Arimeta R. DuPree

Rising Star

The neighborhood where Arimeta DuPree lives, the one she returned to after she became a lawyer, isn’t Kansas City’s best.

She lives squarely in ZIP code 64130 — once profiled by the Kansas City Star as the city’s “murder factory” for its grossly disproportionate share of crime.

“I never, ever, ever, ever, ever have had a problem at my house,” she says. Except for the time a dental hygienist recognized DuPree as having represented a man acquitted of killing the hygienist’s cousin. DuPree caught the woman telling someone about her on a cellphone. When she got home, someone was trying to break in.

DuPree is an assistant public defender. Friends have suggested she move. She won’t. This is home. Her parents, Darwin and Donna DuPree, live right around the corner.

So do some of her clients. DuPree takes pride in being a young professional in her community.

“I live right down the street. You’ll find me in court fighting for your rights, and I’ll go home at night and wave at you on the way,” she says.

Dorothy Savory, a former public defender now in private practice, says that’s partly why she has had DuPree speak at public forums that try to reach young people before they turn to crime.

“To say, ‘I have an attorney who lives next door to me …” Savory says. “That gives them hope. That gives them confidence.”

DuPree’s early legal training had little to do with criminal law. She graduated in 2003 from Widener University School of Law in Harrisburg, Pa., which she picked, she says, for a “corny” reason

“It’s where the Constitution was drafted,” she says. “I needed to be there where it all started for the U.S.”

She also clerked for Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court, an unusual appeals court that handles only government-related litigation. DuPree says the experience taught her to write well. But criminal defense work was always in her future.

“Although appellate work is very important, I was not going to be stuck in an office all day,” she says. She joined the public defender’s office in Kansas City in 2004.

Of course, the life of a public defender has its own challenges. The long weeks, the ungrateful clients, the people who ask that question: “How could you represent the people who are guilty?”

It takes a toll on her personal life. Sometimes that bothers her.

“[My parents] have been married since 1969. Isn’t that beautiful? My gosh, does that love still exist?” she says in an emphatic whisper. “My mama’s like, ‘Yeah, but you can’t work the way you work.’”

Not that she has any plans to try something else. She’s there, she says, for the long haul.

“So often with my clients, I realize nobody’s ever fought for them,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t think they’ve fought for themselves in a positive way. It’s just fighting and letting somebody know that I care and that I’ll do what’s right by them — even when they’re popping off and telling me I’m not doing what I should be doing.”