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Recovery in the News
Recovering addict takes seat on Texas criminal district court
"I know I can do more good for people from the bench than I can do as a lawyer handling one case at a time," says newly elected Judge Kevin D. Fine
Jenny B. Davis
lawjobs.com
January 13, 2009
When newly elected Texas judge Kevin D. Fine took his seat on the bench of Harris County's 177th Criminal District Court, he'll bring a bittersweet qualification to his position: recovering addict.
A decade ago, Fine overcame a dependency on drugs and alcohol, and he says his recovery is what compelled him to become a judge.
"I know 85 percent of the prison population is there because they have a substance abuse problem that can be addressed in another way other than locking them up, which does absolutely, positively no good," Fine says. Helping addicts get clean, sober and out of the court system, he says, was "my whole reason for wanting to run."
Fine's been helping people battle substance abuse problems for years. He's assisted many of his own clients in the course of representing them,and he's also reached out to fellow lawyers through his volunteer work for the State Bar of Texas' Texas Lawyers' Assistance Program.
While he doesn't hide his past, he doesn't exactly broadcast the news. But now he's willing to bring his story to a wider audience.
After 14 years of witnessing firsthand the problems created when addiction and the criminal courts collide, Fine decided to step onto the public stage to talk about his recovery and to try and become a more active part of the solution as a criminal law judge.
"I ran because I know I can do more good for people from the bench than I can do as a lawyer handling one case at a time," he says. "My goal is to help as many people with substance abuse problems that really want help to get help and to reduce the number of those people who go to the penitentiary, because it clearly doesn't work."
Fine says he always knew he'd become a lawyer. Born in Midland, Texas, and raised in Lubbock, he says some of his earliest memories involve hanging out in the law office that belonged to his stepfather, who died when he was young. He'd play pretend with casebooks and legal pads. Law was in his DNA: His great-grandfather was a criminal defense lawyer, his grandfather had a general practice, several uncles were lawyers and one was a judge.
Nevertheless, Fine took the circuitous route. "I always knew I was going to law school, I was just taking my time," he explains. After graduating from Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Va., he spent two years working construction for the father of his high school sweetheart. Then he set out for college, starting at the University of New Orleans and finishing at Southeastern Louisiana State University.
He spent two years in politics after his college graduation, working in Houston as an aide to U.S. Rep. Craig Anthony Washington, Fine says.
In 1992, Fine left Washington's office for Texas Tech University School of Law. There, he says he "took every class that had the word 'criminal' or 'procedure' or 'evidence' in it." He knew he wanted to be in a courtroom, and he knew he had a "soft spot" for criminal defense work.
When Fine graduated in 1994, he moved to Austin, Texas, to study for the bar exam and also to spend the summer clerking for Broadus Spivey. Fine assisted Spivey on a precedent-setting legal malpractice case, as one of seven clerks.
Spivey still remembers Fine's contributions.
"We tried that case for three months in Houston, and he was one of the people who kept the fires burning in Austin," he says. "He turned in very diligent work product" and "was very, very reliable."
Spivey estimates he's had about 200 clerks come through his law office doors, many of whom have gone on to great success.
"I work them pretty hard," he says. "They pick up a lot, and I let them get into the lawsuits."
Although he did not know Fine had been elected to the bench, he was pleased to hear it, commenting that Fine will "be a good judge, he's a really solid fellow."
BENEATH THE SURFACE
Fine's professional trajectory may have appeared textbook, but his personal life was more like pulp fiction.
First, there's his love of racing. "I've always liked stuff that has a motor and goes fast," Fine says with a laugh. As a kid, he raced BMX and motor cross bicycles. In high school, he took up drag racing. During law school, his only mode of transportation was a Harley Davidson. Today he races dirt bikes and did so competitively until he broke his foot last January. Recent injuries have sidelined his participation in a bicycle trick-riding sport called "freestyle" and have slowed down his wakeboarding -- a cross between water-skiing and snow boarding -- although probably only for a while.
Then there are the black-and-white tattoos that cover a significant portion of his skin. Fine's right arm is completely "sleeved," or covered, with art that ranges from tribal designs to two women with angel wings but no halos. He also sports various designs on his left arm.
In law school, a tattoo artist decorated Fine's back with a Native American design featuring what he describes as the symbol for "the everlasting spirit" -- a cow skull with feathers hanging from its horns.
Fine says he got his first tattoo around the age of 17, a shark surrounded by Native American tribal art on his upper right arm.
