keith belzer| Episode 06

Aaron Nelson  1:07  
Hello. Welcome to Sanctuary in the Jungle. Thanks for joining us down here in the sanctuary of the library, Keith. 

 

Keith Belzer  1:12  
Thanks, Aaron. Happy to be here. 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:14  
Yeah. So, as some of the viewers may know, may not know, I met you in probably 2007, nearer 2008ish, I think. I was at a trial skills. You kind of brought me in, and since then, I've always looked up to you as my- as my mentor. So to have the opportunity to have you now working at Nelson Defense Group, but also to go through this, the person who literally taught me most everything. You and Michelle, I mean, she was the foundation, and then you taught me so much about how to be a better human and how to be a better human in the courtroom. So thank you for joining me.

 

Keith Belzer  1:50  
Well, thank you, Aaron. I- we've certainly had a long and interesting relationship, both as friends, colleagues, and now working in the same law firm.

 

Aaron Nelson  2:00  
Yeah, it's a- it's a privilege. So you live in La Crosse now you're commuting up to Hudson every now and then, but you grew up in Chicago.

 

Keith Belzer  2:11  
I did. I grew up in Chicago and McHenry, sort of splitting time between the two places. Born in Chicago, Ravenswood hospital, and then spent most of my schooling until I graduated high school in McHenry, Illinois.

 

Aaron Nelson  2:26  
Tell me about how "story", the concept of "story", has kind of been a theme throughout your your life. Is that something that even in childhood, you tended to be a storyteller?

 

Keith Belzer  2:36  
I did in a sort of niche area. I- when I was a young person, I was very engaged with Bible stories, New Testament Bible stories, and in sort of a Kubrick fashion, I had this idea about how to direct these little plays of- of me and two of my friends, Julie and David, who we called cousins because our families were so close, and I was probably six or seven, maybe eight, and Julie was a couple years older, and David was a year younger. And I would act these plays out, right, all the Bible stories, and then our parents would watch, and they'd see me like so intense with this, and they couldn't help but laugh, right? You got this eight year old kid who was doing these Bible stories, and they start laughing, and I would turn around at them, and I would point, and I say, you can't laugh at the Bible. You have to be serious, which, of course, made them laugh all the more, right? But, yeah, that's, that's where "story" first started for me. I didn't even think of it as theater, but that was also the beginning of theater for me, I suppose, too.

 

Aaron Nelson  3:37  
Yeah, you know, I know you've had a different- lots of us have had a journey, especially when it comes to spirituality. And you ended in the or your continue to be in the Unitarian Universalist, but you're not the first guest who's had some strong connection to the Bible. 

 

Keith Belzer  3:53  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  3:53  
Growing up.

 

Keith Belzer  3:55  
Yeah. Early on, I thought I was going to become a Lutheran minister. I was very involved in the Lutheran Missouri Synod Lutheran Church in McHenry, Illinois. I was an altar boy, and at one point that derailed, when I had a falling out with a pastor at the time, but I was very interested in the idea of how I believed at that time religion could be helpful to people, and the idea of ministering and leading and that sort of thing. 

 

Aaron Nelson  4:23  
Yeah. And you had leadership skills that came across, not only in the in, in plays, you know, in sort of theater, but also on the field, on sporting.

 

Keith Belzer  4:35  
Yeah, I was very involved in sports. Baseball was my true love. Was a pitcher in baseball, but I was better at football. Was a quarterback. I played quarterback at McHenry High School. Was honorable mention all states. 

 

Aaron Nelson  4:49  
Honorable mention all state. 

 

Keith Belzer  4:51  
We, McHenry was not known for their football teams back then, and we had the first winning record, I think, in many years at that point. So, yeah, football was pretty big deal for me at that point.

 

Aaron Nelson  5:04  
So I know parenting my daughter when she was growing up, a huge part of her childhood was watched this series of shows about an athlete who wanted to get into theater. And that was so unusual, the High School Musical, I believe, was the series of it, and it sounds like you lived that out, though, that right there in McHenry High School, you here, you are the starting, honorable mention all state quarterback, and you somehow get into theater.

 

Keith Belzer  5:35  
I did, I would say it was with some significant arm twisting from a teacher I had as a freshman in high school, Ms. Burke, who had us read some plays freshman English, "Caesar" and eventually "Inherit the Wind", which ended up, little did I know at the time, having a significant impact on pretty much the rest of my life. But after doing those readings, she told me that I had to try out for a play in the spring or she was gonna take it out of my grade. And I said, "You can't do that". And she said, "Can't I?" I wasn't willing to test it on Ms. Burke, so I did try out for a play. Didn't get in a play that year. But then the next spring, I got talked into being in a musical where I was wearing yellow tights.

 

Aaron Nelson  6:21  
Wow. But you weren't singing. You had the singing part or no?

 

Keith Belzer  6:25  
Oh gosh no. There is no singing in for Keith Belzer at any point in any theater productions. I- and in fact, I distinctly remember, I think was third grade, maybe fourth grade, where public schools would still do Christmas pageants and everybody would sing. And I don't remember who the director was, but she created a new part in our Christmas pageant of the Herald who only spoke. Created specifically for Keith because we didn't want him singing with the rest of the choir. 

 

Aaron Nelson  6:51  
No need to expose everybody. 

 

Keith Belzer  6:53  
No running and no singing for this guy.

 

Aaron Nelson  6:57  
Well, tell me about "Inherit the Wind". What's- what's "Inherit the Wind".

 

Keith Belzer  6:59  
So Inherit the Wind is a play by boy, I can remember rentals and somebody, I can't remember the authors anymore, but it was a sort of big hit play at some point, 40s or 50s, Spencer Tracy did a movie of it. But it's about the loosely entitled the Scopes Monkey Trial. Is when in Dayton, Ohio, I think it was. There was a teacher who was put on trial, arrested for teaching evolution after Dayton had outlawed the teaching of evolution. Sort of, some things never go away. 

 

Aaron Nelson  7:33  
Yeah, yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  7:34  
The argument over what we're going to teach and and who is in charge of that. And the Chicago Tribune hired Clarence Darrow, a famous lawyer from Chicago, to go to Dayton, Ohio and represent scopes, who is the Teacher of Scopes Monkey Trial, it became loosely called. And so in that class with Ms. Burke, she had me read the character Henry Drummond, who clearly was Clarence Darrow, and just became very fascinated by what a lawyer could do in a situation like that. And in my mind, I thought that was a social justice issue. That case is really more about social justice than it is about criminal law, even though he was a famous criminal lawyer, and I just never forgot about Clarence Darrow. And then, of course, he popped up a couple years later in my high school career.

 

Aaron Nelson  8:17  
Yeah, and yeah, tell us that you- you- you got interested in him. Were reading some more about him, and did you write a play about him? Or were you was it a paper about him?

 

Keith Belzer  8:26  
So by this point, I had acted in a couple of plays, and then I wrote a paper for American Legal- American Studies, American Studies it was called anyway. It was about insanity laws and how that, you know, affected people in McHenry. There was a big case at that time. I was just sort of curious, because I thought insanity laws seemed more like a way to get away with something, right? 

