This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 6, 2011 - KANSAS CITY - Sean O'Brien wants to wind down his law practice, but the pleas for help keep coming.
Letters from prison inmates regularly fill his mailbox at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.
"I need your help," wrote a prisoner in Leavenworth, Kan. "No one wants to listen to me, and I don't have any money to get an attorney."
A letter from an inmate at the Jefferson City Correctional Center said: "Because of you being a great champion for justice, I pray you will find some way to help."
A criminal defense lawyer with a national reputation, O'Brien could have no shortage of clients. For more than 20 years, he has worked to get innocent people out of prison. And he has successfully argued to reduce the sentences of some on death row.
In the past, in tearful telephone conversations, he has had to tell men their appeals were exhausted and they were about to be executed. The intense work takes a toll and pays little.
"I am really trying to reclaim my personal life, so I'm not agreeing to represent anyone for the foreseeable future," said O'Brien, 55.
The rate of help requests O'Brien receives always picks up when there's favorable publicity about one of his clients. That's what happened in August, when the state announced it would not re-file murder charges against Dale Helmig.
Helmig had been convicted in 1996 of murdering his mother, Norma Dean Helmig. Beginning in 1998, after he agreed to take Helmig's case, O'Brien argued post-conviction appeals and habeas corpus claims in state and federal courts in Hermann, Jefferson City, Kansas City, Maysville and St. Louis. Finally a judge ruled last year that Helmig was innocent, had not received a fair trial and should be set free.
Now O'Brien passes along some of the help requests he receives to the Midwestern Innocence Project or replies to the inmate with a referral to another lawyer. O'Brien is still working in behalf of three prisoners, some of whom are on death row.
A full-time professor, O'Brien teaches classes on criminal law and procedure. He also supervises a death penalty representation clinic and a class on post-conviction remedies. Under his guidance, students participate in his cases.
"I still have way more work than I can manage — plenty to keep my clinic students busy," O'Brien said.
Mad At The System
When Helmig entered the Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Mo., in 1997, he decided to formulate a plan to obtain justice. O'Brien eventually became part of it.
"I had to quit being angry," Helmig said. "I wasn't getting anywhere." In a visit to the prison's law library, Helmig asked other inmates whom would they ask to represent them if they were innocent. Three people recommended O'Brien.
By that time, O'Brien had worked as a public defender in Kansas City, and had represented defendants in capital cases working for the Missouri Capital Punishment Resources Center and the Public Interest Litigation Clinic.
Helmig asked his younger brother, Richard, to get O'Brien on his case. O'Brien first said he was too busy, but after seven telephone calls from Richard Helmig, the persistence paid off.
O'Brien changed his mind when Richard Helmig told him Kenny Hulshof, a special assistant attorney general, had helped prosecute his brother. When he agreed to take Helmig's case, O'Brien thought it might help him with another of his clients, Faye Copeland, whom O'Brien was trying to get off death row.
Faye Copeland and her husband, Ray, had been convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of five transients at the Copelands' farm near Chillicothe. Hulshof had helped prosecute the Copelands, and O'Brien was trying to get an insight into Hulshof.
Hulshof declined a request to be interviewed for this story.
Ray Copeland died in 1993 at the age of 78 at Potosi Correctional Center while awaiting execution. A federal court later commuted Faye Copeland's sentence to life in prison. In 2002, she died at a nursing home where she was on medical parole.
Helmig believes he'd probably still be in prison if O'Brien hadn't taken his case.
"There are attorneys, good attorneys and excellent attorneys and there are law professors," Helmig said. "Sean would fall under the excellent law professors. He is just all around a very good person."
O'Brien said his work had been satisfying but also painful.
"I'd been working with Dale Helmig, and losing over and over again since 1998," O'Brien said. "We sat in prison together and literally cried over opinions that came down.
"It gets so frustrating and you just want to quit because there comes a point where you just get so mad at the system. I guess the real thing that keeps me involved and keeps me from bailing out on these clients is that there aren't lawyers lining up to do this work."
Friend Of The Underdog
When you talk to Jeff Stack about Sean O'Brien, one of the stories he remembers is a telephone call he received from the Kansas City lawyer in July 2003. Stack said O'Brien asked him to get some clothes for a prison inmate about to be released from death row in Jefferson City. Stack is the legislative consultant for the group Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
"I went to Wal Mart to get the clothes," Stack said. "I don't normally patronize them, but it was the only place open."
The wardrobe was for Joe Amrine, who had been convicted and sentenced to death for the 1985 murder of a fellow inmate. Prison inmates, who had given testimony against Amrine during his original trial, had since recanted.
O'Brien and his partner, Kent Gipson, had been working on Amrine's case since 1996. And the Supreme Court in April 2003 overturned Amrine's conviction and death sentence in the prison stabbing, saying he had presented clear evidence of innocence.
Stack believes O'Brien "gives lawyers a very good name.
"He's very glad to support someone who is otherwise an underdog," Stack said.
