Justice Consuelo Marie Callahan, Circuit Judge, United States Courts of Appeal [45:30-50:30]

the extensive trial ad program so though I had I had impaired in court when I was a certified law student as a public defender so I remember I went down there it was a drunk driving case and I ran down there and running back at the break I told my supervisor I'm not having fun yet and he said I said I'm terrified he said well I never told you this would be fun I said well I thought once I got going I'd feel better about all of this and all that really went on was I was happy in that first trial to just get up when I was supposed to get up and be in the right places and know when I had to make my arguments and all of that but it was pretty terrifying but I also learned that I can do terrifying things and like all good things come to an end so to all bad and it moved on and so I in those days we tried a lot of cases we were in court all the time and I moved pretty quickly into handling felonies and and some of those felonies involved prosecutions for rape and child abuse and sexual assault and things were still pretty those were really difficult cases as they remained to be difficult and there was a little bit of stereotyping that people felt that women would be better in those type of cases and I really didn't want to be channeled in that direction necessarily I had no objection to it because I felt that the best lawyers should be handling these cases because there's some of the hardest to prosecute but I didn't think that women were better than men necessarily I felt that it was more good lawyers are that are necessary for this but somehow there was a push in terms of my supervisors wanting to push me into that and so when we had a new DA he said I want you to start the child to be a sexual assault unit where we have vertical prosecution and so I started that unit in the DA's office and supervised that for a period of time and continued to prosecute those type of cases and then they went into infant homicides and that type of thing and then from that I went into career criminal and homicide and capital prosecutions so I really much pretty ran much ran the gamut did a lot of trial work was in trial all the time did did supervision as well but when I did supervision I was always I carried a full caseload tell me about what it was like to be a female an attractive petite female prosecutor talking to a jury in front of probably a male judge well there were it had its challenges but as you've already probably seen that a challenge is something that I'm I'm always up for and I learned quickly I remember when I first started out because I was 25 that people would be in the office and I might be preparing witnesses or police officers and they would look at me and I looked younger than 25 as well that they I could see in their face she sounds like she knows what she's talking about but this just doesn't look right there's a I could sense the disconnect here and I noticed as I got more mature that was helpful being looking a little bit older was helpful but I learned very quickly that to make a negative a plus from the standpoint that jurors are just regular people and I could communicate with people better than a lot of people and I knew how to do that or if I felt I felt a lot of times that people misjudged my ability and I was very quick to take advantage of that if if someone it's if you underestimate your opponent and your opponent knows that and it's just right there to to take advantage of that I think that I always I won a lot of cases because people somehow maybe trivialized what I was capable of and before they knew it they hadn't realized what had happened they were you know they were beat and I remember my supervisor who remained a very good friend of mine till his death which was fairly recent he said to me well you know you're actually you're becoming a pretty good lawyer and I looked at him and I said becoming I said what do you mean I said I am lost a case since I've been in here you tell me some other trial lawyer that you're supervising it's got a better track record than I do and he's sort of backing up as the as it's going on here and but it was always that I think I did always have to continue to prove myself people always really on some level marginalized what I was capable of and eventually they realize that maybe I was