 

Aaron Nelson  8:48  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  8:48  
As you might think as a junior in high school, and then I read about this case that Clarence Darrow had defended in Chicago, about Leopold and Loeb, where these were two young men who- not accused... they basically admitted to kidnapping a boy, a young boy who was the heir apparent to Sears Roebuck inheritance. And they killed him. I mean, it's a horrible, horrible case, and the trial was the first sort of insanity case, and had all to do with whether they were going to be put to death or not. And in the context of reading about that case, I became fascinated with this idea of a death penalty, and very clearly, or very early, had a strong opinion about there shouldn't be a death penalty, right? There are some people that maybe they don't deserve to live. That's not for me to decide, but we don't deserve to be made to be killers, in my opinion. 

 

Aaron Nelson  9:40  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  9:40  
And I took that from just reading about Clarence Darrow, and I just thought the case was very interesting. And so that summer between my junior year and senior year, I spent a lot of time at the Library at the University of Northern Illinois and DeKalb researching a microfiche old Chicago sometimes, and old Chicago Tribune articles about that trial, and then I spent the rest of that summer writing a play about the Leopold-Loeb trial in Chicago, inspired by, you know, having read, "Inherit the Wind".

 

Aaron Nelson  10:04  
And this is you- a junior in high school? You're like- 

 

Keith Belzer  10:10  
Between junior and senior year, yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  10:13  
You're like- "I'm going to write a play".

 

Keith Belzer  10:14  
Yeah, yeah. In between, like, summer practices for football, because I also went to a football camp, and I was, you know, researching and writing this play that I thought I could get my high school to put on. And sure enough, in that that winter, when I was done with football, my high school put on "For the Sake of a Thrill", which was the name of the play that I wrote. Interestingly, there's a movie by Alfred Hitchcock that's loosely based on the Leopold & Loeb called "Rope" that has Jimmy Stewart in it if anybody has seen that, but, yeah, I mean- 

 

Aaron Nelson  10:38  
He didn't consult with you?

 

Keith Belzer  10:46  
It's way before my time.

 

Aaron Nelson  10:51  
Man, so you're in high school, you're playing football, you're into theater. You go to college to play football.

 

Keith Belzer  10:58  
Went to college to play football. No thought of theater whatsoever. I thought that was just sort of a fun thing to do in high school. I sort of liked the theater people, quite honestly. So my thought was I was going to go to high school, I was going to go into political science. I really wanted to get into politics.

 

Aaron Nelson  11:16  
More of that social justice was still something that motivated you at that age. 

 

Keith Belzer  11:21  
It was, I mean, I got involved in, like, Model UN. I was very interested in politics and government and how that could be helpful to people, and theater was just not something I was thinking about at all. 

 

Aaron Nelson  11:32  
Okay, that- did that change? 

 

Keith Belzer  11:34  
That did change. Two things happened: my freshman year of high school, I was playing football as a quarterback on a rainy field, and a guy reached out, this wasn't on purpose, but reached out to grab for me, and his feet slid out in the rainy field, muddy field, his fingers got caught in my face mask, and it flipped my head like 180 degrees. It was like a exorcist thing. Yeah, so I was in the hospital that- the next day, but I heard from people who watched- what would always watch these games on Saturday, who watched the game film on Sunday, who watched the game film, and people were apparently gagging watching me do, you know, a reverse with my head. 

 

Aaron Nelson  12:14  
You're wise like an owl, but you don't have a neck like an owl.

 

Keith Belzer  12:16  
Exactly, exactly. I don't want the wise part, but I certainly didn't have a neck like an owl. So, you know, I was in a brace for six weeks, and eventually I came back and played a little bit, but it just always still felt a little bit weak and it hurt. It was years before that stopped hurting. I was out of college before I was still- I don't have problems now, but... So the next year, there was a question, do you want to play? And a doctor said, "you can". There's not a huge chance of reentry, but there's a chance. 

 

Aaron Nelson  12:43  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  12:44  
And I'm playing Division Three, I know I'm not going to go anywhere from there, and, you know, I liked playing quarterback, but also it wasn't my life, probably not. And as it turns out, that spring freshman year, after I got hurt, I decided to take an acting class, frankly, because I thought it'd be an easy credit. And it wasn't an easy credit, but it was sort of life changing. I mean, to actually study acting, and to go back to this idea of feeling emotion at a- without censoring, without censoring, right? To just feel, and then to start to figure out how to build a character to relate to somebody. In this case, a character who's so unlike you, was just this fascinating idea of how do you relate to Stanley Kowalski, for instance, in "A Streetcar Named Desire", if you're nothing like that person? 

 

Aaron Nelson  13:39  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  13:39  
To start to imagine what would I be like if I were that person to use Stanley Kowalski. And so that changed a lot for me. I mean, it just opened my eyes to some ideas, some feelings. That led into sophomore year, fall semester, when they're doing a play called "I Never Sang for my Father", that I really liked that play, and I thought, "if I'm not going to play football, try out for the play". If I hadn't gotten hurt, I would have been playing football. I didn't. I got one of the two leads in that play, and that changed everything. I mean, from there, it was all theater all the time. My political science was gone, and I majored in theater, took- was in plays every term of college, and decided I was going to work in theater professionally.

 

Aaron Nelson  14:20  
Yeah, and so you finished up, you finished up college, and you didn't go to law school right away. You didn't go have a football career. 

 

Keith Belzer  14:28  
No. 

 

Aaron Nelson  14:28  
You went into managing theaters.

 

Keith Belzer  14:30  
Went into theater, managed the Goodman Theater for a while in Chicago, with a few other people. We started a theater called Grassroot Arts Theater that we did plays in Chicago- we sort of based out of Kankakee. And we did some plays about community organizing and social justice. And we lost a lot of money. 

 

Aaron Nelson  14:53  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  14:53  
We lost a lot of money, but it was, it was good, and I really went into that thinking I could make it as an actor. And after, you know, a few tries at that, in the Chicago Tribune, and sometimes one after the other, saying Keith Belzer is wooden, and then in the next play, Keith Belzer is unsatisfactory. Maybe acting isn't the way.

 

Aaron Nelson  15:16  
Oh man. Isn't that? Isn't that funny, just how I'm just thinking to myself, I still remember when I was in ninth grade, I got called up to play in a varsity game- soccer. I was the goalkeeper. Made a- I made a mistake. But mistakes at the goalkeeper level are obvious to everybody, and the newspaper said the ball eluded Nelson, and I will always remember that. 

 

Keith Belzer  15:41  
It's not like it was a knuckleball, right? It was just a- 

 

Aaron Nelson  15:45  
Like, probably right at me, right? But I'll always remember that word "eluded", just like you probably remember the word "wooden", right? It just, I don't know why it is, but those things stick with us, right?

 

Keith Belzer  15:56  
Yeah, it's just good to try though. You know, you just give it your shot and you see, see what it's all about. You know, look back and think, "Boy, if only I tried acting". I did, you know, and I don't, I don't wonder now, I'm glad I took a shot at it, but it really wasn't going to be.

 

Aaron Nelson  16:10  
Yeah, you know. But you're, you high school, you're performing on the football field in front of people. 

 

Keith Belzer  16:18  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  16:18  
You know? College, you're performing in a theater, in in front of people, and then you eventually find your way to be a criminal defense attorney, in which it's all about performance. I mean, it's about caring, it's about a lot of other things, but it's, it's really rooted in performance.

 

Keith Belzer  16:34  
Trial work certainly is, yeah, I mean, in, you know, being a quarterback, certainly you have the spotlight on you. There's no other way to think about that. You are having a lot of input on whatever outcome is going to happen while the offense is on the field. And then as a trial lawyer, it's the same thing. I mean, you're in a courtroom and spotlights on you as a defense attorney in a trial, always very similar.

