For Immediate Release
July 21, 2008

Media Contact:

Kara Tershel, (202) 662-9500

Professor Abbe Smith

WASHINGTON, D.C. - As a second-year law student in 1980, Abbe Smith had no idea that her first case would be her most memorable one. In her new book, "Case of a Lifetime: A Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Story" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Georgetown Law Professor Smith tells the story of her attempt to free a woman who would spend 28 years in prison for robbery and murder.

"It remains the most haunting miscarriage of justice I have ever encountered," said Smith.

Smith met Patsy Kelly Jarrett in 1980, three years after Kelly was sentenced to life in prison for driving the getaway car in a 1973 felony-murder in upstate New York. Convinced that Kelly, whose conviction was based on eyewitness testimony, was innocent, Smith agreed to take on her case and became a tireless advocate over the next 25 years in trying to secure her freedom.

Smith describes her growing affection for Kelly during these years and her struggle to separate her professional responsibilities from her personal feelings. "Kelly showed me that sometimes -- not often, but sometimes -- being a good lawyer also means being a good friend, no matter how uncomfortable I am with the idea," Smith notes.

Smith also discusses her attempt to come to terms with the fact that it was a parole, not her own efforts, that finally gained Kelly’s prison release in 2005. "I confess that I struggled with a feeling of anticlimax," she writes. "I was tormented by the idea that Kelly might have been paroled even if I had done nothing, if I had never come back into her life."

Publishers Weekly says, "The book’s strength is Smith’s openness about her life as a criminal defense attorney and her sophisticated thinking about the moral and ethical dilemmas criminal lawyers routinely navigate."

A starred Kirkus Review describes "Case of a Lifetime" as "a captivating, emotionally intense investigation of the complicated relationship between truth and the justice system."

"This is an extraordinary, profoundly moving book," notes Anthony Lewis, Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Gideon’s Trumpet." "I know of no other book that says as much about a defense lawyer's motivations, self-doubt, frustrations. I finished it with tears in my eyes."

Sister Helen Prejean, author of "Dead Man Walking," says, "this is a substantial work: intelligent, subtle and honest. I couldn’t put the book down."

An essay by Smith adapted from "Case of a Lifetime" appeared in the Washington Post Magazine on June 29, 2008.

Smith, who came to Georgetown Law in 1996, is the co-director of the Criminal Justice Clinic and E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship Program. From 1990 to 1996, she taught at Harvard Law, where she was education director and later deputy director of the Criminal Justice Institute. She has also taught at City University of New York School of Law, Temple University School of Law and American University Washington College of Law. In 2005 and 2006, Smith was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Melbourne Law School in Australia. From 1982 to 1990, she was a trial attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia.

 

About Georgetown University Law Center 

Georgetown University Law Center is one of the world's premier law schools. It has the largest full-time faculty in the nation and is pre-eminent in several areas, including constitutional, international, tax and clinical law. Drawing on its Jesuit heritage, it has a strong tradition of public service and is dedicated to the principle that law is but a means, justice is the end. With this principle in mind, Georgetown Law has built an environment that cultivates an exchange of ideas and the pursuit of academic excellence. It brings together an extraordinarily varied group of teachers, scholars and practitioners, as well as an outstanding student body representing more than 60 countries.

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