Lee Awbrey’s Winding Road to Delco PD’s Office

Lee Awbrey is the first assistant public defender for Delaware County. Photo: Beth Nidecker

Lee Awbrey never intended to go into the law. In fact, she says, “I avoided being a lawyer like the plague.” The Rutledge resident wanted to be an artist, or maybe lead hiking treks across the Himalayas. “I have none of those skills, though,” she laments. “My brain is suitable for the law.”

Awbrey is now second-in-command at Delaware County’s public defender’s office. She began work there last September, drawn to the job by Chris Welsh’s appointment as public defender. “He’s going to do really good things,” she says.

Among the office reforms she anticipates are connecting defendants with lawyers more quickly, hiring investigators and social workers, and better supervision and training for the staff of over 40 lawyers. 

“When people talk about public defenders, there’s an assumption that they’re part of the system processing people to plea so that things move along,” she says. “That should not happen in Delaware County.” 

The job of the first assistant public defender is largely policy and management. Awbrey participates in a new reentry coalition for people returning to  the community after incarceration, works toward de-privatizing the county jail, and conducts community outreach. 

“I love our clients,” she says, while acknowledging that some can be challenging. Often, she observes, previous experience with the criminal justice system leads them and their families “not to expect to receive the help they need.”

Many Moves, Lots of Jobs

After attending college in Maine, Awbrey provided outreach and translation services for migrant farmworkers in southeastern Missouri. She then worked at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Boston, where an anti-abortionist had killed the receptionist the year before. “It was a pretty intense work environment,” she says.

She settled for a while in Vermont, working for various non-profits. “I juggled six different part-time jobs at different phases to make the bills,” Awbrey recalls. “I waited a lot of tables.” She also spent a year with AmeriCorps, providing services to marginalized older people — including weightlifting classes for septuagenarians. Drawn to political work, Awbrey volunteered for Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the House of Representatives in the late 1990s. She recalls that it was hard to get anyone to take her seriously. “There was a politician named Anthony Pollina who I really liked. I went to volunteer for his campaign, just wanting to get into service, and I was offered the receptionist’s job,” she laments.

Unable to get a professional foothold, Awbrey decided to pursue a graduate degree in either journalism or law. She wound up studying law, graduating from the University of California at Berkeley. “California had been the golden horizon in my mind for a long time,” she says.

The goal of service kept Awbrey on track through law school, she recalls, noting that “a lot of people hate the law once they get into it.” But she says she has found it a good fit, despite its being “a brutal profession for people, especially for moms.” 

Her first summer of law school, she worked in Georgia with the Office of the Capital Defender, which defends indigent people facing the death penalty. Later she ventured into private law in San Francisco, paying down student loans and gaining experience. It was an interesting time to be a lawyer in San Francisco, Awbrey says. Kamala Harris, whom Awbrey had first seen speak at Berkeley Law School, was the city’s prosecutor. “I liked her a lot from that presentation forward, in spite of my defense orientation,” Awbrey reports, noting Harris’s rarity as a female prosecutor of color, and as a prosecutor who speaks to social justice. 

Awbrey says she “never had any intention of staying in what they call ‘Big Law,’” with its 90-hour work weeks. Married and hoping to have a child, she began looking for a job more aligned with her values. 

She landed as in-house counsel for Greenpeace in Washington, D.C. Awbrey had long been interested in environmental issues and Indigenous rights, but environmental law had not appealed to her. “It’s a lot of administrative regulation,” she says. Greenpeace, though, “was great because it’s environmental, but I got to work with a bunch of activists who were getting arrested constantly!” Her child was born within two years of the move.

When her husband got a job in Philadelphia, Awbrey followed him north, moving into a rented house on the Main Line. 

It was in her search for high-quality childcare that Awbrey stumbled upon Swarthmore. Attracted to Trinity Cooperative Day Nursery’s multi-age learning, she came for a visit. “I pull up, and I’m like: ‘There’s a college campus!’” she recalls. “‘There are sidewalks. Look at these beautiful houses.’” 

A few years later, after divorcing, Awbrey sought a less expensive home for herself and her child. She moved to Rutledge, “a fun little quirky community.” She adds, “It’s very hard anywhere in the United States to find a good public school district, in a community with sidewalks, that is still somewhat affordable.”

A Big Moment for Delco

From 2018-20, Awbrey was chief of appeals for the Montgomery County Public Defender’s office, under chief Dean Beer and deputy chief Keisha Hudson. Last February, however, both Beer and Keisha were fired in what Awbrey calls “a totally inappropriate way, trampling the independence of the public defender function, and for the wrong reasons.” According to Awbrey, those reasons included disclosing racist comments made by local police and filing a friend-of-the-court brief supporting statewide bail reform — a brief Awbrey wrote.

Meanwhile, Delaware County government was changing. The newly Democratic county council hired Welsh. “There are certain opportunities that come up, and they’re only going to come up that one time,” Awbry says.

Changing jobs in the middle of a pandemic as a single mother while your child is going to elementary school on Zoom is stressful, Awbrey concedes. But “It was an opportunity to make something in Delaware County that’s desperately needed.”

“I think there are a lot of good, good things that can be done to create sustainable, positive change for people who have been underserved for a long time,” she says. “I wanted the opportunity to participate in the moment.”