Everyday People: Lisa Lippiello of Northampton went from chasing suspects as a NYC cop to representing them as a defense attorney

NORTHAMPTON -- Seated in her office in downtown Northampton, attorney Lisa Lippiello said that reflecting on her first chapter as an adult feels strange. It almost feels like the stories are someone else's stories, she said.

"It was a separate life," Lippiello said. "It was a different place. A different way to look to look at the world."

Lippiello, 49, has been an attorney in the Pioneer Valley for nearly 10 years, working mostly on criminal defense cases. Many are court-appointed cases involving indigent defendants. She sees it as a chance to help those people in a justice system that is stacked against them.

But she used to be on the other side of that system. She was a New York City cop, and a tough one. She liked to work in the roughest neighborhoods, and take down the toughest thugs.

"I always catch them first but I get the beating," she said, using the present tense even though it has been decades since she chased a "perp."

It's not easy to go back and talk about her time as a cop, she said, "probably because my last real experience of it was 9/11."

Lippiello left the Big Apple a few months after Sept. 11, 2001 because she didn't want to raise her daughter there. She ended up in law school in Springfield.

"It was kind of a foregone conclusion that after I went to law school, I'd be a prosecutor. It just made sense," she recalled. But in law school she learned more and more about what she called the "imbalance of power" in the justice system. She decided to become a defense attorney, defending the kind of people she used to spend her time arresting.

"It just opened my eyes to how the system is so skewed" against the accused, she said. "I thought with my background, I might be able to balance it a little bit."

Police officers and defense attorneys generally find themselves on opposite sides of matters in court. Their interactions in and out of the courtroom can be strained, as the attorneys often end up questioning the cops' investigations or actions on cross-examination.

Lippiello finds herself in that position sometimes, but in her case, she said she can see both sides of many law enforcement issues. "I don't think I can convey to someone what being a police officer is like -- wanting to help people and then chasing people," she said.

It helps her be a better attorney. She knows what it's like to testify in court, to respond to a threatening suspect, to have to make a split-second decision and she can understand the stress and other issues that are at play.

"When I was on the police department, it was always us vs. them," she said, referring not just to defense attorneys, but to anyone who is critical of police.

It's a sentiment she sees often now, as the Black Lives Matter versus Police Lives Matter debate got more heated every day.

"Discussion and debate about this is good, but not if people are not listening," she said.

Big city cop

Lippiello grew up in Queens. At 16, she started attending Hunter College in Manhattan.

Before starting her senior year, she got a call from her father. Her younger brother, John Drew Lippiello, had been "dabbling on the other side of the law," as she put it, and her father was hoping to straighten him out by getting him into the police academy.

John would only take the test if she did, so she sat the New York City Police Department exam. "I scored really high and they called me within a few weeks," she said.

She had never thought of being a police officer, but the invitation to go to the police academy came at the perfect time: She was basically out of money and she needed to get some before she could finish her education. She decided she would go through the training for the paycheck, and then head back to school.

"But I loved it. I stayed," she said. "I really felt like I was doing good work -- like I was going to be able to help people."

Joining the New York City Police Department in 1987 meant that she was one of the few women there. "So as you can imagine, it was all about proving yourself," she said.

She realizes now that she was a 20-year-old adrenaline junkie.

"I picked the most active and dangerous precincts in Brooklyn," she said. "And to make it worse, I picked the midnight shift."

She was only a few weeks out of the academy when she and her partner responded to a domestic disturbance, and entered an apartment to find a woman lying on the floor, screaming and covered in blood.

Lippiello said she left her partner with the woman and chased the man responsible as he fled out the window onto the fire escape.

She ran across the connected rooftops in the dark until he "popped out" from behind a pillar.

"He's huge," she said, estimating he was more than 6 feet and 300 pounds. Lippiello said at age 20, she was 5-feet-6-inches and 125 pounds.

He kept walking toward her with his hands in the air, laughing and telling her she couldn't shoot him because he was unarmed. She knew she was close enough to the edge of the roof that he could easily throw her over.

"I start screaming, pretending I'm crazy," she said. She swore and yelled that she was "one of the wild ones" and would definitely shoot him.

It worked. He started backing away and telling her to calm down.

She threw the handcuffs at him, and he cuffed himself. When her partner and backup finally made it to their location, he was kneeling, handcuffed and ready to go to the station.

