That's the title of Greg Craig's op-ed in the WaPo. Here's a piece:
On March 30, 1981, I was a young partner at the law firm of Williams & Connolly working for the firm’s senior partner, Edward Bennett Williams, the leading trial lawyer of his generation and one of the greatest in American history.
That day sticks with me because it was the day that President Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a young man from Colorado named John W. Hinckley Jr. That night, while watching the evening news, I learned that Hinckley’s parents had contacted my law firm in search of representation for their son.
Early the next morning, I walked my normal route to work down Pennsylvania Avenue, past George Washington Hospital. The large, quiet crowd of TV cameras and members of the media stationed outside the hospital — surrounded in turn by police cars and barriers forming a perimeter around the entrance to the emergency room — reminded me that my firm might well be, at that very moment, considering whether to take on Hinckley as a client.
Because I had worked for two years as a federal public defender in Connecticut, Ed suspected that I would be eager for the firm to take the case. He might have been surprised when I told him we should decline if anyone in the firm had the kind of relationship with any of the shooting’s victims such that taking the case would cause them to leave the firm. I knew that some of the lawyers in the firm might well have worked closely with the president, been friends with his family or with James Brady, the White House press secretary who was grievously wounded and, on that day, close to death.
Ed invited me to participate in the executive committee meeting to explain that concern. Everyone agreed that we should check to see whether anyone in the firm had a close relationship with any of the victims, but on the underlying question of whether to take the case, there was at first no consensus.
The lawyers sitting around the conference table were articulate and opinionated — and they were not shy. The arguments against taking the case were straightforward: Given the overwhelming evidence of guilt, there was really nothing that we could do for Hinckley that a public defender could not do for him just as well. In addition, we knew next to nothing about his background. He might have turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer who would try to turn the case into a political show trial.
The economic arguments against taking the case were most compelling. We would eliminate any capacity to build business with the Reagan administration. It was hard to believe that clients who wanted to be on the good side of the administration would ever come to us. Besides that, we would surely lose existing clients who did not want to be associated with a law firm representing a would-be presidential assassin. Having Hinckley as a client could have been a financial disaster for the firm.
After hearing the views of everyone else, Ed finally spoke: “If our law firm isn’t strong enough to take this kind of case — as controversial and as blameworthy as this person is — it would certainly be hard for any other firm to do so.” He went on: “I have seven kids in my family. And I don’t doubt that one day one of them might do something stupid or crazy that would cause me to need a lawyer for him. I would not have much respect for our profession if I called up Arthur Liman at Paul Weiss and told him ‘Arthur, I need your help,’ and he came back and told me: ‘I’m so sorry, Ed. I have consulted my partners, and we think representing your son might do damage to our bottom line. But of course we wish him best of luck.’”
Williams & Connolly took Hinckley on as a client. I was on the team, led by Vince Fuller, that defended Hinckley at trial. The trial lasted three weeks, and the jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
