Attorney Judy Clarke, defender of villains, cannot keep synagogue shooter from death row

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Even a partial resume of Judy Clarke’s cases reads like a rogue’s gallery of evil.

The Unabomber. The so-called 20th hijacker on 9/11. The Atlanta Olympics bomber. The Boston Marathon bomber.

And now, Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter.

Over a long, illustrious career, Clarke, a publicity-shy defense lawyer who somehow sees the spark of humanity where almost no one else does, has made her mark by doing the seemingly impossible: finding ways to persuade prosecutors or jurors to spare the most malevolent of criminals from the death penalty despite insurmountable odds.

Her clients, all of whom faced execution, are deemed monsters by society. There is no doubt they have committed the crimes of which they were accused. Clarke does not try to push back against the notion that they’re guilty as charged.

She has managed to keep them alive through plea deals with the government or by humanizing them just enough that a jury accepts “mitigating” circumstances — such as mental illness, an abusive childhood, suicide attempts — that could lessen their culpability.

Clarke’s efforts fell short in 2015, however, when jurors condemned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death, mitigating factors aside.

Two years earlier, Tsarnaev and his brother, both radicalized immigrants, detonated pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three and maiming hundreds.

This week, Clarke’s efforts fell short again when a jury sentenced Robert Bowers to death for murdering 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill on Oct. 27, 2018. It was Clarke’s highest-profile capital case since the marathon bombing.

The Bowers verdict came despite Clarke presenting 115 mitigating factors about the killer’s depraved childhood and claims — rejected by the jury — that he had schizophrenia.

When the judge formalized the sentence, Bowers became not only the latest person to join Tsarnaev and 40 other inmates on federal death row but the most recent example of how Clarke’s magic and the zealous efforts of her fellow defense lawyers again failed to sway 12 citizens to choose life.

Clarke has an almost mythic status among death penalty lawyers in this country. Patrick Radden Keefe, an author and New Yorker writer, profiled her for the magazine in 2015 amid the Tsarnaev trial.

He wrote that her peers refer to her as “St. Judy, on the basis of her humility, her generosity, and her devotion to her clients.” Keefe explained that Clarke takes great pains to get to know her clients, considered by most people to be irredeemable.

The piece, titled “The Worst of the Worst,” is a classic example in journalism of a “writearound,” when the reporter doesn’t have access to the subject. Keefe did not interview Clarke, and at the time, he wrote that she hadn’t spoken to the “mainstream press” in two decades.

That hasn’t changed. Clarke did not address the media in Pittsburgh during the Bowers trial, or after the guilty verdict, or following the jury’s decision on death on Wednesday.

Her elite circle of peers maintained the cone of silence Friday. Several death penalty lawyers who have known Clarke for years or litigated alongside her politely declined interview requests.

Keefe addressed Clarke’s predilection for defending the killers who exist on the outer rim of aberrant behavior.

She’s “driven by an intense philosophical opposition to the death penalty,” he wrote. As well, he continued, she’s “also drawn to the intellectual problem posed by unconscionable crime.”

A lawyer who has known her for decades told Keefe that Clarke seeks “the key that turns the lock that opens the door that would let a person do something like this.”

In the marathon case, Keefe wrote, “Clarke had failed to paint a picture of her young client that was moving enough to save him. It may be that she never found the key.”

She clearly didn’t find it in the Bowers case either. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

The defense team drilled down on Bowers’ family tree, his mental health, his home life, his suicide attempts.

Throughout the trial, Clarke often huddled with Bowers, speaking softly with him, sharing a smile, putting her arm around him.

The gestures always appeared to be genuine — to the point of rankling the families of some of the victims, who addressed it during Thursday’s sentencing.

Clarke exuded soft-spoken kindness even as she sought to dismantle an expert witness or prosecutor. She had a folksy manner in questioning witnesses or speaking to jurors. And she warmly greeted Bowers’ aunt, court security officers and the clerk of courts’ office staff.

None of that mattered, though, when the jury got down to deliberations.

Some lawyers who specialize in capital cases don’t believe anything should be read into the outcomes of Clarke’s two most recent cases when set against her astonishing record.

Monica Foster, a defense attorney in Indiana, has done death penalty work and is an ardent opponent of execution.

“This had nothing to do with Judy Clarke,” Foster said of the Bowers verdict. “The death penalty is a crapshoot. Always.”

Staff writer Paula Reed Ward contributed.

Jonathan D. Silver is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Jonathan at [email protected].

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