"It was back in the day when I had this attitude like, 'I am a shark; I'll eat you,'" he says. Looking back on that time and his youthful bravado, he believes, "I was hiding behind some stuff."
That "stuff" involved drugs and alcohol. He smoked his first joint in sixth grade, he recalls, when the group he was hanging out with ducked behind the back of a gas station next to the local skating rink. It had no effect, he says.
Then he moved from Lubbock to Virginia and made new friends. "The first people I met were potheads, and I started smoking pot, and it did something to me," he recalls. By 14, he says he was smoking marijuana and drinking beer every weekend, and by his senior year in high school, he had tried cocaine.
Fine says he became aware that his alcohol use was a problem in high school, when it had become impossible to stop at just one or two or three beers. "I knew it, but I didn't know it, know it," he says.
Fine recalls one instance following law school graduation when his second stepfather, the one who raised him, "came to the house and said, 'Son, you're going to have to stop drinking, because you're going to end up in jail or dead.' But at age 22, it resonated, but I didn't know what to do."
It likely didn't help that Fine seemed able to control his addiction.
"I definitely led a double life," he says. In college, he was making good grades and was never late for class, yet he'd spend evenings and weekends in techno clubs, doing drugs, he says.
He was even able to quit when he wanted. During college, he says, he stayed clean and sober for eight months and during that time got involved in student government and a fraternity. In law school, he stayed substance-free his entire first year and kept it in check during his second year. He says he was completely clean and sober while working for Spivey and studying for the bar.
"That was one of the things that really fooled me, because I could put it down and go months without doing anything. So I thought, 'Well, there's something wrong with me, but it's not a substance abuse problem,' " he says. "I knew that if I could stay away from it, I was good. But once I put it into my body, there was no stopping it. And that's the very nature of alcoholism and drug addiction: Once you have it in your body, you have little or no control over the amount you're going to take."
During law school, Fine remembers calling his preacher to ask for help. "He didn't know what to do. He didn't offer any suggestions or advice, just a 'Quit doing that.' "
Fine also tried attending some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in his early 20s, but he says the message didn't get through.
"I never heard any similarities. All I heard were the differences." He says, "It was all old guys who had traded their watches for booze and lost everything, and there I was, a kid, who had not lost a doggone thing to my knowledge, but I had really lost a good portion of my soul."
GETTING HELP
By early 1995, Fine says, his addiction demons were becoming more difficult to manage. He was now working for the firm then known as Hurley, Sowder & Reyes, a general practice firm in Lubbock, handling a case load that he says was about 90 percent criminal defense. He represented clients accused of all types of crimes, including DWI, DUI and drug cases. And yes, he says, he fully appreciated the irony.
"I knew I was just like those people. There had been many occasions where I was sitting in the courtroom, just name the county, and they brought out the guy in orange, and I said to myself, 'Man, that should be you,'" he says.
Fine eventually reached rock bottom.
"I was to the point where I could not look at myself in the mirror," he says. He held back when he had important matters to handle, such as when he was in trial, but he says his entire social life centered around drugs and alcohol.
"By this time I was truly leading a double life: lawyer and churchgoer and married on one hand, and on the other hand, I'd stay out two and three days. I'd stayed gone several times partying with people I would probably be representing if they got caught. None of it I am proud of, but that's the nature of the beast," he says.
One Sunday in 1998, he called one of his law partners, Ruben G. Reyes, and asked for help. "I said, 'Man, I've got a big problem,' and [Reyes said he] knew that already," Fine remembers. "He said, 'You can't keep going the way you're going; you're going to die.' And I thought, 'I would rather be dead than keep living this cycle.'"
Reyes remembers the call.
"I wasn't surprised that he'd ask for help, because our local bar is a very tight-knit group. But our firm was even tighter -- the fact that he could call didn't surprise me -- but when he called and said what he needed help for, I was surprised."
"We knew something was going on, but we didn't know for sure what," says Reyes, who is now a district court judge in Lubbock. "We were noticing things like he was not coming in as early as he normally would have, or he was a little more irritable."
Reyes says he thought Fine might be dealing with a health issue or marriage problems, or perhaps the long hours required of practicing law were getting to him.
"There are so many things that come to the front of your mind other than a drug issue," he says. "Kevin was trying to burn the candle at both ends, and after a while, you can't do that. You just can't."
Fine decided to enter rehab.
"I know what's right, and I knew the right thing to do," he says. His firm supported him wholeheartedly.