O'Brien's office is in the Oliver Wendell Holmes suite at the UMKC law school. Citizenship and civil libertarian awards from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Missouri Catholic Conference hang on the walls. Also there's a framed commutation of sentence letter for one of O'Brien's clients as well as a photo of Amrine.
Opposition to the death penalty, the belief that prisoners can be rehabilitated and the conviction that most people want to do the right thing frame O'Brien's work.
"I think institutions like the death penalty or life without parole or those kinds of punishments increase the level of anger in society, but they also trick us into thinking that we are addressing the root causes of crime," O'Brien said.
He points out European countries, which take a public health approach to aberrant human behavior, have safer societies, lower crimes rates and smaller prison populations. By comparison, the United States has 2.3 million people in prison, 3,700 of them on death row.
This, he believes, is a reflection of our politics.
"There is no better way to get people to vote than to scare people," O'Brien said. "Every candidate who runs for office says he's going to crack down on crime. We are locking up people for longer periods of time. We are punishing them more harshly for the same types of crime."
O'Brien believes people should be punished, even harshly so, for serious crimes. But eventually, people reach a place where their violent impulses are gone.
"It makes a statement when you say we are going to put this person in prison and we are going to let him die there," O'Brien said.
Asked about his work, which frequently points out the mistakes of the criminal justice system, O'Brien said, "I like to think that the system gets a little better every time its shortcomings are exposed. As lawyers we all have a responsibility to make the system better."
A 'C' Student
O'Brien has a mind like a legal archive. He can recite the styles or titles of cases and explain how they apply to the facts of a crime. He can resurrect dates, names and places in the cases he's handled over more than 30 years in the legal profession.
One date that sticks most with him is Oct. 21, 1992. The defendant was Ricky Grubbs, who lived near St. Louis. In 1984 Grubbs and his brother beat a man to death in southern Missouri.
His brother received a life sentence in a plea bargaining arrangement, while a jury sentenced Ricky Grubbs to die. As a public defender, O'Brien was brought into the case not long before Grubbs was scheduled to be executed.
Following an investigation, O'Brien concluded Grubbs was mentally retarded and couldn't be responsible for his behavior. That was the argument he raised with the Supreme Court and other appellate courts.
Over a period of 36 sleepless hours, written arguments and briefs were exchanged and faxed until finally the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Grubbs' final appeal. In a late night telephone call, O'Brien reached Grubbs in the death watch cell to tell him his last appeal had been denied. Grubbs didn't understand, O'Brien said.
"And I said, 'They are going to come in and they are going to execute you and they are going to do this now'," O'Brien recalled. "And they wheeled in the gurney and he said, 'I guess I have to go,' and he hung up the phone. And they took him and they executed him."
O'Brien has tears in his eyes as he recalled the event.
"I've had several of those conversations, and Ricky was the first and he's the one I remember the most. It's a burden to think about it like that. On the other hand you have to look back at your losses and learn what's there to help you avoid a similar loss in the future."
Since then state laws have been changed to prohibit the execution of mentally retarded people.
O'Brien grew up in Kansas City and decided to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was an attorney specializing in workers' compensation claims. O'Brien said he wanted to be a lawyer because he believed he could make a good living.
Attending UMKC law school, O'Brien took all the tax and business courses he could and aced them. He got a "C" in the criminal law course.
But once in the profession, O'Brien said he didn't feel fulfilled "moving money from one spot to another." That's how he ended up as a public defender, eventually handling high-profile life and death cases. He now specializes in mitigation claims based on mental illness or mental retardation.
O'Brien hasn't become rich this way, and his family life has paid a price.
"Dad was always busy," said Quinn O'Brien, one of his two daughters. "He'd always bring his work home and it would be spread on the dining room table. We'd have to play somewhere else. There were times when dad had an important conference call, and we'd have to make ourselves scarce. He'd miss my swim meets because he'd have to work."
Quinn O'Brien said she and her sister, Haley, later learned that they'd be able to spend more time with their father if they did clerical work in his office in the summer. Quinn O'Brien is now a private investigator for her father.
And some people were critical of her father, too, because of the people he represented in court.
"It's hard to understand when you are 11 years old, the right to a fair trial or social justice," she said. "There has been a toll."
Quinn O'Brien said she once defended her dad to a woman who had attacked him because of the people he defended. O'Brien said she replied to the woman by reciting a line from the book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," in which Atticus Finch is described as one who is put on this earth to do things no one wants to do.
"And my dad's one of them," Quinn O'Brien said.
Sean O'Brien now believes he's too old to pull the "all nighters" and the around-the-clock work needed to get pleadings filed on time.
"You get to the point where you know you don't have the mental acuity, energy or stamina," he said. "The best thing I can do is try to replace myself with someone who has a similar perspective and similar drive to do the work.
So O'Brien is raising funds for the Innocence Project and training the young lawyers on its staff. Then, there are those students who fill his classes at UMKC.
"If I find one or two good students every three or four years, I'm ahead of the game," he said.
Terry Ganey is an independent journalist in Columbia, Mo.