The Lawyer: The Lawyer: The Accidental Advocate

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May 15, 2002, was Donna Newman's day to serve as a public defender at the federal courthouse for the southern district of New York. For lawyers in private practice like Newman, 54, it's the legal equivalent of being an on-call trauma surgeon at the local ER: if somebody needs a lawyer, she is it. "All I knew was, I had this assignment," she says, "and I had to come in that day." As it turned out, on May 15 somebody needed a lawyer very badly indeed. That was the day that Jose Padilla--former Chicago gang member, alleged would-be dirty bomber for al-Qaeda, constitutional test case for the new millennium--arrived in New York City. And by pure chance, it fell to Newman to defend him--which is how an obscure criminal-defense lawyer began her transformation into a crusader who is now suing the President of the United States.

When Newman met her new client for the first time in a sunny, wood-paneled courtroom on the 21st floor of a federal building in downtown Manhattan, she did not agonize over the moral calculus of defending a suspected terrorist. She did what Americans everywhere have done since Sept. 11: her job. She disputed the government's right to hold her client. After the hearing, Padilla was incarcerated in the nearby Metropolitan Correctional Center--less than a mile from ground zero--where he spent 23 hours a day in lockdown. When he did leave his cell, he wore leg and wrist shackles. Judge Michael Mukasey, a conservative with a tough-but-fair reputation, was scheduled to rule on the matter on June 11, but he never got the chance. On June 10, Newman was driving to work when she got a call from a friend at court: Padilla was no longer in New York. In the middle of the night, the Defense Department had removed him from prison and placed him in a private wing of a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.--with no charge, no access to lawyer or visitors, no warrant and no warning. By making Padilla the first American citizen in the war against terrorism to be held without charges inside the U.S., the government had ignited a debate about whether it has the power to strip basic constitutional protections from its citizens. As Newman saw it, President George W. Bush had stolen her client, and it was her job to get him back.