 

Aaron Nelson  16:58  
Yeah. How'd you get the transition from from theater to law school?

 

Keith Belzer  17:04  
Well, you know, Clarence Darrow never was too far behind. So like as a junior in high school, I did a project where I- I'm sorry, in high school, as a junior in college, I did a project where I performed a one-man play about Clarence Darrow. 

 

Aaron Nelson  17:17  
Oh. 

 

Keith Belzer  17:17  
So even though at that point I had no interest in law school, I had not lost my interest in Clarence Darrow, I mean, the Chicago connection, all of that stuff, and he just stood for a lot of things that had to do with social justice, in addition to being a criminal defense lawyer. So I found that always very attractive. When I was out there working in theater, realizing that I wasn't going to change many lives by running theater companies- not in the way that I had hoped to- I was commenting to a relative at the time, Lynn, at a Thanksgiving and saying, "You know what, maybe I should have gone to law school". And she was like, "why don't you?". Well, undergrad, it never occurred to me I'd go to grad school. So my grade point average reflected that notion.

 

Aaron Nelson  17:59  
You weren't paying as much attention to the books.

 

Keith Belzer  18:01  
I was not paying attention to the books. And I thought, well, I don't think I could get into law school. And she said, "Well, you know, take the LSAT, just see what happens". And so for the first time ever, I really studied for something. I studied for the LSAT. And, you know, happened to get a high enough score, like, "oh, I guess I can go to law school". And once I made that decision, the only question for me was whether it was going to be legal aid or public defender, because I grew up without a lot of means. I mean, I had school lunch my entire life. And representing poor people, if I was going to go into to be a lawyer, was- there was no question in my mind, that's what I was going to do. 

 

Aaron Nelson  18:39  
That combined with social justice, which is often dealing with the poor.

 

Keith Belzer  18:42  
Yeah, yeah. So it's gonna be one of the other, either a legal aid clinic or a public defender. And those are the things that ultimately I ended up applying for jobs when I was in law school.

 

Aaron Nelson  18:51  
Sure, certainly. So I don't want to jump too far ahead, because there's so much about "story" that I want, want to get into, but continuing, just following your path you're in law school, you leave, you start work as a public defender?

 

Keith Belzer  19:06  
Yeah, I got a job as a public defender in La Crosse, Wisconsin. That was my first job out of law school. Went there, did that for eight years.

 

Aaron Nelson  19:15  
Yeah, and pretty quickly, my understanding is maybe you get put into a leadership role in which you're like, teaching other lawyers about "story". How does that come to be?

 

Keith Belzer  19:29  
Yeah, I think it was my second year as a lawyer. I was already starting to do some teaching, and, you know, I had that performance, and so I felt very comfortable in a courtroom, and I not only had performance as an actor, albeit not very good, according to Chicago newspapers. But also I'd done some directing and some writing. So this idea, I mean, a trial, involves all those skills. You're performing, but you're also writing a script that's like jazz, right, or improv, and you're directing where things are going to go, you know? You're trying to figure out what's going to be focus in the courtroom. And so all of that made a lot of sense to me. And so I had some pretty strong ideas that I felt really comfortable. So right away, Deja Vishny, who I think was a former- already a guest on your podcast, got me involved in some some teaching for the public defender's office. Right? Yeah.

 

Aaron Nelson  20:19  
What-what you're really known as, right? What, what I think nationally, your reputation is as- as a storyteller, as like the the OG of- of "story". How did that come to be? Through your work at NCDC, through some work with some other mentors. Tell me a little bit more about how that "story" theme that came from the eight year old directing, directing plays got into your work in the courtroom.

 

Keith Belzer  20:47  
Well, it came out of a failure of sorts to be to be frank, when I first started doing some training for the public defender's office, I thought, what I need to do is teach lawyers to be actors. And that was a mistake. I mean, learning how to act is takes a long time. It takes a lot of work, and even if you do it, you may be wouldn't or you may be unsatisfactory, right? What I knew early on, when I was teaching, was that the connection to the client was the key. And so I gave a lecture early on that was a crappy lecture, to be honest with you, but the whole point was, "I love you, man". That was what I called it. It was about the connection with the client, because that will read. That will read, even if I don't have much technique, if I have a connection with my client, and a jury sees that as they should, they're going to care. And that's true of all of our work. That connection, it's now called client-centered representation. 

 

Aaron Nelson  21:35  
Yep. 

 

Keith Belzer  21:36  
That really wasn't the buzz term 30 years ago. But I just knew that that had just be where it started when I realized that teaching acting wasn't working, I thought, well, what's the next step? And I thought it's going to be telling a story. It's going to be, how do I convey this person's story to a judge, to a prosecutor, to a jury in a way that they can then connect as the connective tissue to- through me, through us as advocates, how do I connect to this person a way that I can convey their story so that we don't otherize people. 

 

Aaron Nelson  21:59  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  22:01  
You know, it's so easy to otherize people in a criminal justice system, particularly poor people, particularly people who don't look like us. I mean, and that's our- that's our work as public defenders, right? Those are the people we're working with, people that are marginalized, people that are easy to other. But I've got to find a way to do that. I didn't really know much about storytelling in the sense of how to teach it. I mean, I had written some plays. That's different than how you get up and you teach it. So I took a class at University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. It was semester long class on storytelling, much like when I did a negotiation class. My whole thing was, I'm going to take this class to learn how to teach this class, but teach it to lawyers.

 

Aaron Nelson  22:51  
Yeah. And then you took it, and now you've, you've taught, I mean, you were probably one of the youngest in the sense of experience on National Criminal Defense Colleges' faculty.

 

Keith Belzer  23:03  
Yeah, I was, I started teaching there five years out of law school, which was sort of, I know, unheard of. 

 

Aaron Nelson  23:08  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  23:08  
At the time.

 

Aaron Nelson  23:09  
So those of us who- listeners that maybe don't know, what's the- what's NCDC? What is the National Criminal Defense College? How did it come to be- what do you know? Tell us the story about NCDC.

 

Keith Belzer  23:19  
I'll tell you, as much as I- as I can recall, about a National Criminal Defense College is a program that believes in the importance of training lawyers to do a good job protecting people. Liberty's last champion is National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. But it's the same idea National Criminal Defense College. We are the protectors. We are the protectors of liberty and making sure that there's due process, that there's equal protection, all these ideas that we want to hold dearly. 

 

Aaron Nelson  23:42  
Yep. 

 

Keith Belzer  23:42  
This is where the rubber hits the road. And so it started off as a series of lectures, I think it was over two weeks. I want to say it was in Texas... Houston, Texas. It was in Houston, Texas. And then, the idea was to turn it into more of a trial program. And I think for a year or two, it might have been in San Diego, and eventually it landed in Macon, Georgia, in part because the Dean was Darryl Dantzler, who was a Law School professor at Mercer University, and she was the dean for years and years and years, and she planted the seeds and watered that plant and turned it into this amazing, amazing, beautiful redwood tree. 

 

Aaron Nelson  24:26  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  24:26  
Right, that has worked to protect people's rights all over the United States. And in fact, we have international lawyers come to this program so all over the world, and always at that program.

 

Aaron Nelson  24:38  
And now it's called the Darrell Dantzler Trial Practice Institute.

