10 Minutes With Tipton: ADA Trevor Holly
10 Minutes with Tipton originated in January 2022 on the Education Page. Students in the After School Education and Safety (ASES) Program at Tipton Elementary School take time to Zoom with individuals in the community to ask them questions about their jobs, lives and strategies they can use in their own lives to help them become college and career-ready.
Trevor Holly, Tulare County Assistant District Attory
What is your job title/role in our community?
“My job title is assistant district attorney. My role in the community is like when you guys watch TV shows and it shows a courtroom and there is a guy who’s trying to prove a person’s guilt and another person trying to prove they’re innocent. I’m the one who’s trying to prove they’re guilty, but only if they did it. The role of the DA in the community is when someone commits a crime and hurts somebody else is to prosecute them and hold them accountable so that victims get justice.”
Please tell us a little bit about yourself Your background, where you grew up, your family.
“I grew up in Porterville. I went to Belleview, Bartlett and Porterville High School. I have a mom and a dad, of course, and a brother and a sister. I’m married and I have two daughters. One is 10, just like you, and one is 15.
I had trouble in college. I went to college at a couple of different places and I dropped out and then I worked in Delano for a couple of years and as it turns out I’m not good at working with my hands, fixing things. I went back to college at Cal State Bakersfield, which is a great place to go if you need to work and go to school. They have a lot of night classes and that’s what I did. I took a career planning course. They talked about what things I was good at and what things I liked to do. One thing I found out in every test I took and every time we talked was that I kept seeing a lawyer and that this guy would be good at being a lawyer.
I went to a law school in Sacramento called the Mcgeorge School of Law. Most other lawyers know about the Mcgeorge School of Law. I worked during the day and went to school at night. I got a job with a public defender as a defense attorney to defend people accused of crimes. I liked it and I chose them because they paid me $13.50 an hour, which was a lot of money. I decided after working there for a couple of years that I did not like being a defense attorney. The people I represented did a lot of bad things and if they let them go free that made me feel bad when I went home. I applied to the Tulare County District Attorney’s Office because of where I grew up. I love working in the community I grew up in and helping make it better.”
What do you love about your career? What do you dislike about your career?
“I like being of service to my community. I think no matter what you do there’s something really special about helping the community you grew up in.
What I do not like about the career is that a lot of the time it’s super stressful. There are a lot of things that can go wrong and they do go wrong and you try to fix them. The stakes can be kind of high.
Is your job like the television show “Law & Order”?
“It’s a lot more boring than ‘Law & Order’ and they do a lot of stuff you can’t do on ‘Law and Order’. I used to work at juvenile hall and I would explain to the kids that the police investigate crimes, then there are the people who prosecute the crimes and assemble the evidence and the defense attorneys who defend the accused, and a judge who is like the referee to ensure everyone is following the law.”
Would you encourage others to pursue your career?
“Absolutely! And if you have older brothers, sisters and cousins please tell them to go to law school because we need people! There are only a few jobs where you get paid to do the right thing and that is what a DA does. If someone’s innocent, my job is to set them free and if they’re guilty my job is to make sure they have an appropriate punishment. It’s a job where you get to do the right thing and that’s kind of rare.”
What is something that might surprise members of the public (either about you, or your career)?
“You don’t need to go to a fancy college to get into law school. If you do well, you can get into a law school and you don’t need to go to Harvard and Yale.”
What advice do you have for young people who might be pursuing your line of work?
“What most people don’t know about the law is you have to be a good writer. We write these long papers called motions and those papers can be more important than anything you say to a judge. What you write to the judge is more effective. People don’t know that lawyers are writers more than speech makers.”
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
“In 10 years I’ll be 63, so I’m hoping I’ll be looking at retirement, but I’m very very lucky that I got the job I’ve always wanted, so I’d like to be doing it as long as I can. I didn’t have it planned, but I wound up in the job I liked, so I’d like to do it for a while.”
Anything else you would like to add? (Maybe a current, or past project you’re proud of?)
“Most of my professional work has been in white-collar crime. Our county is very small so we didn’t have a good team of white collar prosecutors in 2006, but now we do.
White collar crime is where ‘tricksters,’ or a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ acts like a lawyer or a real estate agent and trick people out of their money. I am proud of the team we’ve built to go out and get people like that.
As the county gets bigger it happens more and more. My favorite cocktail question is ‘Would you rather get beaten up and go to the hospital, or lose $50,000?’ Most people say they would rather get beaten up because it takes a lifetime to save up that much money. Those are the kind of people we try to stop. I’ve done all kinds of cases, but that is my specialty.”
Analia and Monserrat like to create pieces of art. Both students are in the fourth grade and attend Tipton Elementary School and are in the After School Education and Safety (ASES) Program.