the system could possibly work. And that's sad, but also those people, I don't want those people just to throw their money away. I want them to get good representation.

But the tension between having to charge for your service and having to do a good job. And what happens when clients don't pay or what happens when you wanna help someone who doesn't have any money or doesn't have enough money? And how do you navigate all those issues?

How do you give everyone equal time? Do you help the client who calls every day more than the client who never calls, even if they both have equally serious cases? It's all of these things. I sometimes think about a private defense as like a retail business. It's like we have the front, basically have a store on the corner, come on in.

But what do you need? I got something at the back. So you have this sort of half retail aspect where you people walk in and they want to feel good, oh, I like this. It's a nice shop you got here. And then you gotta also do the thing that you're offering. And you have this place in the community where people drive by and say, yeah, that's the guy who helped me last year or the year before.

And one of the things I loved about being with the Coopers is that they had 25 years of clients coming back to them representing a man, and then his son and then his grandson over 30 years. That's incredible. Then when I started seeing people coming in and hugging them and picking them off the ground and saying, you've changed my life.

Something, I wasn't getting a lot at the public defender's office. I said, wow, you're making an impact on a family and a community that is maybe monumental to the shape of their lives, that you're actually become part of their family, which is really attractive to me. I really like that and that's something that I think I've said, I've endeavored to try to build those relationships in this practice.

[00:20:35] Louis Goodman: Two part question again, and you could answer either or both of these or combine it into one answer, but what do you think is the best advice you've ever received and or what advice would you give to a young attorney just starting out in practice? 

[00:20:52] Seth Morris: I went to Penny Cooper when I was thinking about leaving the Public Defender's Office and asked her, I said, I love this job.

I have friends here. I do good work. I'm well respected. Tell me why I should consider leaving. She said something interesting, which has stuck with me over the years, which is you should only leave if you think you need to leave to fulfill your own ambition. What do you want to do? Who do you want to be?

If you can do that in the Public Defender's Office, great. You can be the best public defender in town, and that's fantastic. If you wanna get a call in the middle of the night from someone who's in a town next door, the county across the bridge, and you, they need your help right now and you wanna jump and help that family, you can't do that from the Public Defender's Office.

Who do you want? Where do you want this? Where do you want to be? And I, that's something where I thought, I think I could be a very happy public, lifelong public defender. I think about that job every day. I think it's a fantastic job. And also I felt the challenge of seeing what I could do next door with a DA I've never met, with a judge who doesn't know me. When I first showed up to felony trial call in Contra Costa County after being in Alameda County for nine years, they said, I walked in and I said, where are the DAs? I talked to the Public Defender. I said, where are the DAs? They said, oh, they're over there. I said, oh, I'm gonna go talk to the DA in my case, they said, what? You don't talk to the DA. I said, whatcha talking about I'm gonna try to resolve this case. I'm gonna go talk to the DA. And they're like, we don't talk to the DAs. I said, what? I said, because there's so much acrimony between those offices, they all lined up and they would call the case and say, judge.

I'm not ready and I am ready. And they walk back and, and the case, every dispute was settled in a trial. Nobody was talking, right? 

And I said, wow, this is interesting and totally new. How am I gonna navigate this? I want to achieve this goal for my client, but all the skills and tools I've learned don't apply here anymore.

I can't even talk to these people. The moments like that make you think, wow, I thought I was good. I'm nothing. I have to learn a whole new system. And I go to Napa and I go to Sonoma. I go to San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Francisco. I don't even know where to stand. I went to San Francisco. They said, okay, we're doing a felony plea.

Mr. Morris, go ahead. I said, what do you mean? Go ahead, judge. Aren't you gonna go through a form, ask questions? They said, no. There's a binder in the podium by your feet. You go through the, you go through the binder with, and you do the whole voir dire. So I'm, and in San Francisco, so there's tabs everywhere.

