Sitting in her well-appointed living room in a leafy northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhood, Jesselyn Radack seems an unlikely candidate for martyrdom in the war on terror. For three years the Yale Law School graduate and self-described soccer mom made her living telling other government lawyers how to stay out of trouble.
The 32-year-old former U.S. Department of Justice ethics adviser says she thought she'd be a career government lawyer. But that was before she decided to object to the government's tactics in the John Walker Lindh case last year.
Since then she's lost two jobs -- pushed out of her Justice post and then fired from New York's Hawkins, Delafield & Wood, the firm that had taken her in -- and now finds herself unemployed and in limbo. Her personal challenges are daunting: under criminal investigation, ailing from multiple sclerosis, and expecting a third child in January. But far from singing the victim's song, Radack appears composed and stalwart, telling her story with short, chopping hand strokes and near-encyclopedic recall.
I guess it just goes to show that it can be unprofitable to challenge demagogues like John Ashcroft. Read the whole story here from The American Lawyer, via The New York Lawyer.