Breaking the Ice: MSBA honoree dedicated to ‘downtrodden’

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Former longtime federal public defender Andrew Mohring has a simple, direct answer for why he has, as he puts it, spent his life “working for downtrodden, the disposed, the underdog”?

“That’s where the need is,” Mohring said. “If you open your eyes to it, it’s pretty obvious, anywhere, everywhere.”

That’s also where “the coolest cases and clients are, the people with the richest stories,” said Mohring, reflecting after recently receiving the Minnesota State Bar Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The association recognized Mohring in part for “his integrity, legal skills and consistent efforts to support and uplift other attorneys.”

Mohring joined Goetz & Eckland four years ago as a criminal defense and civil rights trial lawyer after nearly three decades as an assistant federal defender in the District of Minnesota. In addition to his own cases, he assists with the federal defender’s Second Chair training program, training attorneys in federal criminal practice and working a case with each of those attorneys.

Name: Andrew Mohring

Title: Of counsel, Goetz & Eckland

Education: B.A., History, University of California, Berkeley; J.D., University of California, Berkeley School of Law

Q: Best way to start a conversation with you?

A: Tell me something about yourself. Tell me something you’re struggling with. What is challenging you?

Q: Why law school?

A: I always wanted to be a lawyer. From early adolescence. I learned that there were these people who were criminal defense lawyers and public defenders, and that seemed to be a neat way to spend some time.

Q: What are you reading?

A: A Scott Turow book called “The Laws of Our Fathers,” that I picked up from one of the neighborhood libraries, while taking the dog for a walk. I’m trying to reread “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” by Joseph Campbell.

Q: Pet peeve?

A: I’ve grown increasingly distrustful of certainty. People who manifest certainty and the lack of open mindedness that goes with it. The world is more complicated than certainty and clarity really allow.

Q: Best part of your work?

A: Getting to represent people. Getting to speak for them, but of them and with them. People who don’t generally get to talk and aren’t generally listened to.

Q: Most challenging?

A: Regular encounters with our society’s appetite for retribution, which is really breathtaking. It’s insatiable, even. Too many people going away for way too long.

And a focus on punishment, not rehabilitation. It’s inhumane. It is counterproductive. But it’s there, carved deep into the society and its institutions.

Q: Favorite activity away from work?

A: Music. Listening and playing. I play the five-string banjo. I play that because that was the one instrument that my older brother, who is a genuinely gifted musician, does not play. By mid-Midwestern standards, I’m a serious Deadhead. Spent six years in the Bay Area, when the Grateful Dead were playing there. Caught lots and lots and lots of shows.

Q: Where would you take someone visiting your hometown?

A: I grew up in Minneapolis. I’m a big fan of the Mississippi River and the Mississippi River Gorge, which you can canoe down. You can be in the middle of the river, in the middle of a city and not know it.

Q: Legal figure you admire?

A: Folks who do capital defense work in federal cases. That’s a higher order of humanity. The federal defenders, Dan Scott, who started the office and Katherian Roe, who came back from the Hennepin County bench to run it.

Q: Misconception about your work?

A: That the people we represent are somehow bad or evil and different than the rest of us, none of which is true. It’s convenient to demonize the people that get prosecuted and that get treated in the way that we treat people who we prosecute. I understand that from an emotional level, but it’s not true.

Q: Favorite book, movie or TV show about lawyers?

A: There was a series called “Judd for the Defense.” Every week there’d be a case, and he would figure out the uber truth underneath it and obtain vindication of that subtler truth.