Prison Break

But what if your high-profile opponent is the United States government? And one of your clients has already been convicted of murder?

For Dean Steward '77, it presented the ultimate challenge and changed his life for the better part of two years.

The Aryan Brotherhood is a prison gang that arose among white inmates in the California prison system. It began forming in the 1960s, supposedly to provide protection against what the Federal Bureau of Investigation called "black and Mexican prison-spawned gangs that were in power in the California prison system at that time."

The FBI, which conducted an investigation throughout the early 1980s, concluded that the Aryan Brotherhood had grown to hundreds of members throughout the federal prison system.

In 2006, the federal government indicted several members of the brotherhood for more than 40 years of crimes, including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, narcotics trafficking, extortion, and robbery. And they wanted the death penalty. Steward certainly had a challenge on his hands.

"The whole thing from the start was unusual," Steward says. Initially, there were 44 defendants, and he represented the leader. It was the largest death penalty case ever brought by the federal government, and federal death penalty cases are extremely rare. Working with co-counsel Mark Fleming '92, the lawyers prepared their defense and dealt with the onslaught of publicity.

Typical of high-profile cases, jury selection was not easy. "We spent three weeks selecting a jury," Steward says. "There had been a lot of publicity. The clients were a pretty scary group. There were the tattoos [of swastikas and other provocative symbols], and they were alleged to have done some pretty horrible things."

The case represented a two-year hiatus from Steward’s regular practice, handling white-collar criminal defense. The Los Angeles Federal Public Defender’s Office asked him to handle the case because of his previous experience with federal homicide cases. But those cases were nothing like this. "I would have to nearly shut down my practice; I'm a sole practitioner," Steward says. "I did handle some other, smaller cases, and judges in those matters knew what I was doing and were very kind about my time."