Xavier Becerra: “I happen to have been one of those ``nasty'' attorneys that on the other side we have heard mentioned so many times.…”

“I happen to have been one of those ``nasty'' attorneys that on the other side we have heard mentioned so many times. When I had the privilege of graduating from Stanford Law School back in 1984, I took a job working for Legal Services in Worcester, MA, working for $18,000 a year, which is not even what I would have had to have paid for another year of Stanford Law School had I needed a fourth year. At the same time, most of my peers at Stanford Law School were being hired for something around $70,000 a year to start their legal career, and certainly that is not the pay that the partner or the mid-level attorney in those firms is making. And what certainly those individuals were charging was well beyond $100 an hour. Yet here I was, representing mostly people who were mentally ill. I had several clients; one, for example, was a minor who was locked up in a facility for adults. It was because Legal Services was there that we were able to remove that youth from that facility that was meant for adults who were mentally ill. I had the opportunity to help adults who were being overmedicated because the wards and the staff at the institution were tired of having to put up with mentally ill patients. So they would overmedicate them so they would be drugged out of their minds and would not budge from their beds.”