Cheryl L. Kates is a criminal defense attorney, former nurse, and former journalist whose career has been built on the belief that everyone deserves a vigorous defense — especially those society has already decided to write off. She and Jaclyn talk Rochester justice, the psychology of advocacy, and what it really costs to stand up for the forgotten.
About This Episode
Most people will never need a criminal defense attorney. And most people, when they think about criminal defense, picture someone defending the indefensible — the villain of a crime drama who gets a technically brilliant but morally troubling acquittal. Cheryl L. Kates has spent much of her career pushing back against that framing, not with speeches, but with the daily work of ensuring that people who have been charged with crimes — often people who are poor, marginalized, and already presumed guilty by the systems around them — actually have someone in their corner.
What makes Kates unusual is not just that she's a good attorney. It's the road she took to get there. Before she passed the bar, she was a nurse. She worked in trauma environments, close to human suffering in its most acute and physical forms. Before that, she worked as a journalist — someone trained to observe, to ask hard questions, and to tell stories that complicate easy narratives. Those two vocations, stacked on each other, gave her something that legal training alone rarely provides: a genuine understanding of what it means to be vulnerable in a system that has power over you, and the instinct to document what she sees with clarity and without flinching.
In her conversation with Jaclyn, Kates talks about what drew her to criminal defense specifically — and to clients who don't have advocates lining up to help them. There's a population of people who move through the criminal justice system without anyone truly seeing them: people experiencing mental illness, addiction, homelessness, or some combination of all three. The charges against them are often symptoms of larger failures — in the healthcare system, in housing, in the social safety net. Kates represents these clients not with pity but with the full force of legal craft, because anything less is a betrayal of the profession and of the person sitting across from her at the table.
The conversation gets into how Rochester's justice ecosystem operates in practice — the relationships between the courts, law enforcement, public defenders, and the communities they all affect. It's a complex picture, and Kates doesn't simplify it. What she offers instead is a practitioner's view: what works, what doesn't, and where the gaps are that cost real people real freedom.
Healing and punishment are the episode's central tension — not as opposites, but as concepts that the justice system forces into a collision it was never well-designed to resolve. Kates's nursing background makes her unusual among attorneys in that she has seen what actual healing requires: time, care, resources, relationship. What the system typically offers is something much faster and much colder. She hasn't stopped believing that the gap between those two things can be narrowed. That belief, more than anything else, is what makes her one of the most important voices in this season of the podcast.
About the Host
Jaclyn Richard is the host of I've Got a Little Brooklyn in Me, a Rochester, NY podcast celebrating the entrepreneurs, civic leaders, artists, and changemakers shaping the city's future. New episodes drop biweekly on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.