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Hello, and welcome to True Crime Daily's The Sidebar, where we take you inside the courtroom of the most high-profile and notorious cases from across the country.

I'm your host, Joshua Ritter.

Currently a criminal defense lawyer based here in Los Angeles.

Previously, I worked as a prosecutor with the LA District Attorney's Office for close to a decade.

We recording this on Tuesday, September 21, 2021.

Today, we are joined by defense attorney and trial lawyer Steve Greenberg, based in Chicago, Illinois.

We're discussing the Arkely trial currently taking place right now in Newark, as we speak.

We are delighted to have Steve as a guest, because until recently he was one of Arkely's attorneys before withdrawing from the case in June of this year.

Welcome, Steve.

Good afternoon. How are you?

Very good. Before we jump into all the details and drama around this case, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background, how you got started in criminal law?

Sure. I like to call it criminal defense law, because criminal law sort of implies that we're doing something wrong.

When I was a youngster, I wanted to be a lawyer, I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney.

I would watch a TV show called Own Marshall, and he had this young criminal defense attorney who worked with them, wrote a motorcycle, all that cool stuff, based in Santa Barbara, California, actually.

So my dream was to go to Santa Barbara and be this individual. I eventually did go out to California to try and go to law school, but unfortunately I wasn't a good enough student to get into UCLA or Berkeley.

So I came back to Illinois, went to law school, graduated, sort of did everything and anything that came my way while I tried to build up a criminal defense practice.

I think I know people nowadays here in Chicago and think that it's crime written. It's nothing compared to what it was back in the late 80s and the early 90s.

So very quickly I was able to build up a practice and I would try all the cases, try anything and everything.

I was trying jury trials for $200. And I think I worked my way up and developed a reputation.

I sort of feel like I'm the exception because I was never a public defender. I was never a prosecutor and I never worked for anybody.

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