They're all pointing in the wrong direction. If this is a, if this is 1178, turn to page five, and if there's gonna be a, a enhancement turn to this page. Is this A GBI? Is this person eligible? Is this probation? But everyone's like, what are you doing? Why are you screwing this up? Clients, you don't know how to do this.

I'd never read from this binder in San Francisco, this one piece of paper, the advice that I got, which was, can you know, do you need to go do something else to feel fulfilled? That that helped me and it helped me feel like I think I wanted a bigger pool to swim in and to see if I could survive, and I'm glad, I'm glad I got that advice.

[00:23:59] Louis Goodman: Is that the same advice that you'd give to a young attorney starting out? 

[00:24:05] Seth Morris: I think my advice to a young attorney is to talk about the marathon versus the sprint. That you have to be good to yourself in order to survive what's gonna be a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, and a lot of challenges. And I got that advice early on.

My first boss at the public defender's office was Bob Ship Way. I still played basketball with Bob Ship way every Sunday. And he would come up to me and say, said, you haven't taken a vacation. It's been two years. I think it's time to go home. What are you doing? Like, and I, I said, I'm fine. I'm gonna keep going.

He is. I wanna see you here in five years. You gotta start kicking. I'm off. You gotta start. Maybe you need a sick day. Maybe you have a tickle in your throat. I said, I fine. Get outta here. And the message in that office, which is a fantastically healthy place in that time was, we're not here we to see how, whether you can burn out in a year or two, we're here to see are you gonna be Richard Fox all, are you gonna be able, like Bob Mertons, are you gonna be someone who's who could give 25, 30 years?

And that's the same advice I would give to someone, to someone starting out saying, look, this is not something, not, we don't wanna see what you can prove and whether you can burn out. We wanna see whether you can develop skills and coping mechanisms to get through hard times and to go all go the distance in this type of work and that applies for any type of law.

It's always hard and it's always gonna be a challenge. And are you gonna be able to pace yourself? Are you gonna be able to get there or are you gonna think you're all that and do something crazy and burn out or fizzle? We see so much, so many issues with lawyers that have addiction issues or alcohol issues or just can't do it over the, over a long period of time.

I think teaching young lawyers to plan for a long haul is something that's really useful. 

[00:25:49] Louis Goodman: Would you ever see yourself going back into a Public Defender's Office? 

[00:25:53] Seth Morris: Probably not. Probably not, because I like, first of all, being in charge of my own life. That's a big thing too. When I left, Brendan had announced that they were opening the East County Hall of Justice, and they were gonna start five year rotations into Dublin, and I live in Berkeley.

I said five years in Dublin. I've got a little cute baby I kids five years in Dublin, and that helped me think about, do I wanna decide when I go to Dublin, or how long I go to Dublin or when for how many years? Or do I want someone else to decide for me? I had, I went everywhere, Hayward, I went to Fremont, I went to Pleasanton.

What we used to have a little Pleasanton courthouse. I wanted to do felony trials in Oakland and Bob Shipley said, we need you in Pleasanton, Seth. I said, you don't need me in Pleasanton. Nothing's happening in Pleasanton. I said, we need you to go out there and pull time and do some no time waivers and really start changing the culture out there.

I said, I don't, but I went and bar Barbara Dickinson was my boss. We had four lawyers in the office and we started pulling time on all these cases and the das were pulling their hair out, but. But I didn't wanna be in Pleasanton for a year or two. I didn't want to go to Fremont and say, oh, you gotta take, go to Fremont now and have half day misdemeanor trials. Do that.

I, yeah, being in charge of your own destiny is a big thing, and I think once you have your own business and I can go where I want to go, generally speaking each day it would be hard to give up that freedom. 

[00:27:19] Louis Goodman: Do you think the legal system is fair? 

[00:27:22] Seth Morris: No. No, I don't think it's fair and I think it's, I think we have a legal system because we know society's not fair.

