Going The Extra Mile For A Client, Going to Prison

Lynne Stewart, the melon-coiffed attorney who was, at one time, the attorney representing Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the cleric who was convicted of conspiring to bomb a variety of New York landmarks, including the Lincoln Tunnel, was today convicted of aiding and abetting terrorists and other charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, providing and concealing material support, and making false statements. Her co-defendants, paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Arabic interpreter Mohamed Yousry, were each convicted on three similar counts.

Things are not always simple, but in this particular case, they are.

Stewart is not your average attorney. She's represented a variety of scumbags, like most defense attorneys, but has simultaneously gone on record, and advised the jury, that she advocated violent "revolution of the people that overthrow institutions." Just the thing to tell a jury of middle-America looking to hang anyone who even remotely hints at the support of terrorists. Apparently, the case against Stewart and her co-defendants hinged on a particular visit she made to a maximum-security prison in Minnesota to confer with her client, Rahman, during which, surveillance video shows, he distracted prison guards so they would not notice her then-associates discussing actions and instructions for Rahman's followers (ie radical muslims) in Egypt, where he advocated overthrowing the government.

Her defense, of course, was to suggest that the government's case was politically motivated.

For a lawyer, her defense was less than stellar.

Her comments, post conviction, focused on her actions: "I feel so much that I have brought grief to people who didn't deserve to have grief," she said. "But I'd like to think I would do it again, because it was the right thing to do. It's the way a lawyer is supposed to behave."

All defendants, guilty or not, deserve and are entitled to representation; but when an attorney actively assists in the violation of laws and manipulates and corrupts the attorney-client privilege to further the breaking of laws, that's generally something that the American Bar Association, and the US government, frown upon. And it's specifically the way a lawyer is not supposed to behave.

CNN's article is located at http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/02/10/terror.trial.lawyer/index.html.