 

Keith Belzer  24:42  
Trial Practice Institute is one of the programs of the National Criminal Defense College, right. Which is a two-week program every summer. There's two sessions. You can either go two weeks in June or two weeks in July. And I would say it's the best trial program for lawyers in the United States.

 

Aaron Nelson  24:57  
Yeah, and you're now in addition to working for Nelson Defense Group, you're working with NCDC just recently.

 

Keith Belzer  25:04  
I just started working, working part time for them with Karen Smaller, who's the executive director. I'll be assisting her on the programming. And so when I say, I think it's the best trial program, I thought that before I got this position. But certainly, you know, one could accuse me of bias.

 

Aaron Nelson  25:20  
Yeah, but you've been on the faculty now for- for 30 years. You know, it's almost 30 years, and you know, you're, you're asked to speak in many different I mean, you've spoken, given lectures on storytelling in 45 states. 48 states? 

 

Keith Belzer  25:37  
Yeah, I think it's like 43 I think at this point. I'm adding two more states this year, so I think it's gonna be up to 45. 

 

Aaron Nelson  25:44  
Okay. 

 

Keith Belzer  25:44  
And I- People's Republic of China. I've talked about story, and-

 

Aaron Nelson  25:49  
Then you had some- you helped train public defenders from Israel. They came over here and got advice and technique from you.

 

Keith Belzer  25:59  
As part of a project we're doing through a public defender's office. We did something called the Gideon project, where Israeli managers came over and myself and Deja, we've talked about and a great teacher by the name of Steve Rench, who was one of the foundational people on this stuff. The three of us worked with these lawyers from Israel, develop a training program of which, you know, I started off with the first lecture, which was about story. And, yeah, it was an amazing project.

 

Aaron Nelson  26:31  
And so, you know, when we, you and I, we've talked about "story" enough that I think I know what it is you mean by "story". How is, how is telling a story different than narrative and story form that you're talking about?

 

Keith Belzer  26:44  
I think really what I'm talking about is narrative and story form. In telling a story, I don't think it's different. I think that there's just a different perception when I say storytelling, and we tend to think of fairy tales or fiction or something along those lines. What I'm talking about is, how do you convey somebody's life, depending on whether it's for a quarter, for a negotiation, or just in general, or how do you convey what has happened in a particular situation in a way that makes sense. And we learn, and we decipher information through narrative. When we hear something, we read something in a paper, we see a headline about somebody did something, we almost can't- most of us can't help ourselves to try to figure out, why would that person do that? 

 

Aaron Nelson  27:38  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  27:38  
Right. And there's some really interesting research from the 40s about people looking at shapes moving around that I've used in teaching, and almost everybody who looks at it, they're just shapes. It's like a square or circle in a box, and they just move around. And then people are trying to figure out, what does it mean? What's the narrative? Because we're sort of hardwired to understand, to interpret motivations by putting in the form of a story. 

 

Aaron Nelson  27:38  
To give it a meaning. 

 

Keith Belzer  27:50  
Give it a meaning. To give it a meaning. And that's what we do when we see a movie or read a book, whether it's a soap opera or it's an Oscar-winning film. I mean, it's all the same thing. We're trying to understand what it is to be a human being in the world. And that gets back to this idea we discussed earlier, Aaron, about that's how we don't other people. 

 

Aaron Nelson  28:23  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  28:23  
And we can have that connective tissue of having similar stories, stuff that Joseph Campbell wrote about, and that Carl Jung wrote about, that we all have a common experience of lived life and dreams and the archetypes that come from dreams to start to see how we're all connected much more so than we aren't.

 

Aaron Nelson  28:43  
And even if we can just unpack that a little bit, because I know I remember distinctly you giving a presentation at WACDL about archetypes. 

 

Keith Belzer  28:53  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  28:54  
And you'd presented the material like the night before, and I totally like, fanboy, geeked out. I read it twice, and like, you're up there presenting. We didn't we kind of casually knew each other, but I was like, raising my hand, "Keith, what about this? Keith, you wrote this. Keith, you wrote this". But throughout there, you kind of give the history, kind of- of how story has evolved in the courtroom, at least as- as criminal defense attorneys. Can you tell us- lead- lead us through that. You know, in Chicago, there was a lawyer that would tell personal stories. How has it evolved from there?

 

Keith Belzer  29:30  
But, you know, when I went back and I looked at the history of criminal defense, you had the Clarence Darrow approach, which leaving aside the Leopold & Loeb, which was a different situation. Basically, it's tearing apart the House of Cards. Prosecution puts up a case, and we put little holes in it and eventually the House of Cards falls down and they don't have a case. At some point that wasn't enough. There had to be something that was more connective to go back to this theme, and Eugene Pincham was this amazing criminal defense lawyer in Chicago. And he used to tell a sugar bowl story. And anybody listening to this, if you would do in a search engine, the Sugar Bowl story with Eugene Pincham, fantastic stuff. And he would talk about growing up in, I want to say Mississippi,could be Alabama. I think it's Mississippi. And growing up in his family, and for time purposes, I'm not going to do this story, but, and he would tie this personal story in his closing arguments to reasonable doubt. And it was a metaphor. It was an analogy that allowed people to connect to a legal concept through the use of story. Okay? The next step was to say there has to be story beyond just a personal story, by way of analogy, and we would start to tell stories, or try to make stories help people understand in trial, this is now we're talking about, by creating characters, but they were sort of two dimensional. They were sort of like snide, the whiplash.

 

Aaron Nelson  30:57  
Yeah, if we're cross examining the snitch, he's a bad guy and a liar.

 

Keith Belzer  31:01  
"You have to pay the rent. I can't pay the rent. You must pay the rent. I can't pay the rent". I mean, and those are sort of the characters. And that, you know, that was a step, right? At least, we're starting to think about people's motivations in a very superficial way, two-dimensional way. And then the next step was to start to do what I think of as a point-of-view cross-examination, where you really start to think, "why do people do what they do?" Right? And in a way of talking to our clients to get their story.

 

Aaron Nelson  31:29  
Why is this person testifying in this manner? We think they're lying. But there's got to be a motivation other than just lying liar who lies.

 

Keith Belzer  31:37  
Yeah, I mean people are at the end of the day. I mean, trials are about human beings. I mean, it's, you can't put it into an algorithm and figure out what's going to happen. I mean, it's about people, and the story is unfolding, and each person who comes into the courtroom, they're in the middle of their own story. I mean, you know, Campbell would talk about- their each on their hero's journey, to some extent, whether they're conscious of it or not.

 

Aaron Nelson  32:01  
So you'd mentioned a couple names, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, who's Carl Jung.

 

Keith Belzer  32:06  
So Carl Jung was, well, I would call him a spiritualist, he's a psychologist. I mean, he was a contemporary at some point. I think of Freud, only he was pre-Freud. Talked about the collective unconscious of dreams that we all share. Dreams. Across cultures, across continents, in a way that could have not been passed on to each other. It's innate to the human experience. And in those dreams, we have reoccurring motifs or archetypes of fear, of jealousy, of love, of whatever it might be that binds us all together. That's a connective tissue between all of us that we share. Joseph Campbell took that information and took it to the next step, and looked at "story", and said, not only is it in our dreams, but it's in stories. And he looked at the myths, the Roman, the Greek myths. He looked at Shakespeare. And he looked at "story", and the fact that stories had those reoccurring motifs, those reoccurring archetypes, archetypal beliefs, feelings, and characters. This is where he really started to expand. And in fact, he was very influential in George Lucas. And if you look at "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" with George, which Joseph Campbell wrote, or the interviews that he did with Bill Moyers, which are very old now, but just spells it all out, and George Lucas took that and created "Star Wars". 

