AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
A litigious lifetime would pass before he would become the lawyer for the soldier accused of one of the worst American war crimes in decades, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who was charged on Friday with 17 counts of murder in the shooting deaths of Afghan civilians, including nine children. But even 40 years ago, long before Mr. Browne was known as one of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent and controversial defense lawyers, he was inclined to make a distinctive case. “I did all the research and learned that you would not qualify if you were over 6 feet 6 inches tall,” Mr. Browne recalled. He was tall, but was he tall enough? He consulted with pacifist Quakers. He received notes from two doctors. He did stretching exercises. Then he faced the recruiter. “They made me take my shoes off, push my arches down to the ground and do all sorts of things,” Mr. Browne said. “I was still well over 6-6.” It was not the last time Mr. Browne would prove expansive and elusive. And although he never went to war, he did go into a kind of perpetual combat. For four decades, he has been the voluble and sometimes victorious defender of the virtually indefensible. “Attorney John Henry Browne,” read a headline on the cover of Pacific, a Seattle news magazine. “He shoots from the hip to defend the notorious.” That article ran in 1983. Benjamin Ng, convicted of killing 13 in the 1983 Wah Mee massacre, this city’s worst mass murder? Mr. Browne saved him from the death penalty by arguing that Mr. Ng had suffered a brain injury earlier in life. Martin Pang, who set a fire that killed four firefighters in 1995? Charged with murder, pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Colton Harris-Moore, the teenager known as the Barefoot Bandit, whose two-year, three-country crime spree terrorized families, littered the landscape with crashed stolen planes and ended in 2010 with an armed boat chase in the Bahamas? He should be free by the time he is 25. Now, at 65, Mr. Browne has taken on still another case of a lifetime, one that will play out far beyond any Seattle courtroom. Sergeant Bales, a decorated veteran of three tours in Iraq before he went to Afghanistan in December, is accused of killing 17 civilians and trying to kill six others on March 11. Some reports say he set some victims on fire. The killings have enraged Afghans and Americans and have increased calls for the United States to exit Afghanistan. The Army kept Sergeant Bales’s identity secret for five days after he was arrested, and it has tried to purge the Internet of information about him. But global tension and military reserve have done little to quiet Mr. Browne, a talkative man who works out of a century-old brick building in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. “He’s definitely a renegade among defense attorneys,” said Daniel T. Satterberg, the King County prosecuting attorney, who has known Mr. Browne for a quarter-century and has clashed with him more than once. “And I mean that in a respectful sense. He is his own man. He calls his own shots, and he doesn’t have to answer to anybody.” Mr. Browne is as loose and improvisational as the Army is buttoned-up and scripted. They wear camouflage and crew cuts. He wears blue velvet blazers and shoulder-length hair. Ask him a question, and he might not stop answering it. “People understand that we have created these soldiers,” Mr. Browne said in an interview. “Your tax dollars, my tax dollars are funding this. We all have responsibility there. That’s why the government wants to paint him as a rogue soldier, because the government doesn’t want to take responsibility. I’m not sure if this is a good metaphor, but in the Frankenstein movies, Frankenstein was not the monster. The monster was Dr. Frankenstein, who created Frankenstein.” “We’re putting these young men and women in impossible situations,” he continued. “I think the general public knows that, and I think this has brought to the public attention a dialogue about the war that the government would rather not have.” Mr. Browne has plenty of detractors. He is all flair and splash in a city not known for either. He does not mix frequently with the city’s other powerful lawyers. When he rides the ferry home to Bainbridge Island in the evening, he sits alone, reading or listening to an iPod. (The guitarist William Ackerman is a favorite.)
No comments:
Post a Comment