So it's, so we're trying to get to fairness. So we set up rules and we set up due process and we set up law statutes, the constitution, in order to try to create some fairness, knowing that if you leave everyone to their own devices, you're gonna get some really unfair results. The legal system's unfair mostly because the whole setup for society is unfair, in a lot of regards, and we see this in the Public Defender's Office and also my own clients who are, were didn't really have a chance in the world of education or employment or job training, or healthcare or housing, and lived in a neighborhood that was tough and members of their family were arrested and prosecuted and sent away, raised by single mothers.

And then when they become 17, 18, 19, 20, we say, Hey, why are you screwing up? We've gotta put you in jail now. And it's not fair. It doesn't make sense. It's like we know that if you deplete an area of resources, you're going to get people who make bad decisions. And so we in society have developed this massive, I think of the society as like a human body.

We have this one really big arm with all these muscles on it, and everything else is weak and depleted. And the big arm is law enforcement. The prisons. Police department, they always have the shiny cars, the newest weapons. We have plenty of prisons. We don't have enough schools. And so is that a fair setup?

Because we come down really hard on young men, especially young men of color, who make bad decisions when their brain is still developing and they probably didn't get a good education and didn't have a lot of stability in their life. That's not fair. And the whole, that whole setup's not fair. 

[00:29:06] Louis Goodman: I want to ask you about this murder case that you tried recently. Can you talk about that a little bit? The self-defense verdict that you got in that was Vallejo. 

[00:29:16] Seth Morris: Yeah. It was a Solano County murder case. Wonderful client. It was a disagreement in a driveway outside of a party where my client had purportedly offended a woman who went inside the party and told everyone how, what a piece of work he was and how offensive he was.

And one of the people she told was her boyfriend and her boyfriend, my belief is, came out to confront him, and Cly had to go to his car and get a gun and ended, they ended up, interestingly, client holding the guy at gunpoint and walking him out, and as the guy got to his car, the factual dispute was whether or not the guy turned and lifted a gun and tried to kill client.

A client said he did and the DA said he didn't, and it was five shots. A lot of them went into the back or the flank, and then the victim went off to the hospital and client fled the scene. The police chased client to see a gun fly out the window. Client said it was self-defense from day one. I took the case over from another private attorney who did a nine day prelim on the case and then the client wanted to go pretty fast.

About six months into the case, six months after arrest, we got DNA results from a gun that was dumped on the way to the hospital that we believe the victim threw out the window and that gun had DNA on the grip, on the slide, and on the trigger that belonged to the victim. So we had a dumped gun with DNA on the trigger, which was a very nice fact.

It also turned out that the victim was a documented norteno, and so I was, the first time in my career I called a gang expert for the defense, a Vacaville sergeant who had knew this guy his whole life since he was 16, and testified for two hours about all the acts of violence he had committed. And it was very interesting because I had a great judge, judge Brian Kim, who came outta the DA's office and had only, this was his first murder trial as a judge.

I had a very good hardworking DA, but the facts were hard for him. And coming from Alameda County, I kept saying, why is this case going? Why don't we just deal this case this? It's obviously, you obviously have problems, your witnesses have credibility issues. You have a norteno as a victim, you have a dumped gun.

What am I missing here? Yeah. And that's an Alameda County mindset because they're looking at me like I'm crazy. They're so whatcha talking about? And they said, your guy could take something in the high teens if he wanted my client. We talking high teens. So we went to trial. I called a fight or flight expert.

I called, we had some privacy and reconstruction stuff. DNA was all stipulated to ballistics, was all stipulated to, and client testified and he never testified before. He was scared out of his mind and he did an amazing job. And one of the things that I had him do is I said, why don't you show us, demonstrate stand up, demonstrate for us, we hadn't practiced this, but demonstrate for us what this guy did at the last second, how he turned around, show us. And the client stood up and said, reached out as gone turn towards me. And I said, do it again, but do it as fast as it actually happened. And he took and he stood up and he whoop brown.

