Getting to know your death row inmate

Andrea D. Lyon would like to acquaint you with the kinds of people who face the death penalty.

Lyon, who handled 136 murder cases, many of them as a Cook County public defender, thinks people charged in capital cases too often are portrayed as inhuman. To add some insight into who they are, as well as to tell her own story, she wrote Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer (Kaplan, $24.94).

A theme throughout her memoir is her repeated discovery that the stories behind even brutal crimes can be more complex than they at first appear.

“People are a product of a lot of different forces, and they end up where they end up for a lot of different reasons,” Lyon said.

In Angel of Death Row, Lyon, who now is associate dean for clinical programs at the DePaul University College of Law, revisits memorable cases she handled while working in Cook County and later while on the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In each case, as she investigates the backgrounds of the defendants she represents, she learns about poverty, childhood abuse, domestic violence or other factors.

But that often not is the image the public sees, she said.

“They are cardboard cutouts of evil,” Lyon said. “I wanted to tell my own story, but I also wanted to tell, even more important, my clients’ stories, so people could see that they are human beings, whether they are innocent or guilty or somewhere in the middle.”

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Source: Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 21, 2010