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In late October of 2010, a young public defender named Ben Goldsmith was reading the Seattle Times when he spotted

a piece about a new development in a murder case out in Redmond.

The headline read, Sex Redman-Hallewien Slane.

When you're in the sign of work,

you're looking for the challenging complicated cases and just from seeing the news

article about this it seemed like this case was all of those things. There was DNA involved which was going to make the case

complicated. It was a homicide which also made the case complicated and you know

clearly the stakes were high. Ben finished the article with great interest.

He did not see a lot of these kinds of cases in the area.

In Seattle, homicide of a stranger, so not a domestic violence situation, but a situation where it's actually unclear what the connection is.

Those cases are more rare and I think there's more of a chance of some

sort of injustice being done against the person charged.

From the time Ben was growing up in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, he'd

wanted to go into law enforcement, put the bad guys away, make the world just a little more just.

Then in college he landed an internship at a public defender's office

in Washington, D.C.

And within a week of working there, I realized that, you know, all the reasons why I thought I wanted to be

a police officer or an FBI agent or a prosecutor, which were to protect people.

That all those reasons were much better served for me

by being a public defender.

...