"A Lawyer Who Served Life"
Dublin Core
Title
"A Lawyer Who Served Life"
Subject
Lawyers
Description
A newspaper article from the "Rutland Daily Herald" by Michael Mello. It is four paragraphs long. It discusses the public's view of lawyers and why they are not trusted
Creator
Mello, Michael
Source
Mellow, Michael. “A Lawyer Who Served Life.” <em>Rutland Daily Herald</em>, April 5, 1976.
Publisher
HIST 298, University of Mary Washington
Date
1976-03-05
Rights
The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source.
Format
300 dpi
1 JPG
Language
English
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
Your "Kill the Lawyers" editorial, along with the daily televised antics of O.J. Simpson's all-star cast of defense lawyers, reveals much of what is wrong with the legal profession today. F. Lee Bailey's cynical playing of the race card suggests that the public's distrust of lawyers flows not from the fact that people don't understand what lawyers do, but rather that the public does understand.
David von Drehle's recent book. "Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Death Row," provides a useful antidote to the public's revulsion with the culture of lawyers. Von Drehle explores Florida's recent experiences with capital punishment, and he does so by focusing on the people- lawyers, mostly, but by no means exclusively-who work within the reality of capital punishment as a legal and political system of deciding who dies, The book focuses on one character who was at the center of Florida's attempts in recent years to make executions a reality.
Craig Bernard, who spent his entire legal career working on behalf of Florida's condemned population, was the architect and driving force behind the loosely affiliated group of lawyers who demanded that Flordia keep its promises of fairness to those whom the state was trying so hard to annihilate. Mr. Barnard did this work as a public defender, working for the lawyerly equivalent of sub-minimum wage; he always worked in self-imposed obscurity, insisting that others- including myself, during the two years I served as a public defender under Mr. Barnard-recuvebe the credit for victories for which he was really the person responsible.
Significantly, Mr. Barnard's job was not, as you quoted Swift, to prove that "white is black and black is white, according to how they are paid." Rather, he always taught that our job, as lawyers for death row, was to fill out the full picture of the person whom the state wanted to kill, a portrait the seldom emerges at capital trails in the southern jurisdictions that comprise the Death Belt. It was all about situating the crime- and the criminal- in context.Mr. Barnard's aim was to tell the prisoner's whole story, in the hopes that such a full view would make it less easy to reduce his clients to one hideous crime they committed in one day of their lives (except for the ones who were innocent).
Whenever I hear people trashing lawyers, I think about Craig Barnard. With the publication of Von Drehle's book, I hope that others will as well.
David von Drehle's recent book. "Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Death Row," provides a useful antidote to the public's revulsion with the culture of lawyers. Von Drehle explores Florida's recent experiences with capital punishment, and he does so by focusing on the people- lawyers, mostly, but by no means exclusively-who work within the reality of capital punishment as a legal and political system of deciding who dies, The book focuses on one character who was at the center of Florida's attempts in recent years to make executions a reality.
Craig Bernard, who spent his entire legal career working on behalf of Florida's condemned population, was the architect and driving force behind the loosely affiliated group of lawyers who demanded that Flordia keep its promises of fairness to those whom the state was trying so hard to annihilate. Mr. Barnard did this work as a public defender, working for the lawyerly equivalent of sub-minimum wage; he always worked in self-imposed obscurity, insisting that others- including myself, during the two years I served as a public defender under Mr. Barnard-recuvebe the credit for victories for which he was really the person responsible.
Significantly, Mr. Barnard's job was not, as you quoted Swift, to prove that "white is black and black is white, according to how they are paid." Rather, he always taught that our job, as lawyers for death row, was to fill out the full picture of the person whom the state wanted to kill, a portrait the seldom emerges at capital trails in the southern jurisdictions that comprise the Death Belt. It was all about situating the crime- and the criminal- in context.Mr. Barnard's aim was to tell the prisoner's whole story, in the hopes that such a full view would make it less easy to reduce his clients to one hideous crime they committed in one day of their lives (except for the ones who were innocent).
Whenever I hear people trashing lawyers, I think about Craig Barnard. With the publication of Von Drehle's book, I hope that others will as well.
Contributor of the Digital Item
Williams, Megan
Files
Citation
Mello, Michael, “"A Lawyer Who Served Life",” HIST299, accessed March 12, 2026, https://hist299.umwhistory.org/items/show/157.