And the dream went. Because it's this moment where you're, if a guy's gonna pull a gun that fast, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? He said, and then I just pulled the trigger. I didn't know where I was gonna hit. I don't, I just knew I was about to die. And it was a trial where a client didn't know the gang stuff.

In 1103, the client didn't know that he was a gang member, but he knew that he was armed and he had been in Vallejo long enough to know when that guy turns. It's either you or him. He did an unbelievable job. Jury came back, not guilty on a first second, and manslaughter, and he came home that night. 

[00:33:24] Louis Goodman: Wow.

[00:33:24] Seth Morris: Unbelievable. Yeah. 

[00:33:26] Louis Goodman: I'm gonna shift gears here a little bit, Seth. Tell me what sort of things do you like to do when you're not practicing law? 

[00:33:35] Seth Morris: Yeah, I'm trying to develop more hobbies that are completely analog. I think that's really important for the human brain to get off phones and screens and have analog experiences.

I love basketball. I play basketball once a week with Chuck Denton and Bob Ship Way and some public defenders at a game that started in 1984 in San Francisco, and it's been going on the same morning every weekend for 34 years. I like them 'cause they're older than me, so I get to find about the oldest guy in the court.

I have a classic car that I love. I have a 1960 Austin Healy, a Bugeye Sprite, which is, which has no computers. Which has di drum brakes, no radio doesn't even have exterior door handles. They're such simple cars, and I love not having a radio, not having my phone and going for a drive and having the experience of what it must have been like to drive in the fifties or sixties while you're just getting dust in your teeth.

There's something about that. I really, I have three kids. I have a 12-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy, and a two and a half year old girl. A little baby girl, and I love them more than anything. I pour myself into them and they pour themselves into me, so I try to spend as much time with them and try to get them to do analog things because I think we need that right now more than ever.

[00:34:58] Louis Goodman: Let's say that you came into some real money. Let's say you came into three or $4 billion. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life? 

[00:35:09] Seth Morris: You're the one who made me think about this question, and when I first heard it, and I've listened to your podcast in funny settings, I once listened to, I think the Matt Dalton episode going on a hike, and I was outta water and I was at the top of this hill and it was hot, and Matt was trying to think of this answer.

And sometimes when you're in these strained places, you think about things in different ways and you, the memories stay with you. I've always thought that I've tried to live my life such that it would be the same if I had no money or tons of money. I'm trying to do things that I love doing and one of the worries that I had when I became a private, when I went to private practice was I have like a, I don't wanna say it's a Jewish business sense, but like a little bit.

My dad is a small business owner. My mom has very money oriented. I have a way I feel good about running the business, and one of the things I was worried about is that I would become obsessed with how much money I could make or how much I could chart and I, and being a public defender, I was like, I don't wanna do that.

I don't wanna go spend my days thinking about can I make this much money this year? So I try to make enough money to be happy and provide for my family and set them up in a way that they can live happy lives. If I had another a million or a billion dollars on top of whatever I have now, I would show up to Wiley Manuel to do a bail motion on a 1 8 7. 'cause that's the best there is. That's the most interesting thing you can do. I think I was placed on the planet to do what I'm doing and I've never felt that I need to be doing something else. I would be terrified to quit my job and move to an island and count coconuts.

I would lose my mind. I need to be doing something really hard and lose most of the time to feel like I'm doing something meaningful. So maybe I'd put that away for a rainy day, but I would just keep doing what I'm doing. 

[00:37:07] Louis Goodman: Let's say you had a magic wand. That was one thing in the world that you could change the legal world, the world in general.

What would you wanna wave your magic wand at and change? 

[00:37:16] Seth Morris: There's so much suffering in the world and it would be very nice if we could see everyone fulfill their own ambition and their own desires by just meeting everyone's basic needs. There's a philosopher at Princeton whose name is Peter Singer, who talks about the moral imperative to give until you are as poor as the poorest person on earth.