After more than a decade as a patrol officer, Lippiello was promoted to sergeant in 1998 and began teaching at the officers' academy. She was promoted to lieutenant a month before her eldest daughter, Sydney, was born in 2000.

She eventually became the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity division of the department. Doing internal discrimination and harassment investigations of fellow cops didn't make her the most popular ranking officer, but she was able to do something about the inappropriate behavior that, as a female and a lesbian, she knew all too well.

"There was a 'boys will be boys' mentality," she said.

Sept. 11, 2001

Lippiello was in her in 14th year at the department when two planes hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Among the more than 2,700 killed were 23 New York City Police Department officers.

Lippiello said she had the unhappy job of scheduling the traumatized officers to go back to help at ground zero in the days after the attack.

"I'm saying, 'I know your brother is missing and probably under the rubble, but I need you to go back there," she said. "The look on their faces when they came back ... I felt so guilty sending the first responders back there."

She said feelings of helplessness and shock took a while to wear off, but the fear stuck with her.

That fear peaked two months after Sept. 11, when a plane crashed into Queens. It turned out to be a tragic accident, but she said she could not shake the feeling of dread she felt when she thought it might have been another terrorist attack, and this time not far from where she lived in Brooklyn with her then-18-month-old daughter.

She decided to leave the city. She had been looking at law schools around New England, and settled on Western New England University.

She said she really liked the Springfield area, but it wasn't until her last year of law school that someone took her to Northampton to try Herrell's Ice Cream.

"I said, 'what is this place?'" Lippiello remembered with a grin. She fell in love with Northampton and moved there soon after.

She has only been back to New York City three times, she said, and she did not keep in touch with the officers whom she had once considered family.

"When I left, I really left," Lippiello said. "I think the distance has been therapeutic."

An imperfect justice system

Lippiello credited her law professors with inspiring her to try to fix what she sees as an inherently unbalanced criminal justice system. It's a system that she believes in, she said, but it's not perfect.

"The imbalance is you've got the police with their resources, the DA's office with their resources, and then you have an indigent defendant," she said.

She believes that being a defense attorney is not about getting people out of trouble.

"There's a part of me that believes in justice and order," she said, but for the system to work right, the government should have to really prove their case. "It's about everyone doing what they have to to make the system work," she said.

Lippiello got her first job as a lawyer from the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Northampton in 2006, right before she gave birth to her youngest daughter, Emily.

"I thought I'd be bad at talking with clients, and it ended up being the part I enjoy the most," she said of her first years on the job. It's about getting to know the person and their situation, she said. "There has to be a reason that got that person in that scenario."

She sees many people find their way into the legal system due to drugs, which is a scenario she has experience with. Her brother died six years ago at age 38. It was an accident, she said, but she considers his cause of death to be addiction.

She loved the job representing "underdogs" in court, she said, and she found a way to keep doing it when she became a private attorney in 2010.

As a bar advocate, she gets one or two "duty days" each month, when she is appointed to represent indigent defendants who are arraigned on those days. She bills the state for her time on the cases. She estimated they make up about 20 or 25 percent of her cases.

In 2013, Lippiello and several colleagues formed the practice Burrows, Weiss, Mintz & Lippiello. Lippiello and David Mintz practice mainly in criminal court, while Mikal Weiss practices mainly in land and business law. Meade Burrows passed away before the practice actually opened, but they kept his name as a tribute to their friend, Lippiello said.

"They're very good lawyers, but my favorite part is that they're really good men," Lippiello said of her partners, during an interview in her office.

Her framed diplomas were on the wall behind her, and pictures of her daughters sat on her desk. There's nothing to hint at her past career in law enforcement. She said it sometimes feels like a different person did those things years ago.

Lippiello said that what's important to her now is being a present mother and being the kind of person who has people's back and really cares, in her job and in other parts of her life.

"That's my focus now," she said, adding of her daughters, "I want them to be proud of me."

She said Sydney, 15, is an aspiring actress who attends Northampton High School. Lippiello described, Emily, 9, as an "old soul." They live in Northampton with their dog, Charlie.

It's a far cry from Lippiello's "adrenaline junkie" days in New York City, when she was getting stitches in the ER after tackling a fleeing 'perp' twice her size.

"I look at myself in the mirror," she said. "And I don't see that in myself anymore."

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