Adegbile: Judging lawyers by their clients

“Forget the presumption of innocence for criminals,” said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. “It doesn’t even exist for their lawyers.” For Senate Republicans, lawyers are apparently as guilty as their guiltiest client, especially if they represent that client successfully. Debo Adegbile is one of the most respected civil rights lawyers in the country, and yet Republicans—aided by seven Democrats—last week blocked his nomination by President Obama to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. What makes Adegbile unqualified? While working for the NAACP, he helped overturn a death sentence for black radical Mumia Abu-Jamal 28 years after his 1981 killing of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Republicans are calling Adegbile a “cop-killer advocate,” said Jesse Wegman in The New York Times. Another word for that might be “lawyer.” John Roberts once defended a serial murderer before he became chief justice of the Supreme Court. Does that make Roberts a “serial-murderer advocate”—and unqualified to serve?

Adegbile is a “professional practitioner of racial politics,” said NationalReview.com in an editorial, and that’s the last thing an already politicized Justice Department needs. Adegbile did more than defend his clearly guilty client on legal grounds. He took part in “the propaganda campaign waged by the murderer and the fashionable radicals congealed around his cause” to argue that the trial was tainted by racism. Pennsylvania eventually gave up trying to execute Abu-Jamal, and now he lives on in prison, “enjoying the rewards of radical chic.” For Philadelphians who remember the night Danny Faulkner was murdered, said Christine Flowers in Philly.com, Adegbile’s nomination was “repulsive and unconscionable.” Abu-Jamal cowardly shot a young cop and good husband in the back, and got “more process than anyone is due.”

“If Adegbile were white and had a name everyone could easily pronounce,” asked Andrew Cohen in TheAtlantic.com, would Republicans find him such an easy target? Adegbile never contended that Abu-Jamal was innocent, but made a persuasive legal argument that was accepted by a largely conservative federal appeals court. In recent weeks, conservatives even tried to add fuel to racial fires by pointing out that Adegbile has advocated affirmative action—horrors! They also warned he’d force businesses to hire murderers and rapists. Shades of Willie Horton. “In a month, Debo Adegbile went from being a man poised to fight against America’s deep racial divide to being a victim of that divide.”

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