“How could someone represent someone so vile?”
I’ve been asked that sort of question regarding the criminal defense profession more than once after people learn that I am currently covering the ongoing case of Tyler Robinson, who is charged with the murder of Charlie Kirk. After hearing the rhetorical question — underlined with a negative tone — I decided to ask it. Why do people choose to go into criminal defense law?
“I came to criminal defense thinking that I was fighting the good fight, that I was standing up for the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed against the power of the state,” criminal defense attorney Kathleen Heath said in a 2018 TED Talk. “But what I quickly learned is that there is another view of a criminal defense lawyer. One that perhaps holds a greater deal of cultural currency. And that’s the stereotype of the wily criminal defense lawyer — the one who would use verbal tricks, unscrupulous means, technical loopholes to make sure that undeserving, guilty criminals are let back out onto our streets.”
Two Utah attorneys with nearly a century of combined expertise in criminal defense, each having represented thousands of clients, laughed at the stereotypes and depicted a very different reality of the profession. One filled more with redemption than hopelessness.
Defending those nobody wants to
“If I’ve done my job, I will never see you again,” Greg Skordas will tell his clients.
“Some people do horrible things, and some people have to go to jail,” he added. “But I think you just need to try to keep it in perspective and do what you can to get people who need help and who want help and who really, really want to change their lives, the opportunity to do that if you can.”
Skordas had gone to the University of Utah to study mining and patent law. It wasn’t till after he had attained an engineering degree and was in law school, interning at a law firm, that he found his true calling.
The firm was representing Joseph Paul Franklin, “an avowed racist,” per The New York Times, who murdered two Black joggers, Theodore Fields, 20, and David Martin, 18, while they were running alongside two white women in Liberty Park in 1980. The prosecution said Franklin could not stand “race-mixing.”
“I’m not going to say you could help or you could change (Franklin), but the whole case was about saving his life,” Skordas said, noting that the state was seeking the death penalty, which his legal team was able to avoid.
“I thought, this is interesting. This was something I wanted to do, but I was just a baby, not even a lawyer yet; I was just in law school.”
Ed Brass knew he wanted to go into criminal defense in high school — partly because of his own experience getting into trouble, which led him to want to better understand the justice system and how to help people navigate it.
He attended law school at the University of Utah in the 1970s, toward the end of the Vietnam War, “when public service seemed like a really good idea.”
Brass entered his 50th year as a criminal defense attorney this month and laughed at the fact that he’s made it this far. Years ago, he attended a seminar, “And they had a presentation of lawyers who had served for 50 years. And I can tell you right now, I never thought I would be one of those guys. It just sort of happens to you.”
Like Skordas, Brass knew criminal defense was his calling in life. When asked if there’s ever been a case he would turn down, Brass was quick to say, “No.” Why? “Because I think everyone’s entitled to a defense,” he said.
“Does the person who I represented come away with a feeling that they were treated fairly is the most important thing to me,” he added. “That may mean that they entered a guilty plea to something, to a reduced charge or the dismissal of some charges. Sometimes it might mean that there was a trial, they were found guilty, but they still think that they were treated fairly.”
The cases that stick with you
Both men shared how common it is for people to come up to them years later and thank them for giving them or their loved one a chance.
“Never, ever does a week go by when someone doesn’t come up to me and say, ‘You represented me, or you represented my son, or you represented my husband years ago, and you changed his life, and he’s now going to college, or he’s now raising a family,’” Skordas said. “It’s not about getting bad guys off, because that’s not what we do.”
He acknowledges that there are people who just want an attorney who’s going to clean their slate and protect them from accountability. But more often than not, it’s people wanting to change.
“You end up doing these cases because you think you can change somebody’s life, even sex offenders,” Skordas said. “I mean, there’s no excuse for that, but sometimes there’s a way to satisfy both the public and the victim’s need for punishment, and the suspect’s or defendant’s need for rehabilitation.“
Like Brass, Skordas doesn’t turn away cases, but some are more taxing than others.
“I remember once cross-examining a little girl, and while I was cross-examining her, I saw my daughter in that girl, and it tore me apart,” he said. “She talked and acted and interacted exactly like my daughter. And I just thought, this is really difficult, because his victim could have been my daughter. I still did what I needed to do on the case, and I don’t have any regrets. But every once in a while, a case tugs at your heartstrings, especially cases involving children or just crime victims, people who are victimized by others.”
The cases that have stuck with Brass are the ones where victims have forgiven his client.
“Instead of saying this person should go to prison for the rest of their life, or they should burn in hell, or whatever it is,” which Brass said is a sentiment he can understand, more often are the “ones where people have stood up who’ve lost a loved one and in court, say, ‘Judge, whatever else you’re going to do here today, I want Mr. So-and-so to know that I forgive him.’ I’ve seen that happen in homicide cases.”
He had a client who was driving under the influence and killed a single mother who was a nurse who had just gotten off her shift. “And most of her kids are older or adult, and they came to the sentencing and actually asked that the judge not send this woman to prison and hugged her,” Brass said. “That, to me, is an incredible experience, meaning it’s indeed what humanity really is at its best, forgiveness.”
No matter the circumstances, “I want to know that people who get accused of crimes are in good hands with people who really care about them,” Brass said.
“I‘ve had thousands of clients, literally,” he said, “and there’s a handful of them that are just beyond redemption. There are people who commit atrocious crimes, and there’s going to be severe punishment for them, no matter what kind of person they are, but as far as people who are hell-bent on doing evil to other people, there just aren’t that many of them.”