Character Analysis
Kathy O'Brien (the defense attorney)
In Steve's screenplay, Kathy is "the defense attorney with doubts" (2.16). She's "all business as she talks to Steve" (2.32), and sees no need to believe her clients, or even to believe in them—her job is only to prove their innocence to a jury.
She does her job.
Yeah, she coaches Steve through his testimony.
Yeah, she gives him the skinny about how well (or not) the trial proceeds.
Yeah, she tells him a little about her life: McDonnell High, St. Joseph's, NYU Law.
Yeah, she pats his hand and smiles at him.
Yeah, she wins her case.
Wait—what? Why isn't that a bigger deal?
Because it's all a job and that's all she ever treats it as. Steve is a client, not a friend, even though she fights for him. When they win, Steve opens his arms to hug her—totally reasonable—but "She stiffens and turns to pick up her papers from the table before them" (20.25). Cold, O'Brien, cold.
What does she see in Steve? Well, the truth is that we don't really know because we don't get to see inside her head, so all we can do is try to make sense of what she says and does. She's a good attorney—she battles Osvaldo to the ground in his testimony, and she trains Steve well for his time on the stand—but she also doesn't seem to love her job. When Steve asks her how many times she's been to court, "her mouth tightened and she said, 'too many times'" (13.4). Even when she tells Steve about her life, she ends with a less-than-enthusiastic, "And here I am" (7.12).
Add that to this exchange:
She thinks I am guilty. I know she thinks I am guilty. I can feel it when we sit together on the bench they have assigned for us. She writes down what is being said, and what is being said about me, and she adds it all up to guilty.
"I'm not guilty," I said to her.
"You should have said''I didn't do it,'" she said. (13.5-7)
And Steve is probably right. It sounds like O'Brien has worked with her share (and then some) of guilty defendants, and she's probably tagged Steve as guilty. It doesn't change her defense strategy, though, and she works her patootie off for him. Maybe the distance O'Brien puts between herself and her case works in Steve's favor—she uses a cut-and-dry defense strategy to yank Steve away from the thugs in the mind of the jury, whose mindset she can understand because it's probably similar to her own. In this way, she's just what Steve needs… even if she doesn't like him.
Sandra Petrocelli (the prosecuting attorney)
Steve isn't a person to Sandra. He is what she calls him: a monster. In her words, monsters are "people who are willing to steal and to kill, people who disregard the rights of others" (2.80). This makes Steve, Bobo, and King all monsters who deserve to get slapped with guilty verdicts and locked away for life… which is exactly what she tells the jury in her opening and closing statements. In Petrocelli's words, lookout or not, Steve "is as guilty as everybody else, no matter how many moral hairs he can split" (18.238). She accuses him of toilet-level morals, because no matter how much he may believe in his own innocence, he is, in fact, complicit in the murder.
None of this is particularly surprising when you consider that fact that Petrocelli is the prosecutor. Whether she believes the things she's saying or not, her job is to make the jury believe them.