What if you had to defend John Couey?
Commentary: Many of us wouldn't entertain the idea of fighting for the man who killed Jessica Lunsford. Public defenders have no choice.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published March 13, 2007
MIAMI - John Couey sat here these last few weeks, looking bored, looking like an old man, looking like a bald-headed, little-fingered pedophilic killer. To his right: the two men who defend him.
Dan Lewan and Alan Fanter, 5th Judicial Circuit public defenders based in Inverness and Brooksville, respectively, have defended Couey for two years. Wednesday, Couey, 48, was found guilty of burglary and the kidnapping, rape and murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford of Homosassa in one of the Gulf Coast's most wrenching crimes.
The Couey trial shifts today to the penalty phase, and his attorneys' job now is simple to say and hard to do: to save the life of the man who ended the life of a little girl who loved cartwheels, the color pink and her wiener dog, Corky.
Some say Lewan and Fanter are the kind of attorneys who prove the justice system works.
Others think the opposite, that the system is broken. That it coddles the accused.
Public defenders, unlike private attorneys, don't get to pick their clients. Society provides. Sometimes that means representing the reprehensible.
"They're not defending what he did," said Rob Christensen, an attorney in Homosassa who represented Couey's housemates in early 2005. "They're defending the client.
"That's what makes us civilized."
"If ever there was a candidate for 'let's just take him out back and shoot him now,' it's John Couey," said Charlie Rose, a professor at Gulfport's Stetson University College of Law. "But he's still a human being - and if the rights of the most vile amongst us don't matter, it's only a matter of time before all of us lose the protection of the rule of law.
"Societies are judged by how they treat their worst, not their best."
The worst: Couey took Jessie from her bed in the dark, back to the trailer where he was staying. He raped her on a filthy mattress, leaving blood, then buried her alive in trash bags and left on a Greyhound bus to Georgia.
Asking questions
In court, Couey fiddled with those Crayola colored pencils of his, a ruler, a legal pad, the wires of the headphones that let him listen in on bench conferences, the wood of the table in front of him. Hardly ever did he look at the people who got up on the stand and described what he did.
Lewan and Fanter haven't talked to the media during this case, but those who have worked with them in Citrus and Hernando counties usually describe them with words like "professional" and "experienced."
Fanter, 50, the co-counsel, graduated from Stetson law in 1981 and is the chief assistant in the office in Hernando. Lewan, 58, the lead, is a Florida State law grad and is the chief assistant in Citrus. He once defended a man who killed his mother and got him a life sentence instead of death.
But how does Lewan defend Couey?
In his opening statement, which ran 13 minutes, Lewan told jurors "a half-truth is no truth."
In cross examination, he picked at inconsistencies in the investigation and unanswered questions in the case, made a DNA analyst acknowledge that Couey's semen and Jessie's blood might have been left on the mattress at different times and put forth a theory that Couey's housemates could have been involved, too.
There wasn't much to work with. What they did have, though, Lewan and Fanter used.
They were precise. They made the necessary motions and objections at strategically appropriate times.
They did their jobs.
But that's not really what we mean when we ask how.
The public's opinion
"I don't know how they can sleep at night," wrote one poster on the Times' Web site at tampabay.com. "Hopefully they'll meet one of the drunk drivers they got off on the highway one night on the way home."
"I'd like to see a new rule in our judicial system," another poster wrote. "If a criminal gets off, then the defense attorneys are convicted and get the sentence."
And another: "His lawyers will have to answer to God."
"It's a question I very often get from first-semester law students," said Mike Seigel, a law professor at the University of Florida. "How do defense attorneys live with what they do?"
There's a series of answers.
The idealistic: "It really comes down to believing in the system that was established over 200 years ago by the people who founded our country," Brooksville attorney Kirk Campbell said. "You're defending the Constitution."
The realistic: "It's a job," said Mark Rodriguez, an attorney with offices in Inverness and Spring Hill. "You have to look at it that way. And that's the way Dan and Alan are looking at it."
The bottom line: "You are the surgeon in the operating room whose only goal is to save the patient," Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in his 2001 book Letters to a Young Lawyer, "whether that patient is a good person or a bad person, a saint or a criminal."
How?
"The same way a soldier does what he does in battle," Brooksville attorney Jimmy Brown said. "No one takes pleasure jamming a bayonet in the chest or the neck of another human being. That is morally abhorrent to all of us. A soldier in battle, though, has to overcome those natural human feelings and emotions and do his duty because he is serving a greater good."
Mark Lunsford, Jessie's father, had this to say about Lewan last week:
"He took the oath. He had to do his job. Even if it meant swallowing the bulls--- he said."
Worse than evil
What's so scary about the crime, beyond the obvious, is that in the details were things so pathetic, and human. A Citrus jail guard said Couey told him he couldn't bring himself to kill Jessie "by his own hands." So he buried her in bags; he made her disappear. A child's solution to a spill. He let her have the stuffed dolphin when he put her in the ground because he said he knew she liked it. Later he told investigators he took Jessie because he "wanted somebody close to me."
Wholly evil is one thing. Warped, twisted, withered, ugly, incomplete humanity, that's somehow harder to accept.
We wonder how someone gets to where Couey got that night he opened the door to the Lunsfords' mobile home on S Sonata Avenue. We wonder how one of us can do such a thing to another. And whether we believe in nature or nurture almost doesn't even matter here: Couey had neither.
Born premature, beaten at home, bullied at school. Shy, tiny, slow in the head. Unloved, unwanted, unchecked.
There were instances of sexual deviance starting when he was 8, and they never stopped. Most went unreported.
There were requests for help with his "problem." He didn't get it.
There was a prison sentence. He got out early for "good behavior."
The defense in a courtroom is in a way the last line of defense.
John Couey failed. And the system failed. And the system is ours.
This makes us mad.
And we always need someone to blame. So we look at Couey, the dimwit, the halfwit, the pedophilic killer. Then we look to the two men to his right.
- Staff writer John Frank contributed to this report. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434. Information for this story is from court testimony and from John Couey's March 2005 confession, which was ruled inadmissible in court.