Andrea D. Lyon - Fixing Legal Injustice in America: The Case for a Defender General of the United States

Andrea D. Lyon is a criminal defense attorney (the principal in the criminal defense firm Lyon Law), a death penalty expert, an author, a former professor and law school dean, and an occasional target of the How can you represent those people? blogosphere.

Andrea has tried more than 130 homicide cases, more than 30 of which were potential capital cases. Of those thirty clients, nineteen were convicted and found eligible for the death penalty. With the help of her team, Andrea prevented all nineteen clients from being sentenced to death.

When Andrea joined the Homicide Task Force of the Cook County, Illinois, Public Defenders Office in 1979, only one other woman had served on the teambriefly. Not only did Andrea stick around, but two years later, she became the first woman in the nation to act as lead counsel on a death penalty case. Eventually, she was named chief of the Homicide Task Force, supervising the work of twenty-two attorneys.

Over her forty years of lawyering, Andrea has been involved in several high-profile cases, including former Illinois governor George Ryan.

Andreas legal memoir, Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer, published in 2010, received a starred review from Kirkus and was voted Next Great Read by the American Booksellers Association. Angel of Death Row chronicles her struggle to humanize clients in the face of a criminal justice system that gives enormous advantage to the prosecution and stacks the cards according to wealth, race, and social status. She has also published more than fifty law review and bar journal articles as well as other books, including most recently: The Feminine Sixth: Women in Criminal Defense (2018) and The Death Penalty: Whats Keeping It Alive (Rowman & Little-field, 2015).

Among various professional leadership positions, Andrea has served as president of the Illinois Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and cochair of the Death Penalty Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Among many awards and honors, Andrea received the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penaltys Outstanding Legal Service Award, the Illinois Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Clarence Darrow Award, the NLADA Reginald Heber Smith Award for being the best advocate for the poor in the country, the American Constitution Societys Abner Mikva Legal Legends Award, and Operation Pushs Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon B. Johnson Dream-Makers Award.

Complete listings of publications, leadership positions, and awards are in Andreas rsum, available at www.andrealyon.com.

Andrea divides her time between Valparaiso, Indiana, and Chicago, and is married to Arnold Glass. She has two adult children, William Glass and Dr. Samantha Glass.

I would like to thank the Alliance for a Defender General for their ideas and support of this project and this book. I also thank, with profound gratitude, E. Kate Cohn, my colleague who was an integral part of this book.

Some early readers/advisers also helped a great deal: Raymond Brown, Geoff Burkhart, Evan Griffith, Christine Filip, Sara Kadoura, Ernie Lewis, Elliot Lyon, Cynthia Roseberry, Tony Thedford, Kyleen Tremont, and the amazing Emily Hughes.

Thanks to my agent, Regina Ryan, and Becca Beurer of Rowman & Littlefield for their belief in this project.

Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my sisters and brothers who fight this good fight and my clients who have taught me so much.

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