Public defender’s unsavory client poses dilemma
A young black lawyer entered the courtroom only to realize she would be representing an alleged white supremacist
By Annie Sweeney, Chicago Tribune reporter
MiAngel Cody, a young federal defender, was running an hour late for her 9:30 a.m. appearance in Courtroom 1386.
Representing a man on a deportation charge five floors away in the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, she had no time to research her next case: 12 CR 00395. Such is the grind for a public defender on “duty day” — representing clients who can’t afford a private attorney for their initial court appearance.
It wasn’t until Cody reached the courtroom and leafed through the indictment that she learned the details of the charges against the heavily tattooed white man sitting next to her — he was accused of setting fire to his neighbor’s home because the family was black.
Cody is African-American. She had just been appointed to defend an alleged white supremacist.
Cody privately conferred at some length with defendant Brian James Moudry and then stood next to him before a federal judge to enter a plea of not guilty on Moudry’s behalf. Appointed by the court to represent the indigent Moudry, Cody is scheduled to be by his side again when the case is back in court later this week.
Cody would not consent to an interview for this article. And efforts to reach Moudry, who is locked up in a downtown federal jail, or his family were unsuccessful. But from the outside, the pairing would appear to be an uncomfortable one for both client and attorney.
Veteran criminal-defense lawyers, however, say attorneys often have to set aside personal misgivings about clients to fulfill their ethical obligations and ensure that justice is done. Those who know Cody said she is too committed to the defense of the poor to let Moudry’s beliefs interfere with her work.
“Our job is to represent people charged,” said Terry MacCarthy, who ran the federal defender’s office in Chicago for 42 years and still has an office there. “A good criminal-defense attorney can handle anything … He’ll be in real good hands with her. She is one very good and very bright lawyer.”
Moudry, 35, grew up in Marquette Park, a Chicago neighborhood with a history of racial tension, most notably in 1966 when Martin Luther King Jr. marched there to protest racist housing policies. Angry white residents lined the streets and pelted black marchers with rocks and bottles.
By contrast, Cody, 32, is a product of the South whose ancestors were sharecroppers and later civil rights activists, friends and family said. Fresh out of law school, she worked as a law clerk for a federal judge in Montgomery, Ala., where a 1955 bus boycott to protest segregation became a seminal moment in the civil rights struggle.
The two’s paths crossed by happenstance. Moudry, who didn’t have the money to hire an attorney, made his initial court appearance on the day Cody pulled “duty day” — a regular assignment for the attorneys in the federal defender’s office. The cases can vary widely — a single day could bring an accused drug trafficker, bank robber and child pornographer. Among the three cases Cody picked up on May 31 was Moudry’s.
The attorney appointed on that first day typically stays with the case to its conclusion.
“It is the difference between my job and her job,” said Ronald Safer, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice who knows Cody from her stint at the same law firm. “I can say ‘no, I detest what this person stands for, so I don’t care whether he has committed the crime.’ She has picked a job where she does not have that luxury. And that is one of the things that makes that job — the public defender — the most difficult job that exists in the legal system.”
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