If everyone gave of themselves to the poorest people on earth, eventually there'd be an equilibrium and everyone would be fine. And so what could we do to just get people so they don't, aren't starved with their basic necessities and they can actually live a happy life, meeting people's basic needs around the world, food, shelter, everything else.

And then our own, in America, when I joined Teach for America, they're like, this is a, this is like Peace Corps at home. There are people in our own country who are living on the streets, who don't have money for food, who can't find a place to sleep at night. They're vulnerable. And so why are we, why do we live in a society where we can't provide for even our own citizens down the street?

Not to mention what we're doing to people who are undocumented right now. So I would try to take some suffering outta the world if I had a magic wand, and just get everyone to be, have their basic needs met and start from there. 

[00:38:37] Louis Goodman: Let's say someone gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl. You had a 60 second one minute super Bowl ad and you could put any message out there to the really big audience, what would you wanna say? 

[00:38:50] Seth Morris: I wouldn't be any good on that ad. I'd freeze. No, I think, I think we're losing the, we're losing sight of kindness. We're losing sight of joy. But we have, we're in a very strange political moment, Louis as, and there is so much emphasis on undermining your neighbor and turning on your neighbor and.

That, that your neighbor's, the problem that, that people are taking from you. And most people like their neighbors and most people care about people in their community, but there's no, there hasn't been any emphasis in that from our current administration. And so if I could spend some time at 60 seconds with the American people, I would try to send a message of kindness.

Just be kind, just be nice to the person behind you. You don't know what they're going through. Even on a homicide cases where I have clients who've shot someone and killed them, and they say to me, I was worried about being shot and killed. There's a lot of dangerous people out there, and I think to myself, you're the one who shot and killed someone.

Right? But they have an honest belief that they're in danger every day. Why? They're not. Why are we so obsessed with fear? Instead of thinking about hope and thinking about. The goodness in our neighbors. That's the message I want to get out there. 

[00:40:07] Louis Goodman: Seth, if someone wants to get in touch with you, someone is looking for some representation on a criminal case or an attorney who would like a little help, guidance in a case that maybe they're representing someone and feels that you might be able to be helpful. What's the best way to get in touch with you, Seth Morris? 

[00:40:29] Seth Morris: Probably go to our website, which is morris defense.com and we have our phone number there. We have our address there and email address and you can reach us. We're open 24 7 all night, all day, all weekend. Just like you, Louis, 

[00:40:43] Louis Goodman: Seth, is there anything else that you'd like to talk about? Anything at all that you'd like to bring up? Something that we haven't discussed? Any, anything at all? 

[00:40:51] Seth Morris: I think that we just should be thoughtful as the defense bar and as prosecutors and judges in Alameda County about what's happening with ICE right now. And I think we all need to think about how we're gonna react and how we're gonna adjust because it's a scary time for the people in society, people who look like immigrants, who might be US citizens, or people who are undocumented immigrants who are working hard to build their life.

It's a really hard time. As much compassion as we have in our hearts for anyone accused of something. I wanna extend that as a community to people who are trying to contribute to society and could be subject to a really brutal process in if we start seeing major sweeps in our city. Just to be mindful of that into and to try to be gentle and kind with each other during the times like that.

I think you could say, we can say it's a hard time in our country right now, and we all should be thoughtful for each other and caring for each other so that we make sure our community stands together during difficult times. 

[00:41:54] Louis Goodman: Seth Morris, thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

[00:42:00] Seth Morris: Thank you, Louis. I really enjoyed myself and I hope you have a wonderful day. 

[00:42:06]Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.

Thanks to my guests, and to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

[00:42:42] Louis Goodman: Are you trying to get me arrested? 

[00:42:44] Seth Morris: I haven't asked for your papers, Lou. Do you have 

[00:42:46] Louis Goodman: No, but But if I put this out there on the podcast, they're gonna come and come looking for me. 

[00:42:42] Seth Morris: No, you, yeah, you're right. So think about how you wanna edit that, Louis.