LEWISTON — At first, it appeared that Leonard Sharon was not going to show up for his speaking engagement.
The famed attorney was not at the lectern. He was not at the door greeting guests or off in a corner sorting his notes.
At the Lewiston Public Library on Thursday afternoon the question was: Where is Lenny Sharon?
Not to worry, the answer was obvious. Sharon was right where he usually is: among the people.
Seated in a chair in the center of a row, the tall and lanky Sharon was already mingling, already engaging in lively conversation, and it was still 15 minutes before the event was scheduled to begin.
This is a fellow who doesn’t need formality or a fancy introduction. By the time 2 p.m. rolled around, Sharon was comfortable in his chair and deep into the dialogue. Who needs a lectern?
He began by asking the usual question before anyone could beat him to it.
“How can I do it?” he said to the group, arms uplifted. “How can I represent these terrible people?”
Several people in the audience chuckled and nodded. They were about to ask that question, as it turns out, and why not? Everybody wonders how a criminal attorney — and 97 percent of Sharon’s caseload is criminal — can live with themselves after fighting for the freedom of sometimes truly awful people.
“People tend to think,” Sharon said, “that everyone who comes into my office is Charles Manson.”
It’s a question he answered at length, telling the story of a tour he took early in his career of a Pittsburgh penitentiary. While touring the prison, he met a man whom he had known many years earlier in childhood.
“I said, ‘What are you doing these days?'” Sharon told the audience. “And he said, ‘Ten to 20 years for armed robbery.'”
Sharon’s point? Sometimes, not a lot separates the good guys from the bad. As a lawyer who has represented killers, rapists, biker gangs and mafia members, Sharon has to find ways to identify with his clients.
“That doesn’t mean I have to share their depravity,” he said. “It just means I have to figure out what we have in common in our backgrounds. What led him to go off in one direction while I went off in another?”
The audience, composed mainly of men and women of retirement age, stirred as they absorbed this. While they did, Sharon hit them with a scenario: A man is pulled over by police and, when they search his car, they find a computer containing hundreds of images depicting children in pornographic poses.
As a criminal attorney, Sharon might argue that the search of the car was unconstitutional and if his argument is successful, the case could be thrown out, and the accused would be free to go.
“How many of you think that I did a good thing?” Sharon asked them.
Only one hand went up.
To expand, he described a common occurrence: a man who condemns Sharon for helping bad guys one day is begging for the attorney’s help another. Accused of drunk driving, the former critic now wants Sharon to work his courthouse magic on the man’s behalf.
It’s hard to miss the hypocrisy.
“You didn’t like it when I did it for that other guy,” Sharon said. “But now you want me to do it for you?”
The U.S. Constitution, Sharon reminded the group, insists that everyone accused of a crime is entitled to legal representation. Being a lawyer means doing your best for people you might not like very much. If a bad guy goes free, Sharon said, it means he did his job.
“If I can’t live with that morally, I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing,” Sharon said. “That’s the bottom line.”
He’s been practicing for 44 years as a multi-state criminal defense lawyer. He has defended the notorious, such as Henry Hill cohort Paul Mazzei, in a case that involved the Boston College basketball team, a point-shaving scheme and ties to organized crime.
With his practice based in Auburn, Sharon is a member of the Maine and Pennsylvania bar associations and a past president of the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In the Lewiston-Auburn area, he’s one of the most well-known attorneys, and so the audience had no shortage of questions.
One wanted to know what he would offer for advice to young people considering law as a career choice.
“They should be really prepared,” Sharon said, “for the injustices in the system.”
He told another story, this one about an African-American client who walked into a courtroom for trial and looked around. White prosecutor, white defense attorney, white jurors, white judge.
“He turned to me and said, ‘Where the eff are my peers?'” Sharon told the audience.
The system is, in many ways, stacked against the poor and minorities, Sharon said. Some consider the U.S. war on drugs a substitute for the old Jim Crow laws, and Sharon doesn’t disagree.
“The law looks like it’s colorblind,” Sharon says, “but it’s really not.”
Which brings Sharon — and his attentive audience — to the matter of Baltimore, the scene of rioting and chaos this week after a black man died there in police custody.
The overturned cars, the smashed storefront windows, the out-of-control fires, it’s all very familiar to Sharon. Back when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots broke out in several cities, Sharon’s father lost his Pittsburgh store to looters and flames. Sharon remembers it well.
“For the first time in my life,” he said, “National Guard tanks were rolling down the streets.”
Sharon joked about his idealist daydreams as a young lawyer. A member of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s, he wanted to help to change the world. Then came the Nixon years and the war on drugs. The U.S. government would end up torturing and sending people to places like Guantanamo Bay without due process. Things seemed to get worse instead of better.
“If I’d known how bad it was going to get,” Sharon said, “I would have thrown myself off a bridge back in Pittsburgh.”
He was kidding. Mostly, anyway. The group hit him with questions about various things: voter ID, the public defender system, his fees … Oh, and the Baltimore woman televised pummeling her 16-year-old son to keep him away from the riots.
“I look at it from his point of view,” Sharon said of the latter. “She humiliated him out in public. What’s going to happen to that kid the next time he has to hit the streets or go to school?”
The audience wanted to know what a typical day is like for a criminal justice attorney but for that one, Sharon didn’t have an answer. He told them about crazy hours, moral dilemmas, the tightrope act a lawyer walks between good and evil.
“Listen, I’ve had a good time,” Sharon said. “There is no typical day, but that’s what makes it fun for me.”
When it was over, Sharon got to his feet, shook a few hands and headed out, stepping onto Lisbon Street and preparing for his next meeting.
It was, after all, a workday.
mlaflamme@sunjournal.com
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