"Those guys had my back the whole time, all of them. I still owe them a great debt of gratitude," he says.
Says Reyes, "Our concern for him was not as an employer-employee relationship. He was also our friend, so it was like a friend saying 'I need help.' And our response was, 'Absolutely.' And then we said, 'What needs to be done?' The last thing we thought of doing was turning away."
Fine says the firm gave him as much time as he needed to get well and was willing to continue paying his salary, which was a portion of revenues received from the firm's cases.
"We wanted him to take the time that he needed. Some people it takes 30 days; some people it takes six months. We were willing to help him get through it," confirms partner Daniel W. Hurley, whose firm is now called Hurley & Guinn.
"Kevin had a great amount of talent as a trial lawyer," he says. "He was such a good judge of character. He was good with people, and juries really liked him -- they wanted to embrace him. Sometimes people with a high degree of talent in one area have failings in others."
Fine's absence, however, meant everyone else at the firm had to pitch in to handle his case work and appearances.
"That was difficult, but it was all well worth it," Hurley recalls. "When you're a criminal defense lawyer, and I've been one for 30 years, you certainly learn that a lot of people have problems -- that as far as I know there was only one who walked this earth who did not have problems, so we try to help people through their problems."
Reyes says the firm reviewed Fine's case files, just to "make sure everything that was supposed to have been done was done."
It was, Reyes says. "We did not find anything that was a glaring mistake," he says. "Kevin had been working his files very well, and it was very easy for us to pick them up where he had left off."
Fine grasped treatment like a life preserver.
"I was so desperate that if you had told me to stand on my head eight hours a day with a pencil in your mouth to save your life, I would have done it; I was willing to go to any length not to have to live like that anymore."
It was during therapy that Fine finally accepted that he was an alcoholic, he says. He describes the realization as a relief; it meant he was "not crazy" and that "we have a label and a solution."
After about a month off, including 10 days of detox, Fine returned to the firm, juggling his case load with six months of intensive outpatient treatment, which included therapy and AA meetings, he says. It wasn't about earning money, he says, more like staying busy to stay clean and sober. Although it wasn't instantaneous, he says, "life was so much better and sweeter."
In 2000, however, Fine decided to move to Houston. "I love the guys at the firm, but I didn't care for Lubbock," he says. Houston, he says, was where the legal action was -- "where the big boys played ball." He started up a practice and in 2002 joined colleagues Stanley G. Schneider and W. Troy McKinney in their criminal defense firm, Schneider & McKinney.
Now when he represented clients with drug and alcohol issues, he didn't think about joining them, he thought about helping them.
"Every time I had a client with a substance abuse problem, and I knew they were willing to do whatever it took to stay clean, I did everything in my power to get them into treatment or some program to keep them out of the penitentiary," he says. "Several times I would tell the judge my own life experience in Readers Digest form: 'I've been where he is, and I am better, so if you give him a chance, he could [be better].'"
He also became involved in TLAP, serving on the committee for two years and becoming a "point of contact" in Houston.
"That means if there's a lawyer who is having a problem, I am a point of contact for that lawyer in Houston," he explains, noting that there are several people he's helped along their road to recovery. Sometimes he just talks to them, sometimes he takes them "to a meeting or two -- or 20."
Fine says, "There's a saying that there's no substitute for an addict or alcoholic helping another addict or alcoholic, because we've all been to that place."
TLAP director Ann D. Foster seconds that. "There are plenty of people who can help, but there's something very unique about someone who's been through that tornado, that hurricane, and their ability to identify with the person who's in it," she says.
TLAP has about 600 volunteers across the state, she says, and between the fiscal year spanning June 2007 to May 2008, the program did direct outreach to 594 lawyers, including fielding 253 calls to the TLAP hotline. She says that in her experience, lawyers who are able to do well in recovery generally do well in their practice. When they click with a recovery program, she says, "[T]hey get well, and they bounce back."
Fine had certainly bounced back. His life became about two things, work and AA, and he was enjoying a feeling of contentment, something he says he'd never experienced before, "not even when I was a little kid."
Two years ago, he sat for two major new tattoos wrapping around his right arm, tattoos that symbolize hardship, faith and hope. Sweeping across Fine's outside forearm is the great storm depicted in the Book of Matthew, and along his inside forearm is a scene depicting Fine's own lifeless body and "a form of Jesus Christ holding me up and pulling me up from the water." The scene reflects the message of the story, that faith can calm the storm, he says.
