Gideon’s Heroes

Honoring Those Who Do Justice To Gideon’s Promise

“My client is homeless and has mental problems. The cops said to him, ‘We have your fingerprints on the brick.’  He said to the DA, ‘Are you sure I should be admitting this?  Then the real guy who did it will still be out there.’”

– Natasha Lapiner-Giresi, Staff Attorney, New York City Defender Services

THE CASE: An innocent woman is nearly beaten to death in mid-town Manhattan . Screaming headlines. Pressure on police. Three eyewitnesses. They pick Bentley Grant out of a lineup.  He is charged with attempted murder, and confesses. 

Homeless, Grant always carried around a milk crate filled with his belongings. Police found several newspaper clippings about the attack in his milk crate when they arrested him.

This may have been enough to convince the District Attorney of Grant’s guilt, but it wasn’t enough for public defender Natasha Lapiner-Giresi.

Grant had no criminal record. He told Lapiner-Giresi that his confession had been coerced, and that the witnesses were mistaken. He told her everything he had done on the day in question.  He had clippings about the incident in his crate because police had questioned him the day after the assault, and taken his photograph before releasing him.  He clipped the articles afterward out of curiousity.  Lapiner-Giresi theorized that police had taken his picture that day, created a sketch from it and showed it to the witnesses, which is why they picked Grant out of a lineup.

Lapiner-Giresi went to work, and sought the surveillance videotapes of all of the places he said he had been that day.  Finally she found a record store, 20 blocks from the scene of the crime, that had a surveillance camera running at the actual time of the assault.

But the D.A.’s office got the videotape first. They balked at letting her view it, and insisted that Grant be committed to Elmhurst Hospital Prison Ward. Grant’s family was “so scared that he would go to jail,” says Lapiner-Giresi, “that when they went to the hospital they signed the papers to have him civilly committed.”

Sure enough, in the videotape images that Lapiner-Giresi was finally allowed to view, Grant was at the record store at the exact time of the assault, carrying his milk crate.  He spent another month in the prison hospital before he was released.  After two months, the District Attorney dismissed the charges against Grant.

“This guy was really, really innocent,” said Lapiner-Giresi.  “If that tape hadn’t been there, he would have gone to jail for years and years – probably 15 to 20.  Everything he said was supported, but we were the only ones who believed him."

THE HERO: Natasha Lapiner-Giresi was born and raised in lower Manhattan . She grew up wanting to be a police officer, but a family friend told her, “We can always find police officers. If you really want to make a difference, you should be a lawyer.”

In retrospect, she thinks he meant “prosecutor,” but at the time, with friends in her neighborhood occasionally running afoul of a harsh criminal justice system, public defense felt like the place where she could make more of a difference. Now, when people ask what she does, “I never say I’m a lawyer – I always reply, ‘I am a public defender.’”

“Sometimes it feels like you’re beating your head against a wall,” says Lapiner-Giresi, of the long days, the adversarial pressures, and the miserable circumstances of the crimes and her clients’ lives. She feels a need to go the extra mile because her clients have no choice about who their lawyer is – yet have the right to get the same representation as a person with money.

One secret to keeping a sense of humor and perspective: Lapiner-Giresi is married to a stand-up comic. Together they own a wine store, and live in an apartment above it. Dinner with a roomful of comedians, and a great wine cellar, helps keep things loose.

THE OFFICE: New York County Defender Services is located one block from “Ground Zero” – the World Trade Center . It has 32 staff public defenders plus managers and support staff, handling about 16,000 cases a year – or about 500 cases per public defender. Chief Public Defender Mike Coleman is proud that his lawyers love their work, and make a career of it. Many gave up more lucrative private practices. They have an average of 15 years experience, and turnover is near zero.

On September 11, 2001 , the office was still standing, but uninhabitable. The fire department commandeered it as a morgue. The staff trooped over to Lapiner-Giresi’s apartment – the nearest working phone – to call loved ones to say they were safe. Two days later, they got a fireman to break down the door to the file room so the public defenders could grab their case files. Though the office was closed for another month, they worked out of their homes and friends’ offices, and, Coleman notes, “no client was unrepresented for even a day.”

THE QUOTE: “I feel like I can make a big difference in the lives of my clients – and the community – by helping get housing, drug treatment, mental health services, or navigate around the bureaucracy to get government services or benefits. I really care what happens to them. 25% of them are mentally ill. I love getting up and going to work in the morning.”

THE PROBLEM: Most indigent defendants are not as fortunate as Bentley Grant. “Despite progress in many jurisdictions,” declared a U.S. Department of Justice report issued in 2000, “indigent defense in the United States today is in a chronic state of crisis.” High caseloads and miserly funding have resulted in “legal representation of such low quality as to amount to no representation at all, delays, overturned convictions, and convictions of the innocent.”

THE PROMISE OF GIDEON: Still unfulfilled.

Read about NLADA's Gideon's Heroes project to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Gideon v. Wainwright ruling, and find out how to nominate a Hero

Read about the February Gideon's Hero, Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis.