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PHOTOS: S.
Hayward
John Byrnes is the head of the federal defenders office for eastern and southern New York, a public defender for the federal court system. He is soft-spoken, easy to laugh and subtly passionate about his duty defending accused drug dealers, supposed money launderers and alleged terrorists. Ask him what he likes about his job and he will shrug, and mutter something about liking litigation. But watch him in the courtroom and he may, as he did a few weeks ago, cry when his client’s sentence was reduced. As a federal defender, Byrnes handles the cases that wind up in federal court that tend to be high-profile cases that involve large amounts of drugs, crimes that cross state lines, money and national security charges and white-collar crimes like tax evasion, Securities and Exchange Commission suits and mail fraud. "It’s all criminal law," he says. "I just like to litigate."
Byrnes is stoic about his interest in defending the accused. "Eighty [percent] to 90 percent of the people who go to trial are guilty of something," he says exhaling at a response he must give often, "But they are entitled to rights like everybody else." As he sees it defendants are often wrongly charged or overcharged with additional crimes they did not commit. Is he afraid of his clients? Never. "People make mistakes and they are just looking for help too," he says.
Between 1966, when he got his law degree from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and 1972 he worked for The Legal Aid Society of the City of New York. He lived in the city then, before his daughter was born. In 1979 he began his tenure at the federal defenders office. He now lives in Westchester County and handles 40 to 50 cases at any given time. For instance, he says, leafing through a green book on sentencing guidelines, if you are caught with 50 grams of crack cocaine the minimum sentence you will receive is 10 years in federal prison. But to receive the same amount of jail time you must be caught with five kilograms of cocaine. The laws are unfair, illogical and a drain on our system, he argues."The drug war is not working," he says, "everybody knows that but no one knows how to resolve it." There are moments when he knows it is all worth it. Two weeks ago during the sentencing of Leslie Gethers he convinced a judge to lower a mandatory sentence. Gethers was convicted of dealing dilaudid, an addictive perscription painkiller. According to federal regulations, a sentence is determined by the severity of the crime and a defendant's criminal history. Gethers had many prior convictions, but most of them were for minor offenses, like jumping subway turnstiles and petty theft. Byrnes argued that his client did not deserve to sit in jail for more than 10 years. The judge agreed and gave Gethers a lower sentence. According to witnesses in the court, Byrnes teared up and looked toward the ceiling when the judge issued his ruling. "The judge recognized that [Gethers] was a person, and I appreciated that," Byrnes says. Last year he was even more elated when Preston Brown, a Harlem man accused for selling an illegal gun to two Secret Service agents, was set free. Brown had been exonerated after it was discovered that the government had charged the wrong man. Byrnes, who oversaw the trial, said "That was a great feeling," in his usual, understated way.
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wall of inch-thick, security glass shields the law offices where
John Byrnes works. To get into the 10th floor at 52 Duane
St. you must punch a code on the silver keypad on the wall or have
an employee open the door from the inside. The security measures
are not just to protect the lawyers from average street crime. They
are also to protect them from their own clients who wait outside
the glass.
That
may be, but he defended, at one point, the accused terrorists of
the World Trade Center bombing in a preliminary case in 1994. He
was also the defender of one of the men accused of bombing the United
States embassy in Kenya before he was relieved due to a conflict
in 1998.
orn
and raised in upstate New York, Byrnes’ interest in defending accused
criminals was not peeked after he returned from service in the Vietnam
War. "It was the late 1960s, early 1970s, and there was a lot of
upheaval in the country," he says. When he came back, he says, he
"just gravitated towards criminal law and being for the underdog
and the indigent." He won’t say much more than that, but it’s clear
from an award for 25 years of service to The Legal Aid Society that
sits on his bookshelf that he picked the right path. 