And yet, despite the contentment, Fine started thinking about becoming a judge. He worried about his background, certainly, but another stumbling block had been his political party; he was a Democrat. The last time Harris County had elected a Democrat to the bench was in 1996. Then came Barack Obama. And for the first time, Fine says he began to think it could be possible.
ELECTION RESULTS
In the spring of 2007, the Harris County Democratic Party put together a panel of about 40 people from various walks of life to begin vetting possible judicial candidates for the Nov. 2008 election, says party chair Gerry Birnberg, including the candidate who was to run against Republican judge Devon Anderson for the 177th Criminal District Court.
The roles of the panel were many, Birnberg says.
"One was to make sure we had enough people on the ballot and to give us an opportunity to have a diverse ticket that was representative of the entire community," he says. The panel also wanted to make sure the candidates were not only qualified but that they understood the realities of seeking office, like the time resources, the expenses and the party participation expectations.
Birnberg says the panel also looked into whether would-be candidates had any "potential blemishes," like having been held in contempt, or whether there were any conflicts of interest between cases pending in certain courts and the firms' clients. Birnberg says the committee created a "matrix" to determine who would be best running for which seat.
Houston criminal defense lawyer David Mitcham of Patchen & Mitcham was on that panel. He says he personally interviewed Fine in the fall of 2007 as part of the vetting process. Mitcham says Fine "made full disclosure to us and was forthright" with him about his struggles with drugs and alcohol and that the panel determined Fine would make not only a good candidate but also a good judge.
"I have known Kevin Fine for many years, and I know this is deep in his past, and he has certainly recovered from it," Mitcham says. "The fact that he had struggled with this problem in his past [was] frankly, in my view, a positive aspect of his candidacy, and I think it will be a help to have that perspective in the judiciary in Harris County, because it's a very serious problem we have in our society. To have someone who has been on the line in this regard can be very helpful -- it's not an abstraction, it's something he's dealt with personally -- [and] it offers a really fresh perspective on the bench."
Fine rode a judicial election tsunami that swept Democrats onto Harris County benches for the first time in years. In an e-mail, Birnberg writes that Democrats won 23 of the 27 Harris County benches that were on the ballot in November and that an election contest is pending regarding one of those benches won by a Republican. Overall, he writes, Democrats now hold 13 of the 25 civil district court benches in Harris County and eight of the 22 criminal district court benches.
Tsunami or not, Houston criminal defense solo Feroz F. Merchant says Fine will make a "great judge." Merchant says he first met Fine in court back in 2002 when Merchant was a prosecutor with a case against Fine's client.
"What I really enjoyed about him was that he worked hard for his client, and he was professional. I was very impressed with how he handled the case and his client, and he made me work," he says. "Right after that we became friends, and we've been friends ever since."
Merchant assisted Fine with his campaign, hosting a fundraiser for him, e-mailing friends and colleagues, and getting friends to post campaign signs in the yards of their homes and businesses.
"As long as I've known him, he's gone on about helping others and making a difference, and this was long before he wanted to run for the bench. It wasn't like he wanted to say something that would make him electable," he says. "A lot of people supported Kevin; people on both sides of the aisle know him and respect him. Obviously I am biased because we're friends, but I don't think they'll be disappointed."
Reyes agrees. "In a judge you want someone who has a good judicial temperament. It requires someone with patience and viewing the file not as a file but with the recognition that they represent faces, and I think Kevin has a good view on that," he says. "He didn't pursue this [judge position] for the title; he pursued it because he wanted to continue to give back."
As the presiding judge in the 177th Criminal District Court, Fine will hear all types of felony cases, "from state jail drug possession to capital murder cases."
Although he does not know the exact percentages of each type of felony, "it is my understanding that a very high percentage of the dockets are cases involving state jail felony offenses of possession of a controlled substance weighing less than one gram," he says.
According to statistics from the Harris County District Clerk's Office, county prosecutors filed 20,476 felony drug possession cases in 2007, a 40 percent rise over the previous year, and the county now runs four drug courts.
And that's precisely where he's prepared to make his mark. "I am nervous because it's a big responsibility," he says of taking the bench. He recognizes that his personal story is compelling, but he's adamant that the focus should not be on him, but rather on the problems he'll be trying to solve.
"I am not trying to be a superstar," he says. "If you make it all about me, no one will care, but if you make it about the system, people will open their ears a little more."