Lawyer's Attempt to Keep His Head Above Water Landed a Client on Death Row
Photo of Lionel Barrett by Jim McGuire
Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman needed a really good lawyer. Prosecutors claimed to have a mountain of physical evidence and powerful eyewitness testimony against him in a murder case. And they were seeking the death penalty.
Cellmates at the Nashville jail where Abdur’Rahman was being held told him there was only one lawyer to call: Lionel Barrett.
Barrett, they said, never turned down a client in need, no matter how controversial the case was, how bad the facts were and how impossible the defense seemed.
“I never said no,” Barrett confirms. “I took cases no one else would. Everyone deserves representation.”
But in 1987, Barrett should have said no. Because he didn’t, Abdur’Rahman’s life now hangs in the balance.
“It was the perfect storm,” Barrett says, looking back on the case some 24 years later. “Everything I could have done wrong, I did.”
Now Barrett is pleading for forgiveness from his former client and apologizing to his colleagues in the bar. The case, he says, is “a daily burden” and was one of the key factors that drove him from law practice a decade ago.
“It is every lawyer’s nightmare to have a case like this in their life, a case they screwed up so badly. This case is my nightmare,” says Barrett, who now works as a nonlawyer adviser for the Davidson County (Tenn.) Election Commission.
“Abu-Ali is on death row because of me. I failed him,” he says. “I have no excuse. This is the only case in my entire career that I would do anything to be able to do over again.” But he’s finding there are no do-overs.
Abdur’Rahman’s case, which is once again in the hands of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati, has been passed up and down the state and federal appellate systems more times than Brett Favre comebacks. At the heart of the appeal is one question: Did Barrett’s ineffective representation, combined with claims of prosecutorial misconduct, cause Abdur’Rahman’s trial to be constitutionally flawed?
Click to read the rest of “A Life in the Balance” from the March issue of the ABA Journal.
