Andrea Lyon - Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer

THERE IS CERTAINLY room for debate about whether nature or nurture plays a greater role in many aspects of human life, but it seems clear that zealous criminal defense attorneys are born to the task. Fighting the establishment is in their DNA . Defending the unpopular is inherent in their nature. It takes a certain amount of inborn contrariness to be the one person in the world whose job it is to stand up for those whom the vast majority of people want to see imprisoned or executed. It takes a firm resolve to join a profession where most of the time you lose, even when you put up a stronger case than your opponent. It takes an even rarer breed to be a death row lawyer in a nation, and at a time, when capital punishment is popular and death row lawyers are seen as obstructions to justice.

Andrea Lyon is truly of that rare breed. She was a defense attorney from birth, if not from within the womb. Her commitment to the downtrodden, to the abandoned, and to the despised, became evident at an early age. She was born to be an angel of death row, and a devil to those who see execution as a quick fix for the social ills of our age.

In fact, Lyon, the first woman to be lead counsel in a death penalty trial, has tried more than 130 murder cases, a third of which were potentially death cases. Of that number, 19 went to the penalty phasewhere the jury or judge has to choose whether to put the defendant they have convicted to deathand she won all 19.

Lyon is also a storyteller par excellence. I can just imagine how compelling she must be in court, especially if she talks to her jurors and judges as she writes for her readers, with a high dose of common sense and a low tolerance for BS . Unlike some zealots of her radical generation, Lyon does not place cause over client. She believes that by defending her clients with zeal and professionalism, she is indeed serving the causes to which she has committed her life.

Despite the serious subject, Lyon has a sense of humor. She seems like she would be fun to be with (but not to argue against). She is confident but self-effacing. She takes her role, but not her persona, seriously. She is the kind of defense lawyer who makes those of us who teach young law students wish that more of them would devote at least a portion of their careers to defending those on death row or facing long imprisonment.

It is not an easy sell to the current generation of law students, whoeven with the current recessioncan expect to be paid multiples of what capital defenders and other public interest lawyers receive. The few Andrea Lyons out there, who are willing to sacrifice lifestyle in order to fulfill the mandate of the Sixth Amendment, cannot undo the scandal of how our society deliberately skews the criminal justice system against the indigent accused by underfunding defense lawyers, investigators, experts, and other resources essential to mounting an effective defense. Moreover, the civil practice is so much cleaner and nicer than the criminal practice. For todays crop of law students, it is far easier to explain to parents who have sunk their life savings into a legal education why you are representing a wealthy banker or corporation rather than an accused indigent rapist or murderer.

But as the accounts in this memoir show, there is no more exciting or rewarding (in the nonmaterial sense) practice of law than serving in the emergency ward of our justice system, where lives can be savedor lost. I wish every student entering law school would read Lyons riveting stories, if for no other reason than to be exposed to alternate career choices than the standard corporate ones for which most automatically opt.

Lyons story includes a groundbreaking moment that made national headlines. She writes of the decision by then Illinois governor George Ryan to free four innocent men and commute the death sentences for those remaining on death row in the state to life without parole. Critics of Governor Ryans actions argued that it would have been enough simply to pardon those who were exonerated by newly discovered evidence. Why was it necessary to impose a moratorium on the execution of the guilty as well? This debate reminded me of a similar one about the famous biblical story of Abrahams argument with God concerning the sinners of Sodom, in which God agrees to save the entire city if a certain number of righteous people can be found in it.

God surely saw the flaw in Abrahams advocacy. He could have responded, Look, Abraham. You accuse me of overgeneralizingof sweeping away the righteous with the unrighteous. And you have a point. But youre guilty of the same thing: You are sweeping the wicked along with the righteous, and giving them a free ride. If I find fiftyor forty or even tenrighteous, I will spare them. Youve convinced me of that. But why should I spare the wicked just because there happen to be fifty righteous people in their city?

The answer lies in the fact that in the narrative, God is teaching Abraham how to create a legal system that strikes the appropriate balance between convicting too many innocent and acquitting too many guilty. Since human beings are never capable of distinguishing precisely between the guilty and the innocent, it would be unjust to destroy a group that might contain as many as fifty or even ten innocents. It might not be true of only one or two.

Since it is always possible that any substantial group of guilty people could include one or two innocents, selecting so low a number would make it impossible to construct a realistic system for convicting the guilty. But tolerating the conviction of as many as ten innocents would make any system of convicting the guilty unjust, or at least suspect. When the number of people on Illinoiss death row who were freed because of their possible innocence reached double digits, the public began to express concern. Seemingly, the execution of one or two possibly innocent people was not sufficient to stimulate reconsideration of the death penalty, but once the number climbed beyond ten, even many death penalty advocates began to question whether the system was working fairly. The Anglo-American ratiobetter ten guilty go free than even one innocent be wrongly convictedis also somewhat arbitrary, but it, too, uses the number ten in attempting to strike the proper balance.

This biblical narrative has been particularly salient to criminal defense lawyers, like Lyon and me, who know that many of our clients are probably guilty of the crimes with which they are charged. We know this not because they tell us very few confess to their lawyers. We know it as a statistical matter, since the vast majority of people charged with crime in America, and in other civilized countries, are guilty. Thank goodness for that! Imagine living in a country where the majority of people charged with crime were innocent! That might be true of Iraq, Iran, or China, but certainly not of the United States. So we can safely assume that our clients are no different from the statistical norm; a majority of them are probably guilty. (If anything, my appellate clients are more likely to be guilty than those of a typical trial lawyer, since my clients have already passed through the most significant check on prosecutorial error or abuse: the trial. And they have been found guilty. Some of them, of course, are innocent.)