Fifteen years ago this month, Juan Luna was convicted of mass murder — the slaying of seven workers in a suburban Brown’s Chicken restaurant on Jan. 8, 1993. He and another defendant, later convicted of the same crime, are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.
A small team of attorneys defended him. The lead attorney was a solo criminal practitioner, and the rest were public defenders working for a statewide capital crime defense unit that went out of business when death sentences were ended in Illinois. The Luna defense team’s work involved five years of preparation for a trial that finally began in spring 2007. On May 10 that year, the jury found Luna guilty. Days later, it was decided he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.
I was a contract attorney on the defense team, and I thought again about the Brown’s Chicken case when the U.S. Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson as a Supreme Court justice last month. It was a close partisan vote. Everything in Judge Brown’s background was extraordinary, including the unusual fact that she had held various defense roles in criminal cases. A few prominent committee members harshly criticized her for representing criminal defendants and giving “light” sentences in criminal cases as a federal judge.
That struck a nerve.
Most attorneys who have represented criminal defendants know how unrewarding Judge Brown’s early career as a defense attorney might have been. She was not a champion of criminals but rather was upholding the law, as she repeated in her Senate hearings. An attorney who deals with the “worst of the worst” must be committed to following the Constitution. That commitment means making certain a defendant gets his day in court, even if it is delayed for years. Most ordinary citizens have difficulty fathoming why anyone would spend time and effort helping someone accused of a crime, particularly the slaying of seven workers in a fast-food restaurant. That’s not surprising. Most of us, except family members and close friends, tend to believe a person who has been arrested is guilty of the crime. The vast majority following a case think the defendant will be convicted and harshly sentenced.
That was certainly true when Luna went on trial for murder in the Brown’s Chicken case. The public was going to find it hard to accept any verdict except guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but that would not be enough. He deserved to die. If he didn’t go to death row, people may claim he got off because his attorneys somehow tricked the jury into giving him an “easy” sentence, even life in prison.
The public likely may never understand why anyone would want to represent a man accused of slaughtering seven people, and yet that is what it takes to uphold a bedrock right in a democratic society. The Constitution says anyone accused of a crime is innocent until proved guilty by a jury or judge. A defense attorney does not have to demonstrate that his client is innocent. He only must ensure the prosecutors prove his client’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
So a defendant can sit in a courtroom wearing street clothes, not a jail suit. He will not be handcuffed or otherwise restrained unless he is acting dangerously. Only when he is convicted does the pendulum swing to the other side.
Luna wore a business suit with a white shirt and tie when he sat with his attorneys. At the trial’s onset, attorney Clarence Burch said his team was trying to free an innocent man. Other attorneys — Stephen Richards, Mark Lyon and Allan Sincox — spent years preparing for the case. They challenged all the evidence that prosecutors presented to prove Luna’s guilt. They questioned every prosecution witness, looking for holes in the testimony, much of it technical. They fought for their client.
By the way, that’s what Judge Brown was doing throughout her time as a defense attorney and later as a federal jurist when she weighed the appropriate sentences for guilty people.
Luna’s attorneys had an even greater responsibility. When Luna was convicted, they had to argue his crime did not meet the requirements to impose a death sentence under Illinois law at the time. Finally, they had to convince the jury that he should not be executed.
As attorneys who opposed the death penalty, they realized the jurors had the right to decide that Luna should die for his crime. Ultimately, the jury voted 11-1 to impose capital punishment, but their verdict had to be unanimous. The holdout was a woman. We never found out why she chose to not vote for a death sentence. Her fellow jurors could have resorted to browbeating to change her mind, but instead, they accepted her reasoning.
Over the years, I’m sometimes asked if I thought Luna committed the crime. I’ve never answered. There’s only one appropriate response as a defense attorney: A jury of his peers believed he was guilty. That’s all that matters.
Any other opinion, including mine, is irrelevant.
Dennis Shere was a contract criminal defense attorney on a case involving one of the two defendants in the Brown’s Chicken case.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
