As Secaucus’ public defender for the last 10 years, Peter Weiner has seen it all, from traffic tickets to combative characters. Through it all, he has remained cool and upbeat, doing his job with a quiet dignity while struggling sometimes to get his clients to tell him the truth.
“The most trouble I have is from people who lie to me when I defend them,” Weiner said. “Then I find out the truth in court.”
For over a decade, the only time someone would likely have had to deal with Peter Weiner was if he or she had legal trouble. Although Weiner has an active private practice, most people come into contact with him at the Secaucus Municipal Court. Weiner reflected on his job recently.
“While I give everyone the legal counsel they need, if I feel someone is absolutely innocent, I’ll take the issue to the limit to make certain that person gets justice,” he said.
Although nearly 54 years old, Weiner has only been an attorney for 12 years. And while he dreamed of becoming an attorney since he was a small boy living on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the road to his law degree was a complicated, although as he puts it, interesting process.
His family moved to North Bergen from Manhattan in 1960 when he was 13. He had skipped grades, and graduated North Bergen High School at 16 1/2 in 1964.
He remembers the school being strict about neatness, and says he was required to wear a suit and tie all the time, while girls had to wear a dress or skirt.
“If it was 100 degrees in May, they might have let me take my jacket off,” he said, displaying a deceptively quiet humor.
Whereas most kids graduating high school would have gone off to college, Weiner’s family didn’t have enough money, so he did odd jobs until his 17th birthday, at which point he enlisted in the army.
The army sent him to helicopter repair school in Virginia, where he spent 19 weeks. He might have suspected something when the army did not assign him right away, but transferred him to Oklahoma to wait until he was 18. Then, he got his orders for Vietnam, and served in several locations during a yearlong stretch from 1966 to 1967.
“I was part of a recovery team that picked up helicopters and small planes,” he said.
Most of these were in combat zones, and many, he noted, were Red Cross vehicles or other unarmed transports.
After he returned to the United States, he continued in helicopter repair in Virginia and thought he had a career. Indeed, for a while after his release from service, he continued in the field. He worked at Teterboro Airport for a while fixing planes, and then for a two-year stretch at the Port Authority.
Yet he couldn’t get out of his head his earlier dream of becoming an attorney.
“But I knew I needed four years of undergraduate work and law school, and I hadn’t even gone to college yet,” he said.
Doing it the hard way
In 1972, he got married. His wife, Mary Ann, believed in letting him follow his dream, and also believed in education. As she went on to become a teacher in North Bergen, she encouraged her husband to seek the education that would allow him to achieve his own dream.
He had moved onto a job in General Electric, where he eventually worked for nine and a half years.
“While I was at GE, I started to go to school at night,” he said. “My wife calls me a professional student. The first 20 years we were married, I was going to school.”
He got his undergraduate degree from Fairleigh Dickinson, although scheduling classes was a nightmare because he was on the road a lot for GE. At the time, he was undergoing a change of profession, becoming a quality inspector for ships – first in Hoboken, then later in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. He was just getting ready to pick a law school when contracts for work at the navy yard dried up. Most of the work had shifted to places in Southern states.
Since he had been at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, he assumed he would get his legal degree at Brooklyn College. But once the navy job dried up, he decided to look around, and chose Seton Hall in South Orange, N.J. He had no problem getting in. He looked over the books, took the test, and got accepted.
Fortunately for Weiner, he got a new job in Newark doing quality control. He also worked at a law clerk for Waters, McPherson, a Hudson County-based legal firm.
Just before entering law school in 1986, his first child was born. A year before he was ready to finished his law degree, his second child was born.
In the middle of this, fortune smiled on him. A company called asking him to serve as a quality control person. He agreed, but gave up work at the Newark Law clinic and other quality control jobs.
When he finished his law degree, he told this boss that he would continue to work there only until the results of his bar exam came back, then he was going to work at an attorney. But once he got accepted to the bar, his boss gave him a job as the company’s legal counsel.
While bar exams are extremely difficult and people routinely have to take them several times to pass, Weiner was older than most students and knew he couldn’t afford to wait.
“I made up my mind I was only gong to do this once,” he said. “That’s all it took.”
He took his bar exam in May 1990, and was accepted to the bar that December.
Weiner has lived in Secaucus since 1978, when he and his wife, his sister and brother-in-law found homes here. He was appointed as Secaucus Public Defender in 1992, a position he requested once he heard there was a vacancy.
Cases he faces
“Many people don’t realize that municipal court is a criminal court – this means that for some crimes a judge can impose a jail sentence,” he said.
The court hears a variety of cases, including drug-related crimes, driving while intoxicated, underage drinking, assault, shoplifting, fighting, disturbing the peace, moving violations, traffic tickets, or speeding.
“In cases where a person cannot afford an attorney and there is a threat of a jail or loss of license, the court must appoint a public defender,” he said. There is a fee, but this depends upon what the accused can afford, leaving it up to the judge to determined how much a client must pay.
“But people get an experienced attorney for one-tenth to one-twentieth of the normal fee,” Weiner said.
Normal legal fees to defend against a DWI charge can range from $1,000 to $5,000. A fee for a public defender, who defends the poor who can’t afford their own attorney, is between $50 and $100. Since the public defender gets paid by the session, not the case, this money goes into a fund.
While some towns didn’t have a public defender before state law required it in 1998, Secaucus always has.
“It’s my duty to protect people’s rights,” he said. “While the judge reads the rights to a person, I explain what penalties the person faces, and the merits of whether or not to go to trial.”
More than half the cases get settled when the person pleads guilty, often to a lesser change. It is Weiner’s duty to work that negotiation.
While case in Secaucus vary to some extent, Weiner sees largely the same charges again and again. A person can be brought to court on charges as a result of a violation of local ordinance, or violation of some law that involves the state or local police. Occasionally, a violation on a train platform will have changes brought by transit police.
Sometimes, there is a combination of offense – drugs found while a person is being arrested for shoplifting or a moving violation. A person might be found to be driving with a suspended license.
“It is the people that are different,” he said “People tend not to tell me the truth and I find out what happened when we get to court. I see them in a video. People will tell me they weren’t there, and that they didn’t throw the gun out the window.”
While he has defended many kinds of people in many kinds of professions, Weiner never defended another lawyer nor handled a malpractice case.
Weiner also has a healthy private practice, doing criminal work on a county level and even in Superior court. He has dealt with harassment, divorces, child support, real estate, and personal injury.
While he says there is great satisfaction in the job as attorney, and he finds it very rewarding helping people, the pressure is immense and he is constantly fighting deadlines and meeting demands of consignment judges and clerks.
“Criminal law is about perseverance,” he said. “If you know you are right, you keep fighting until you get the outcome that is just.”
He added, “If I believe the cause is just, I’ll stick with it to the end. But even if a person is guilty, that person is entitled to a fair trial and the best defense I can offer.”