Prominent Chicago defense lawyer Thomas Durkin, a 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.

Returning to Chicago, he clerked for Judge James Parsons of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois before entering private practice with a specialty in federal criminal cases. From 1978 through 1984, he served as a federal prosecutor in Chicago.

Over more than 40 years in private practice, he cultivated a reputation as one of the country’s foremost advocates of defendants other attorneys would pass on representing.

“He took on the most challenging, controversial and complex cases that other lawyers would run away from,” said Joshua Herman, an attorney who worked on national security matters with Durkin. “Above all, he valued the rule of law the most and raised his strongest objections to what he saw as abuses of power.”

Durkin’s clients included Adel Daoud, who was accused in a plot to bomb a Chicago bar, and Mohammed Hamzah Khan, who as a teenager was arrested on charges of conspiring to provide support to the Islamic State. He won an acquittal on terrorism charges for Jared Chase, one of the so-called NATO 3 defendants accused of plotting to bomb the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago, and he represented Matthew Hale, a white supremacist leader accused of domestic terrorism offenses for soliciting the murder of a federal judge.

“I used to tell him he was my favorite ‘cause’ lawyer,” said Dan Webb, a former U.S. Attorney in Chicago who said he had known Durkin for more than 40 years and spoke to him just a week ago for a case they were working on together. “When he got committed to a cause, he would not stop until he accomplished his goal.”

He also was a go-to lawyer for numerous local elected officials who found themselves in legal trouble.

The work, Durkin said, appealed not only to his commitment to civil liberties but stimulated him intellectually and spiritually as well.

“I think these are the cases of our day. They point out all the problems that terrorism has spawned, with the reaction on our side, both good and bad. I find them fascinating,” he said in a 2014 Chicago Reader piece. “There are some days I find it hard to believe that people are paying me to be involved in what I’m involved in. There’s a tremendous amount of history you have to learn, which I enjoy. There’s a lot of theology you have to understand, which I enjoy.”

Beyond Chicago, he did legal work for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including helping represent Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an accused facilitator of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and representing others who have since been returned to their home countries. His experiences there, he said, helped show him the “dark side” of American intelligence.

“I think I’ve been involved in some pretty wild stuff around here but I’ve never been involved in anything as wild as this,” he said in a 2009 Chicago television interview.

Since 1984, he operated a law practice, Durkin & Roberts, with his wife, Janis Roberts, whose own legal career he was proud to pay tribute to.

“Without Roberts,” he has said, “there is no Durkin.”

Besides his wife and his daughter Alanna, he is survived by five other children: Erin Pieplow, Krista Mussa, Catherine Durkin Stewart, James Stewart and Matthew Stewart, and 15 grandchildren.