 

Aaron Nelson  33:18  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  33:18  
It's based on archetypes.

 

Aaron Nelson  33:19  
Those interviews. You can find them on YouTube. Find them someplace else. Those interviews between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. 

 

Keith Belzer  33:26  
It's great stuff. 

 

Aaron Nelson  33:27  
It really is. I mean, just breaking down, breaking down the story. So that's where it then evolves into these archetypes.

 

Keith Belzer  33:35  
Then we start to think about, and I'm not going to say many lawyers look at it at that level, but that's what we're trying to get to is because that really helps us understand how we're connected to each other and why people do what they do. And it's not just, this is not some manipulative thing. It's just the way the world is. It's wanting to look at the world as a pastiche of colors, as opposed to simply black and white, that people do this and they're bad and people do this and they're good... It's so much more complicated and so much more interesting, but it takes being interested in finding out what it is. 

 

Aaron Nelson  34:11  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  34:11  
And to me, there's no higher calling for our profession, because when we start to look at the world that way, and then we look at our clients that way, then we won't be othering our own clients, right? Because if we're othering our clients, then everybody's gonna other them.

 

Aaron Nelson  34:27  
Yeah, we have to model that and see it in a different way. And so sometimes our client might be the hero in the story, but sometimes our client might be a different character in the story.

 

Keith Belzer  34:38  
Many of our clients, particularly for public defender attorneys, have been beaten down, have been beaten up, have been neglected, have PTSD, have trauma of all sorts from early ages, many times. And the hero should be us, all of us, and trying to figure out, how can we rise this- raise this person up so that they can become their own hero. Sometimes, if we're talking about a trial, the hero has to be the jury, or it has to be a judge, right? It has to be the person to say, "You know what? This is, the heroic stance we're going to do. We're going to see this person through this connection as a person, and figure out, how did we fail this person", right? And how can we help them do better?

 

Aaron Nelson  35:26  
Yeah, and that's kind of where we're trying to strive to, right? I know that that's what you're working with me. You're working with Emma and Mac and the other attorneys around the state and in the country, certainly here within this little sanctuary in Hudson, but to just try to be able to tell that story through archetypes.

 

Keith Belzer  35:45  
Yeah, yeah. And again, it's not like everybody has to read Joseph Campbell. And you and I both, you know, know this book by Christopher Vogler. It's a book about screenwriting. First time I read that, that was what really connected everything for me. And whenever any lawyer will say to me, what's the best book on trial skills? 

 

Aaron Nelson  36:03  
It's "The Writer's Journey". 

 

Keith Belzer  36:04  
It's "The Writer's Journey" by Christopher Vogler. And I highly recommend that. I feel like I should get a commission from him, recommending it for literally a couple of decades now. But it really is, because it's about, how do you- I mean, the first step is, is the interview that Michelle Levine has already done with you, which I have had the privilege of listening to, where you have to find the story, right? It means you have to care. 

 

Aaron Nelson  36:27  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  36:27  
You have to do all the things we're talking about right here, Aaron, to even want to care about that, but assuming you do, once you know the story, then how do you convey it? And again, that could be an audience of 12. It could be an audience of one if it's a prosecutor. Could be an audience of one if it's a judge. Many times it's an audience of one of our clients, we're trying to help them to understand their own story. 

 

Aaron Nelson  36:47  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  36:48  
Because many of our clients, particularly, again, going back to public defenders, they don't think of their lives in forms of narrative. That's a luxury. That's not one of a hierarchy of needs, right? It's not a Maslow hierarchy of needs to think of myself as a hero, but to help people to start to see: you do have a story, and let's talk about how we can change the trajectory of that story, trajectory of that story.

 

Aaron Nelson  37:13  
Yeah, because sometimes the call to action that we're asking for is our own client to- 

 

Keith Belzer  37:13  
Absolutely. 

 

Aaron Nelson  37:13  
Step up and do something. 

 

Keith Belzer  37:15  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  37:16  
As simple as maybe it's not simple. I don't mean to imply that, but self-care, self-help.

 

Keith Belzer  37:25  
Yeah, I mean motivational interviewing to get as a conversation for maybe another guest or another day, but just to help our clients start to see themselves as important. 

 

Aaron Nelson  37:34  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  37:35  
Right, and not just victims, even though their victimhood has been very real and their trauma is significant? 

 

Aaron Nelson  37:41  
Yeah. I think I was telling you the other day, the author, the founder of motivational interviewing, also has a little book that I just recently bought that's called "Loving-Kindness". 

 

Keith Belzer  37:53  
Yes, yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  37:54  
Which is connected to unconditional positive regard, which I previously talked about on here, and so that all of these are connected. The connective tissue, as you say, of what we're trying to do to eventually tell somebody's story is just-warms my heart.

 

Keith Belzer  38:11  
Well, and loving-kindness is such a Buddhist notion. I mean, this idea that we are all connected, right? I mean, that is part and parcel of a unit- a feeling of universalism, that we are all part of something, and that's the opposite of othering somebody.

 

Aaron Nelson  38:27  
Yeah, so obviously we're telling these stories, our clients stories, sometimes like you said to them, sometimes to a prosecutor through negotiation, sometimes to a judge in sentencing. Not that those aren't difficult things to do, but it's a little bit more straightforward than in a trial setting, because in a trial setting, we as the lawyers don't really just get to get up and say, let me tell it all to you. There's little rules, there's parts, there's different things to do it. How do you- how do you do that through trial? I know that's a that's the bazillion dollar question. 

 

Keith Belzer  39:04  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  39:04  
But it's a whole different setting. And how does that connect to your- your theater background?

 

Keith Belzer  39:10  
I mean, that's where the- like the Christopher Vogler book comes into play, is like, how do you tell a story? I mean, to really understand how a story, an effective story, a memorable story, comes together. You're taking information that you're gathering from another human being, client, or from investigation or from reports... discovery, right? And then what is the story that will make sense for this audience, that's truthful, that's consistent, that's coherent. And the story then combines all those things in a way that makes it easier to follow. Any of us who are trial lawyers have seen trials, quite frankly, probably conducted trials that somebody else has watched and thought "I have no idea what's going on here". Yeah, and then we tell ourselves, we'll wrap it all up in the closing. I think it's too late. To me, I don't think you win a case in the opening, but I think in the opening you sort of set the ground rules. You set the lens, is what I like to say through which we're going to look at everything else. So it's like the opening shot in a movie, or it's like the prelude in a musical. This is where we're going to go. This is our world. This is the universe we're going to work in. And then everything else comes through that, but it takes to really think through, how did this all come together? Now there are some cases, I don't think a lot, frankly, but there are some cases, just don't lend themselves to that, and that's okay too. Sometimes, sometimes it's legitimate to just say they didn't prove the case. They don't have evidence. 

 

Aaron Nelson  39:10  
The story is the constitution. 

 

Keith Belzer  39:58  
Story is the Constitution. And my friend, but your really good friend, Jessa Nicholson, was great at that stuff, as good as anybody talking about that stuff. I mean, that's not my strength to talk about the Constitution is the story. She was very good at that. Very powerful.

