Chicago defense lawyer Thomas Durkin, zealous advocate for clients, has died at 78
WASHINGTON (AP) — Thomas Anthony Durkin, a nationally prominent criminal defense attorney who for five decades was a fixture in Chicago’s courthouses and who was known for his relentless advocacy for a roster of notorious clients, has died. He was 78 years old.
Durkin died Monday after a brief battle with cancer, said a daughter, Alanna Durkin Richer, an Associated Press journalist in Washington.
Durkin participated in some of Chicago’s highest-profile court cases, but his influence spanned beyond the city through his representation of Guantanamo Bay detainees, lectures at law schools across the country and legal essays and news media interviews in which he sounded the alarm about the perils of unchecked government power.
His career was driven by a conviction that all defendants, no matter their alleged crime or society’s perception of them, were entitled to a rigorous defense and to the protection of their constitutionally afforded civil rights. So committed was he to the defense of the unpopular that the headline of a 2016 Wall Street Journal article described him as a “terror suspect’s best hope in court.”
“I don’t do this because I think my clients are wonderful people who should be exonerated,” he was quoted in the story as saying. “I do it because I think I have a role in the system.”
Durkin was born on the South Side of Chicago to a steel mill worker who saved enough money to put his son through the University of Notre Dame, where he graduated in 1968 and whose home football games he rarely missed. He later received a law degree from the University of San Francisco, where he was exposed to criminal defense by serving as a student adviser at a local public defender’s office.