Name: Sanaiya Aftab
Class Year: 2027
Major: Psychology, Literatures in English
 
Internship Organization: Federal Public Defender’s Office – District of Connecticut
Internship Title:  Mitigation Intern
Location: New Haven, CT

What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!  

This summer, I am interning at the Federal Public Defender’s Office in New Haven, Connecticut, through the Liman Summer Fellowship at Yale Law School. My work sits at the intersection of legal research and narrative reconstruction. A large part of my work involves assisting in developing social histories: documents that attempt, often imperfectly, to account for the human context surrounding a criminal case. That context is rarely linear. It must be reconstructed from sealed records, institutional gaps, psychiatric assessments, and the granular debris of systems that record everything except what matters. The labor is cumulative. It demands a kind of attention that is as ethical as it is analytical. A large part of the work is trying to find words that hold weight without distortion; language that stays close to the violence without collapsing into performance. I am learning that truth does not always emerge through clarity, and that restraint, when used carefully, can protect more than it withholds. Sometimes, the most difficult part is knowing when to speak, and when to allow what is unsaid to remain intact. This is not the kind of work that seeks resolution. It asks how meaning is constructed, what narratives are admissible, and whose pain can be rendered legible within legal thresholds. The most difficult task is often the most essential: making a life intelligible without making it a spectacle. That challenge is not external to law; it is one of its central problems.  

Why did you apply for this internship?  

I applied for this internship because I was interested in how legal institutions reckon with harm: how they name it, narrate it, or, more often, render it invisible. I was drawn to the space of public defense not because it offers easy answers, but because it complicates the questions. What does accountability mean when histories of dispossession go unacknowledged? What possibilities exist for justice in a system that was not built to recognize certain lives as grievable in the first place? The Federal Public Defender’s Office stood out not only for its legal work, but for the structural role it plays in holding the system to its own standards. Public defense asks what it means to advocate when the odds are uneven by design, and how to tell a story that the law has already condemned as irrelevant. I wanted to be part of that process, not as a spectator but as someone learning to engage with the record as both evidence and omission. More than anything, I was looking for a space where legal research would not be abstracted from the people it concerns. This internship offered that. The work is technical, but it is also intimate. It requires listening as a form of method and writing as a form of responsibility. I applied because I wanted to understand what it means to do this kind of work well, and what is at stake when one fails to do so. 

Can you give us three adjectives and three nouns that describe your internship experience?  

If I had to choose three adjectives to describe this internship, they would be immersive, rigorous, and precise. The work does not permit detachment; it asks for full attention, both intellectual and emotional. It is rigorous in its demands. Every decision, omission, and sentence carries consequences. And it is precise, not only in terms of legal accuracy, but in the ethical discipline required to represent someone’s life without distortion.  

The nouns I would choose are narrative, record, and silence. Narrative, because so much of the work involves shaping meaning within constraints, building something coherent out of what is often fragmented or deliberately obscured. Record, because the archive is both a resource and a battleground. What appears there is incomplete, and what is missing can be just as telling. And silence, because it is everywhere: around trauma, inside institutional gaps, within families, and even between lines of text. Learning to read that silence without filling it has been just as important as anything I have written summer for me. 

Was this internship what you expected it to be? 

In some ways, yes. I expected this internship to be challenging, and it is. The legal system is dense, fragmented, and often resistant to the kinds of complexity that real lives carry. I anticipated long hours with documents, and I anticipated writing that would require precision. All of that has held true. What I did not expect was how much of the work would hinge on interpretation, not just of facts, but of gaps, silences, and omissions. I did not expect to spend so much time thinking about the ethics of tone, or how much weight a single adjective can carry in the context of someone’s life. I did not expect that so many questions would remain open, not because they lack answers, but because the answers themselves resist being flattened into evidence. This internship has not resolved my questions about the law. If anything, it has only sharpened them. But it has also given them contour. It has tethered them to forms of labor that are difficult, necessary, and often invisible. I came in thinking I would learn about the law’s failures. I am leaving with a deeper understanding of its structure, its blind spots, and the weight of trying to do good work within them. So no, this experience has not been exactly what I expected. It has been harder, quieter, and more morally dense. But I think that is exactly what makes it matter more to me.