In a 40-year law career, Richard Kammen has stood before judges and juries to defend people accused of despicable crimes.He's represented a teenage boy suspected of killing a pregnant 16-year-old girl, a woman convicted of running a baby adoption scam and a former state trooper accused of cold-bloodedly murdering his wife and children.
Along the way, he's built a national reputation for defending people facing execution for their crimes. As recently as last year, he persuaded a jury to spare the life of a man convicted of gunning down an armored truck employee during a heist.
But the 65-year-old Kammen, known to colleagues as "Rick," may be facing his biggest challenge yet: He's the lead attorney for the accused terrorist charged in the planning and preparation for the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, a bombing that killed 17 sailors and wounded several dozen others.
Abd al-Rahim Hussein Mohammed Al-Nashiri of Saudi Arabia is scheduled to stand trial in November 2012 in a military court at Guantanamo Bay, where he's being held with dozens of other suspected terrorists.
Many people and even some lawyers might recoil from having contact with someone associated with such evil. To Kammen, it's simply about seeing humans rather than crimes.
"I think you have to see people as more than the worst thing they've ever done," Kammen said.
"I have seen people who have certainly been accused of doing horrific things, but who have shown tremendous courage and tremendous grace and really some sensitivity. I think people are more complex than how we want to simplify them."
Kammen first gained notoriety in the 1970s and 1980s in Indianapolis for successfully defending the First Amendment rights of shops to sell adult materials. Since the 1980s, he's become one of the most prominent lawyers in death-penalty cases. In 35 cases in which he was lead attorney, none of his clients has been sentenced to death.
He was a public defender during his first case. Ed Robert Anderson was charged with murdering two people during a robbery spree in Indianapolis in 1977. He was found not guilty of both murders in 1983, though the jury convicted him of attempted murder, three counts of armed robbery and criminal confinement.
Now Kammen is a go-to guy in federal cases. But nearly 25 years ago, he got the job simply by meeting a few qualifications. When Congress passed a capital punishment statute in 1988, officials began looking for defense attorneys with experience in federal court who had defended clients in local death-penalty cases. And, Kammen says, a willingness to travel was a must.
"There really weren't very many of us at that time who fit the mold," he said.
Criminal attorneys who defend clients accused of the most heinous crimes, legal experts say, must set aside their feelings.
"When you have a client you on a personal level might find morally reprehensible," said Fran Watson, a law professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, "you have to be skilled at setting aside your personal judgments. You are representing a client within the construct of the law and ethics, and once you step into that box, if you find you can't handle it, you have to get out."
Former drug pusher Steve Keller was touched when Kammen treated him with respect and honesty. Keller, 42, pleaded guilty in 2007 to conspiracy to possess and distribute 215 pounds of marijuana in a drug-trafficking case. He served a couple of years in prison instead of the 40 he faced.
Keller remembers that every sentence Kammen uttered in court was carefully crafted to deliver the most impact. But the attention to detail stood out the most.
"He knew everything about me in a short period of time -- seven days," Keller said. "I don't have a clue how, to this day."
And one more thing. Kammen hired Keller's daughter -- a student at IUPUI -- this year as a summer intern. A teenager in high school in 2007, she had mentioned she was interested in attending college. Kammen told her to look him up if that happened.
"He's an exceptional man and an exceptional attorney," Keller said. "He's not what I expected, because of the tags attorneys have."
But prosecutors tell a different story.
Former Marion County Prosecutor Scott Newman won't forget the unpleasant feeling he'd get when Kammen walked into a courtroom. Indianapolis has its share of hard-nosed lawyers -- James Voyles, Robert Hammerle, Monica Foster -- but Newman says Kammen is in a class of his own.
The highly competitive Kammen is not the type to have a drink with prosecutors at the end of the day. He doesn't chat during court recesses and doesn't make small talk in the courthouse hallways.
Newman does recall one conversation in 1986, his first year as a deputy prosecutor. Kammen told him exactly how he was going to beat him -- and then he did it.
"He is very good, he is very thorough, and he is no fun to deal with," Newman said, adding, "It was like knowing you were going to have a colonoscopy."
Kammen has been known to stand during prosecutors' arguments in court, hands in pockets, head bowed to the floor, shoulders rocking gently with silent, mocking laughter.
"It's very disconcerting," said Newman.
Kammen's peers say he's cordial enough -- until he's in court. Standing before a jury and judge, he's confrontational, accusatory, intimidating. He peppers police officers and prosecutors with sharp questions to cast doubt on how they've investigated his clients.
"The world according to Rick," Newman said, "is like this: The defendant may or may not be a terrorist, a child molester or a murderer. But so what? We know for sure that the prosecutor is a scoundrel and a reprobate, not to be trusted!"
Those tactics appear to influence juries. In a three-month federal trial last year in Detroit, Kammen persuaded a jury to spare convicted killer Tim O'Reilly's life. During a heist, O'Reilly shot armored car employee Norman Stephens in the back, killing him, after he was already wounded and on the ground.
O'Reilly reportedly showed no remorse in the years since, and boasted he would beat the charges.
Despite pressure from prosecutors and Stephens' family, the jury gave O'Reilly life without parole instead of lethal injection. Kammen wove the picture of a man who was the product of a bad childhood and easily manipulated by cohorts in the crime.
U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts presided over that trial, and she noted Kammen's expertise at jury selection and his thorough understanding of the case.
"Mr. Kammen, I thought, was incredibly skilled during the jury selection process in trying to . . . find out what made them tick, whether they were compassionate, empathetic, whether they could stomach the testimony they were going to hear, whether they would regard his client as a human being even though he is accused of crimes that are quite heinous."
Voyles, a prominent Indianapolis criminal attorney, said lawyers enjoy the challenge presented by high-profile cases. And death-penalty cases, he said, have different stakes.
"Success in Rick's cases is to save the guy's life," Voyles said. "Some people say that's not much, but yes, it is, if it's your life on the line."
But none of Kammen's clients has been charged with doing anything more horrific than Al-Nashiri, the accused terrorist.
The Department of Defense appointed Kammen to defend Al-Nashiri at trial this year. Kammen had represented Al-Nashiri since 2008 at the request of the John Adams Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. The project provided death-penalty-qualified lawyers to assist military lawyers in representing high-value detainees.
Al-Nashiri, 46, is accused of coordinating the suicide bombing of the USS Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, while it was refueling in Aden, Yemen. Two men boarded a small boat laden with explosives and rammed the warship, blowing a 30-foot-by-30-foot hole in its side.
He's also implicated in planning a failed strike on USS The Sullivans in Aden in January 2000 and of an attack on a French oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden in 2002.
He has been in U.S. custody for nine years at Guantanamo Bay and other CIA "black sites," where he has been waterboarded and subjected to mock executions. The case of Al-Nashiri, who appeared in public for the first time at a hearing Nov. 9, is the first death-penalty case to be tried in a military commission under President Barack Obama.
"The allegations are that he was a lieutenant to Osama bin Laden," Kammen said. "We don't have discovery yet, so I don't really know what evidence the government has."
And what of Al-Nashiri?
"I'm not allowed to discuss anything he has told me," Kammen said, "but he is certainly a person with feelings and a heart. We tend to see people in terms of black and white. . . . This is not a one-dimensional person."
Kammen says he's being sincere. After spending endless hours with defendants, he says, he gets to know them as people.
"In the end," Kammen says, "you're helping people. Sometimes you're helping people through the worst times of their lives. Sometimes you're helping people through situations where there really is no good resolution."
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