 

Aaron Nelson  41:04  
Yeah, the different parts then, of the- of the trial, right? We have opening, we have cross-examination. You've recently given, you know, the lectures at NCDC about cross-examination, and I think that's where most of the time people think of criminal defense attorney, it's like your bread and butter. Your bread and butter is at cross-examination, because the state's always calling witnesses and we're always asking them questions. And I know this could, we could go on for hours about it, but how does story play a part in cross for you, just at a simple level?

 

Keith Belzer  41:39  
Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, we think of cross for two reasons. Number one: and the defense side, we do it a lot, and it's where we have control. We get to decide what's going to happen. And it's the movies. I mean, the movies are always about cross examination. 

 

Aaron Nelson  41:41  
Yeah, yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  41:44  
"You can't handle the truth". Everybody knows that scene. Absolutely. May never have seen the movie, but you know that scene, it's during a cross-examination, right? The the issue I have is that in many of those scenes, it's about beating somebody up. And while I think there might be a place for that, there is a place for that, frankly, but juries don't want to see a lawyer beat up a witness who is not at the same level of understanding the evidence or the case. It's not an intelligence thing. It's a preparation thing. I mean, I've been trained for 30 years to argue, to question people. This person on the stand has not been trained for 30 years to answer my questions. 

 

Aaron Nelson  41:44  
Yep. 

 

Keith Belzer  41:44  
It doesn't seem fair, yeah, but there's a whole different way to ask questions that have to do with who is this person really, right? That you get the same information, and the jury thinks that's fair, and it is fair, right? Because what we're talking about is, who is this person? Why are they here? 

 

Aaron Nelson  41:44  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  41:51  
What do they care about? And it's just a different way of approaching a cross-examination. And frankly, it's a different way of approaching the world. And it all ties back to negotiation, by the way, because it gets back to interest. I mean, negotiation is not about manipulation at a higher level. It's about the stuff that Stephen Covey talks about in his writings, right? It's about the Harvard Negotiation Project. What are our interests? What are their interests? How can those interests come together? When I'm cross examining a witness, I'm saying, "What is this witness interests? I don't have to beat this witness up". Honestly, ethically. If I thought the best strategy was to beat somebody up, I would probably do it, because it's my job. 

 

Aaron Nelson  43:27  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  43:28  
But it's just not the best way to be a human being. And as it turns out, it's not the most effective way to be persuasive.

 

Aaron Nelson  43:34  
Yeah, a lot of that. Maybe I don't want to get too far, because it it impacts our credibility. 

 

Keith Belzer  43:40  
Sure. 

 

Aaron Nelson  43:40  
Right? I mean, a it's a bad way to treat another person, correct? And when we do that, and we're in the power position that does that, it- how are we going to get up later and say, "trust me". 

 

Keith Belzer  43:50  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  43:50  
"Believe me", when they're like, "you're the guy that just beat up on that vulnerable person".

 

Keith Belzer  43:54  

You're a jerk. Right? Why should I believe you, you jerk? 

 

Aaron Nelson  43:57  
Right? 

 

Keith Belzer  43:57  
Right? Yeah, absolutely. 

 

Aaron Nelson  43:58  
Yeah. And, I mean, I just did. I had a trial, two trials. I had to try it twice down in La Crosse recently, and so I had the opportunity to cross-examine a young woman who had witnessed some- some trauma and we had the first trial, and I didn't, it wasn't my best work. We got a hung jury in that trial, but it wasn't my best work. I don't think I saw her and you and I talked about it a lot, and then we had the second trial, and I think I still had the same plan in the second trial as I had the first trial. If you remember that I do, yeah, and she got up and testified and thank my lucky stars... the judge says "we got to take a break for lunch", and that was maybe the most important meal, most important break I've ever had in a case. You remember that? 

 

Keith Belzer  44:51  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  44:53  
And we just, I came to you, I was like, I can't do that cross. Like, I can't do that, Keith, what are we going to do? And you helped me come up with a new theory. 

 

Keith Belzer  45:05  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  45:05  
Do you remember that?

 

Keith Belzer  45:07  
I do. I remember we walked over to a, like, a sandwich place, we got a sandwich and and then we talked about, "what is her point of view, right? Who is she? What is she doing here", right? 

 

Aaron Nelson  45:16  
Yeah. And since then, and that, it was my first try. I had like, a half hour-45 minute prep, and it was okay. It didn't work out the way we wanted for our client. But sometimes that happens. But since then, you and I have been growing on, working on that, evolving on that. And it's, to me that is a lot of ways that I think of as sanctuary. Like, I'm helping to create a sanctuary in the courtroom, because part of it is, is I'm modeling how you should look at another human being. And that was because you're like, "you're not seeing her as a full person, Aaron, you got to see her as a full human being. You got to treat her as a full human being, even if it's cross examination". And to me, that was, I mean, I've had a lot of little career change nudges, kind of but that's what that was profound, even in my 28th year of practice, before I started this sanctuary, it was really sanctuary-

 

Keith Belzer  46:16  
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's, and it's not just in trial. It's just like how you approach life. It just so happens I think it's the most effective way to do a trial. But the more we can see things from another person's point of view, the more we can explore what their interests are, the more effective we are at communication. Whether it's communication to them or with somebody else, about what they're about. The more adversarial we are, the more we cut off, I think, true communication, true understanding. I'm not saying there's never a time to be adversarial. There are. It's an adversarial system. But more often than not, the more we can understand humanity, which is story- 

 

Aaron Nelson  46:57  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  46:58  
The more effective we can be.

 

Aaron Nelson  46:59  
And you've, you've talked about this, you've written about it quite a bit. I mean, it goes back to Aristotle, the three core parts of- of story. 

 

Keith Belzer  47:09  
Yeah, ethos, pathos, and logos.

 

Aaron Nelson  47:11  
So we were just, we were just, what are each of those? Just tell us briefly. What- just a thumbnail sketch.

 

Keith Belzer  47:17  
Sure. So ethos is the character of the speaker. Pathos is emotion, and then logos is logic, which, of course, is where we spend all our time in law school and all the research ever since Aristotle has said, it's the least effective form of persuasion.

 

Aaron Nelson  47:32  
But yet, here's what we're testing people on. 

 

Keith Belzer  47:34  
Yeah, we're testing people on logic, and really far and away. I mean, think about advertising. Advertising is not about logic. They'll throw in some logic at the end of a commercial, because then you can rationalize your emotional decision. Or they'll put, as I say, Shaquille O'Neal in front of you to sell deodorant. Why does Shaquille O'Neal know what deodorant I want? But that's the ethos, right? We either want to sell things to the character of the speaker, or we want to sell it by reaching our emotional core. We feel something, and then we will act upon that feeling, and we'll justify it with logic.

 

Aaron Nelson  48:07  
Yeah. So we have the logic that we're taught in lawschool- here as lawyers, right? And then we have, if you're going to portray criminal courtrooms in- in the media, it's all pathos, pathos, pathos. Yeah, right. It's all you don't, "you can't handle the truth".

 

Keith Belzer  48:22  
Law and Order, I mean, it's not about a lot of logic, as far as I know. I don't watch the show, but yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  48:28  
It's, perhaps it's about ethos, but I just have a bias on the people that they're putting the ethos on. 

