Sid Brush, Client Advocate For Life

by Meryl Carver-Allmond, Capital Appellate Defender

On March 18, 1984, Sid Brush moved her things into the Sedgwick County Public Defender office to start her job as office manager. She had worked with the chief, Richard Ney, in Illinois, and he called her out of the blue to ask for help setting up the new office. “I told him I didn’t have any experience running an office,” Sid explained, “But Richard said I knew how he liked things done and we’d make it work.”

One can imagine that Ney was happy just to have a friendly face. While the brand new Sedgwick County office wouldn’t officially open for a month – and no one would get paid for even a few weeks after that – they were already in hostile territory.

“The county did not want us here. The judges didn’t want us here. The prosecutors didn’t want us here. The private bar didn’t want us here. At that time, the big firms would use appointment cases to train their new attorneys, so no one wanted us at all.”

Gradually, though, the office grew and thrived. “We had seven attorneys, two secretaries, ad two investigators to start. Then we added an appellate attorney, because there wasn’t even an appellate defender office at that time: all of the attorneys just did their own appeals.“ “And then eventually we added more attorneys and a social worker – I think Sedgwick County is still the only office that has a social worker, in fact,” she added with a hint of pride.

But ultimately Sid missed working directly with clients, so she moved to a legal assistant position, and eventually transferred to the Death Penalty Defense Unit.

“My first death penalty case was actually in Illinois in 1983, and I’ve always been really passionate about not having a death penalty – I had worked on the board of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty, and done whatever else I could. So when they decided to put a DPDU office in Wichita after the death penalty was reenacted in 1994, I told the attorneys working there, ‘I really want that job!’”

She’s been there ever since, and – in almost 18 years – she’s never had a death verdict stick in a case that she’s worked on.

And it’s clear from talking to her that it’s the clients she works with that make her job worthwhile. When I ask her about people our offices have represented in common, she’s thrilled to exchange stories: “He was such a sweet boy when I knew him,” and, “To this day, I still have his paintings all over my office walls.” And her best day ever on the job is a life verdict their team was able to get for one of those particularly beloved clients. “We have the verdict on the wall still, and it’s the only one.”

Because she does come from such a client-centered place herself, it’s not surprising that – when I specifically ask her what she would like to see attorneys do differently – being more client-centered tops her list. “We get on the judges, we get on the DAs – all for seeing our client’s as something other than human. But we slip into that, too. Sometimes clients are hard, but they’re still people and I’m going to work my butt off to make sure they get the best defense. Not an ‘adequate’ defense; the best defense we can give them.”

But Sid is optimistic for the future of BIDS. “I think the best thing that’s happened to the agency in 25 years is that Heather is now the director. She’s given us hope. I think she’s really listening to what we need. And by what I’ve seen, she’s really fighting for us in the legislature, which is something I don’t think we’ve had for a while. She’s telling them, ‘This is how it is. We can’t do our jobs without more. We’ve already been doing more with a whole lot less and our people are exhausted.’ I think that’s one of the biggest things she’s brought is that she’s fighting for us.”

From the day she first moved her boxes in all those years ago, Sid’s career has been a storied one. But after 37 years with BIDS Sid is starting to think about another adventure – retirement. While she says she hopes to have more time for volunteer work with her local food pantry and homeless shelter, I can tell she’s most excited about having time to travel. “I’ve never taken a cruise, but there’s one in New England that I’d love to do.It starts in Massachusetts and goes up to Maine – I’ve always wanted to see that area of the country.”