2Ls' Work Heads to Supreme Court
When 2Ls Joseph Saks and Eugene Roytberg started their summer internship at the Fairfield County, Ohio, Prosecutor’s Office, they were excited to finally apply their classroom knowledge to real-life. While they really didn’t know what to expect from their first law internship, the two would have never guessed they’d have the opportunity to work on a brief for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Eugene
Roytberg
The nearly 40-page petition regarding a writ of certiorari was in response to a case involving David L. Bruce, who after a six-week trial was convicted of aggravated murder and kidnapping in 2006 for the brutal killing of a young woman. The county successfully prosecuted the case and the defendant was ultimately sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility after 20 years to be served consecutively with a 10-year sentence for the kidnapping charge.
Working under the direction of Fairfield County Assistant County Prosecutor Gregg Marx '79, the two Moritz students, along with another intern from Capital University, researched a variety of topics, mainly focusing on the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause to help draft the brief and convince the Court not to deny Bruce’s petition.
Joseph Saks
“Writing the brief was very different from the other work we’d been doing,” Saks said. In addition to the brief, Saks, 26, and Roytberg, 23, primarily assisted with preparing indictments and helping prosecutors prepare for trial.
“It was really fun when we got stuff before the indictment because that’s when we’d go through all the facts … like watching videos of the interrogations,” said Roytberg, a Cleveland native.
Roytberg, a graduate from Case Western University, and Saks, originally from Akron and a graduate of Dartmouth College, will certainly be paying attention to how the Court decides one particular case in the coming months.
“It was really exciting to get to work on that knowing that we may not get a chance in our whole careers to do something like that again,” Roytberg said.