 

Keith Belzer  48:34  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  48:35  
So, ethos, and you talked about credibility, what? How does that relate to story? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

 

Keith Belzer  48:43  
Well, I think there's a symbiotic relationship between emotion and character. We are more willing to be led to an emotional place by somebody we trust. We are more willing to trust somebody if we feel like they're speaking emotionally truthful. So when we can speak from the heart, we're more willing to trust somebody who's speaking genuinely from the heart, not faking it, right? 

 

Aaron Nelson  49:07  
Yeah, yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  49:08  
We know fakers. We know no disrespect to Used Car sales people other than what they deserve, but we know when somebody's trying to sell us a load of bunk, right? 

 

Aaron Nelson  49:19  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  49:21  
When somebody is speaking in a heartfelt way, we trust that person, and then they can tell us a story. Until somebody is telling us a story that makes sense, that we feel, then we're going to have that feeling, too. So those two things really work off of each other, the character of the storyteller and the emotion that comes from the story. It's not one before the other, it's them both together.

 

Aaron Nelson  49:42  
Yeah, you know, as I said, one of our recent guests was Jim McComas, and there's a book that I talked about with him that was written by a good friend of his, Rick Friedman, called "The Way of the Trial Lawyer Beyond Technique". And the beginning of it, here... there's a quote from Jim McComas as the- as the- in the beginning here: "The sincerity of a true heart is the only requirement of effective advocacy". I mean, when you talk about a heart and you know true ethos, I mean, I think that's what- that's what I hear.

 

Keith Belzer  50:23  
I wouldn't be that black and white about it, but certainly that's important, because you can have a true heart and be incomprehensible or boring or- but yes, I mean, the communication is not going to happen unless you have a true belief. And the true belief comes from the connection with the client. And I know I keep coming back to that, but it's that connective tissue. If I connect to you, I can help you connect to them. 

 

Aaron Nelson  50:48  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  50:49  
And I can help them connect to you. And it becomes this triangle of energy and connection and- and without that, the logic doesn't matter. We don't- you know, buy and large, there are a small group of people that are going to buy a car based on the logic, whatever it is that makes a car good. I'm not a car person. Great majority of people are going to buy a car based on the feelings they get by seeing a commercial, right? Maybe some people will buy an electric car because it's an intellectual- it's a logical thought. But there's still even that's tied to feelings in some way, or they're going to buy it because somebody has that same sort of car. I mean, advertising is all about that, as I said, without that human connection, without that love, frankly, goes back to what I thought, "I love you, man", that's the direct I mean, I didn't know much more, but I knew that was true. And then when you tie that to the story, that's that's life, though. I mean, that's not just what we do in a courtroom. It's how we want to try to live our lives. And, you know, I'm not saying I do that all the time. It's what I'm trying to do. 

 

Aaron Nelson  51:49  
It's what we're striving for right? 

 

Keith Belzer  51:51  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  51:52  
I was just, you know, I was just telling you about a presentation I'd seen about, how do we, how do we convey things to a jury, right? And you and I were talking about the difference between perhaps a lawyer, a law school trained lawyer, who might say, make an argument to say "you should believe my client, because I believe my client" right? And we're not allowed to do that. That's called vouching, right? How does a storyteller, how does a lawyer who's in connection in the way that you say, has a has a true heart, has a love for the client, has this connection... How can they do that in a better way, that's within the rules, that's better in a persuasive manner to get that same point across?

 

Keith Belzer  51:52  
I mean, the connection belies itself. If I'm going to talk to somebody about Aaron Nelson, and I can say Aaron Nelson is a great guy, and I say it with, you know, as a matter of fact, with a flat tone. It's one thing. If I say, "You know what? I gotta tell you. Aaron Nelson, he's a good guy. He did this. He did this. He does this. This is something that we share. It's a belief in human defending humans. It's a belief in defending humans". It's getting inside of the message you're trying to convey. It's telling the story from the inside. Too many times, I think when we think of storytelling, we tell it from the outside, something that happened, and it's other- it's over there. And I think to really connect, to really have empathy, to really have compassion, it goes back to what I learned to be getting acting: Who would I be if I were that person in that situation? 

 

Aaron Nelson  51:52  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  52:29  
What if I were in this story as that person, not as me, not as me, with all the privilege that I grew up with, what if I were that person in that situation? And then we start to imagine what that's like, and then we can start to convey that story from inside the story, and then we have to say, I vouch for this person, because I am living with them. I'm walking with them. My- my good friend Cynthia Roseberry, talks about, we're rocking with our client, right? We're sitting on that porch, we're in two wooden rocking chairs, and we're rocking back and forth, and when we rock back and forth, and then we talk about that person who we're holding hands while we're rocking with. We're going to convey that connection. We don't have to say I believe in this person. I'm going to show it just in my word choice, in my emotion, in the way I look at my client. This is not about manipulation. This is real stuff. It's real stuff. It's not fake stuff. It's real stuff.

 

Aaron Nelson  54:41  
And this is the story that's happening in the courtroom during the trial. So- 

 

Keith Belzer  54:45  
Yes, if it's happened before you got there. 

 

Aaron Nelson  54:47  
Yeah, you have to obviously have that connection beforehand. 

 

Keith Belzer  54:48  
I mean, it's not something. And you again, you know when somebody is bullshitting you. 

 

Aaron Nelson  54:49  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  54:50  
You know, somebody's getting up there and they, they put their, it's like the public defender in My Cousin Vinny, right? He pats the guy on the shoulder and he walks up and then he stutters. It's real, it's genuine. And if it's not, people know it. And that takes wanting to care about our people. It takes wanting to connect. It takes- not just being a lawyer. It's not logic, right? It's life.

 

Aaron Nelson  55:16  
It's the ethos that comes through because you're showing- you're showing the care, and then you have the credibility. But that story right there is, there's a lot to unpack, I think, from that, but that's to me, the the somebody telling it is outside of the story, talking about an event that's not happening in the courtroom. What you're saying is one of the stories, there's lots of stories that go on in the courtroom. But one of the stories that we're telling silently but communicating through our body is this care for our client, and we do that- 

 

Keith Belzer  55:50  
Absolutely. 

 

Aaron Nelson  55:51  
You know, if it's a one day trial, if it's a five day trial, if it's a 10 day trial, it's all of these little things that you can't fake. 

 

Keith Belzer  55:59  
You don't even- it's not even on a conscious level. It's just innate to the relationship. If my son were accused of a crime and I were in court representing my son, every pore of my existence would be exuding vouching for this person. I wouldn't have to say I'm vouching for him. 

 

Aaron Nelson  56:20  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  56:20  
I would just live it. 

 

Aaron Nelson  56:21  
Yep. 

 

Keith Belzer  56:22  
Right. And that's what I'm saying, is that you get to that place where you are just there with that person. I mean, even just talking about it, I'm more animated than I've been, because this is what I truly believe in. 

 

Aaron Nelson  56:33  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  56:33  
And part of that is just personal heart work. You want to get to a place where you're just going to connect with these people, right? People again, it could be clients, or it could just be life, but to connect with people we're working with to advocate for, and then it'll just- it'll just happen. It'll just happen. But you have to do that personal work, that homework, that's not easy stuff sometimes.

 

Aaron Nelson  56:57  
Well, it was a lot there, right? Because it's also the storytelling that's not about the telling. It's not verbal, I mean, and so, so part of this is just, even to just get away from- and it's not acting, you know, it's neither telling nor acting. 

 

Keith Belzer  57:14  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  57:14  
It's being, it's doing, it's showing. 

 

Keith Belzer  57:18  
Yeah, yeah.

 

Aaron Nelson  57:19  
You know. And as part of that, I think you said, you know, there's a lot of work that we need to do. 

 

Keith Belzer  57:23  
Yeah. 

 

Aaron Nelson  57:23  
Right? We need to be able to love.

 

Keith Belzer  57:25  
So much of this work is- and I am still working on this. It's hard, this, this notion of putting aside our ego. 

 

Aaron Nelson  57:37  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  57:38  
I mean, as lawyers, we have to have ego. I mean, how do you do this work? How do you walk into a courtroom and ask 12 strangers to agree with you without having some ego? But we're so much better. We're so much better the less ego we have, because then we're more connected. We're more connected to our client. We're more connected to 12 strangers who, hopefully, by the end of the trial, they don't feel like we're a stranger anymore, because we've let them in, we've put down our defenses. 

 

Aaron Nelson  58:03  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  58:03  
And we've shown them ours, and they've shown us theirs in a way that's very meaningful.

 

Aaron Nelson  58:09  
Yeah, you know, for me, one of the things that I almost have to make sure that I'm intentional about is there's, I think maybe it's just me, maybe it's others share this fear of like. But if I do that, if I, if I, if I open myself up to that love and to that care, the jury might disappoint me, the judge might disappoint me, and the prosecutor might disappoint me. My client might disappoint me, this and I'm gonna hurt, man, that's gonna hurt. 

 

Keith Belzer  58:39  
Yes. 

 

Aaron Nelson  58:41  
You just, just got a once more into the breach. 

 

Keith Belzer  58:44  
Yeah. I mean, we have to be protective. I- you know, I don't, I'm not saying that you, you, you're so far invested that you fall apart. 

 

Aaron Nelson  58:56  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  58:57  
But you also have to dare to hurt. I mean, that's life. I mean, you're in love with somebody, and maybe it doesn't work out. That hurts. Does that mean you shouldn't be in love again? Well, why live, right? You have people that you love in your life. Sometimes they die. Does that mean you don't care about the other people who are still alive? I mean, you find a way to soldier on. And, the best part of life is, is that connection and does it hurt sometimes? Yeah. I mean, if you're gonna do the thing I'm suggesting, I- you do want to have guardrails up? You do? I mean, there were times- you know this about me in my career where I wasn't as good at that as I could have been. 

 

Aaron Nelson  59:41  
We've, I don't know about we've all but, you know- 

 

Keith Belzer  59:42  
Many of us have been hurt.

 

Aaron Nelson  59:44  
You got to dare to hurt. And part of it is, it's daring because we've been hurt before, right? And you don't know where the lines are sometimes, until maybe you, you cross them, or or you just, you go- anyways, you get hurt.

 

Keith Belzer  1:00:01  
And this is, I'm not going to say this is for everybody. I'm going to tell you this is how I view our work. But I feel like, if I lose a case and it doesn't hurt, then I haven't created that connective tissue. Yeah, right. I mean, what am I doing?

 

Aaron Nelson  1:00:18  
What am I doing? Yeah, you know, if I'm not nervous, if I'm not anxious, if I'm not having these feelings, you know, and if, at the end, you're not feeling some of that hurt and that pain, maybe you haven't done it right. Maybe right's not the right word, but you haven't done it the way you intended to do it.

 

Keith Belzer  1:00:36  
There are lawyers who I who I think can do this work without that same personal-

 

Aaron Nelson  1:00:47  
Connection? 

 

Keith Belzer  1:00:48  
Vulnerability. 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:00:50  
Vulnerability, yeah? 

 

Keith Belzer  1:00:51  
Without that same personal vulnerability. And it may be that they're every bit as good. I don't know. I'm not going to say they're not. That's not for me to decide. What I know is for me, I am at my best when I am with that person, and I'm rocking with them every moment of the way, from the first time I meet them to the time the jury comes back, win or lose. 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:01:13  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  1:01:14  
That I'm with every step of the way. And if we lose, it hurts. It hurts.

 

Aaron Nelson  1:01:20  
Yeah, absolutely so well. Thank you. This has been fantastic. I want to wrap up. But before we go, I do have one more question. I mean, just for those lawyer listeners out there, who, all of us, who are, you know, trying to find motivation and inspiration, and sometimes meaning even perhaps you know what, fills your heart, what fuels you to to keep doing this, to sign up for another job with NCDC, to commute up here from from La Crosse, to help Emma and Mac and me, you know, help other people, representing people. What what fuels your heart?

 

Keith Belzer  1:01:59  
I think what fuels my heart just in life is story. It's people's stories. It's about connection to people. What fills me up or motivates me to do continue this work is the protection of people. Part of that is talking about trial right? To protect people's liberty, and that's what the trial is. It's the last stop, right? It's the last defense, but honestly, we do more work. That's not trial, as we've talked about 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:02:31  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  1:02:32  
And it's what you've talked about. Aaron, and I got this phrase, I mean, I had the idea before, but "defending humans", that's what drives me, and that's not about trials, 95%-99% of the time. It's about why is this person here? If they did something on their worst day, why and how do we understand it? How do we help that person so they don't ever do that again? How do we all become a better society by having a fuller understanding instead of simply blaming somebody. I understand people being upset when a crime is committed. 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:03:07  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  1:03:08  
I get it. I totally get it. That's fine, but there's something else right? Why was the crime committed? Why did the person do this? And that gets I mean, you talk about creating a sanctuary. That's the sanctuary that's never in the TV shows. It's understanding, how do we change this person's behavior? How do we help an addict stop using? Because when that addict stops using, they stop stealing. 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:03:34  
Sure. 

 

Keith Belzer  1:03:34  
Great. So that's one little thing. They become a better father. They become a better mother. They become a better son. They become a better daughter. They live. They continue to live. They don't die prematurely from overdose, from a bad liver, if it's alcohol. To help human beings thrive, is really what I care about. And in our case, I hope that I'm helping the people I work with. 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:04:02  
Yeah. 

 

Keith Belzer  1:04:03  
You, and Emma, and Mac. I'm helping those people. I'm helping them thrive, not just as lawyers, but by a point of view about the law that's holistic, and that carries over beyond just the law. And at the college now that I'm going to work there, it's the same thing, whether it's working with other faculty members to just try to model a way of life that's holistic, that's connective, so that we can then go on and work with other lawyers to have that same approach, because it goes beyond the courtroom. Mean, we want that sanctuary in the courtroom, but then we want it to extend out. We want sanctuary in our families, we want sanctuaries in society. We want sanctuary when we're meeting with people from across the aisle in politics, wouldn't that be something, right? That would be wonderful. I mean, it's much more likely in a courtroom these days, but one can hope.

 

Aaron Nelson  1:04:49  
One can hope. Well, you bring so much hope, you carry so much hope, and you've helped me to thrive. So I- I love you, brother.

 

Keith Belzer  1:04:57  
Thank you, Aaron. I love you too. 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:04:58  
Thank you. 

 

Aaron Nelson  1:04:59  
Thanks for listening to Sanctuary in the Jungle. This episode was brought to you by Nelson Defense Group and MadeDaily. Subscribe to Sanctuary now and never miss another episode. You can also sign up for our newsletter on our website and follow us on social media for new bonus content. We'll see you next time at the library for another episode. Until then, stay strong and carry the hope.