Legal Ethics Forum

Barristers, Law Clerks, and Fees (Oh, My)

Several decades ago, an American client asked me to help recruit some British barristers for an international project.  I flew to London and met in chambers with a QC and a junior, and we discussed other barristers who might be interested in joining the group.  After about thirty minutes, the conversation veered oddly off course, as the two barristers began talking about the need for “cases of claret.”  One of the possible recruits liked a particular type of claret, another one preferred some other claret, and they all seemed to be interested in acquiring it only by the case.  They went on this way for a good twenty minutes, matching barristers to claret and commenting on how many cases of claret each one usually brought home.

Finally, it dawned on me.  “Oh,” I said, in a direct manner that made my Chicago upbringing even more obvious, “you’re talking about money.”

The room fell deadly silent, as if I had uttered some unforgivable vulgarity in relation to the royal family. (This was in the days before scandal and divorce had rocked the institution, which was still spoken of in hushed and reverential tones.)

The junior barrister tensed in his chair, giving every indication that I had triggered the “fight or flight” reflex.  It was as though he had been surprised in a bordello raid, and was trying to decide whether to demand a search warrant from the constable or bolt for the back door.

The QC at first appeared paralyzed; his vigorously ruddy complexion having turned deathly ashen. Obviously shaken, he eventually stirred.  “Well, well,” he said, “that’s enough of that. Perhaps you should speak with the clerk.”  There was no more talk of claret, or money.  If my client had not been so internationally prominent, I am quite sure that I would have been shown the door.

Such was my introduction to the British law clerk – a combination major domo, operations manager, and bill collector, whose function bears no resemblance to legal or judicial clerks in the United States.  I was put in mind of this story by an outstanding article about the British law clerk institution recently published on Bloomberg.com.  It appears to have changed only slightly since the days of Charles Dickens.  Here are a couple of paragraphs:

Clerks are by their own cheerful admission “wheeler-dealers,” what Americans might call hustlers. They take a certain pride in managing the careers of their bosses, the barristers—a breed that often combines academic brilliance with emotional fragility. Many barristers regard clerks as their pimps. Some, particularly at the junior end of the profession, live in terror of clerks. The power dynamic is baroque and deeply English, with a naked class divide seen in few other places on the planet. Barristers employ clerks, but a bad relationship can strangle their supply of cases. In his 1861 novel Orley Farm, Anthony Trollope described a barrister’s clerk as a man who “looked down from a considerable altitude on some men who from their professional rank might have been considered as his superiors.”

Fountain Court is among the most prestigious groups in London practicing commercial law, the branch that deals with business disputes. One day last summer, Taylor gave a tour of the premises, just north of the River Thames. The waiting room had been recently remodeled, with upholstered sofas, low tables, and asymmetrically hung pictures that called to mind an upmarket hotel. Taylor explained that the barristers had tried to walk an aesthetic line between modernity and the heritage that clients expect of people who are sometimes still required to wear a horsehair wig to court. Barristers are self-employed; chambers are a traditional way for them to band together to share expenses, though not profits. The highest-ranking members, barristers who’ve achieved the rank of Queen’s Counsel, are nicknamed silks, after the plush material used to make their robes. But even the silks cannot practice without the services of clerks, who operate from a designated room in each chambers, matching the ability and availability of barristers to solicitors in need.

You can read the entire article, “The Exquisitely English and Amazingly Lucrative World of London Clerks,” by Simon Akam, here.

[Cross-posted from The Faculty Lounge]

AALS Section on Professional Responsibility Call for Papers – The Ethics of Legal Education – 2018 AALS Annual Meeting

Call for Papers

AALS Section on Professional Responsibility

The Ethics of Legal Education

2018 AALS Annual Meeting

San Diego, CA

January 3-6, 2018

The Section on Professional Responsibility is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the Section’s 2018 Program: The Ethics of Legal Education. In addition to featuring invited speakers (Professor Joan Howarth, Dean Andrew Perlman, and Dean Daniel Rodriguez), we will select up to two speakers from this call.

This panel will explore the ethical challenges U.S. law schools have faced during the past decade and will consider the path ahead. Speakers will address various subjects that may include: alternative and accelerated degree programs, for-profit law schools, accreditation decisions, admissions and scholarship practices, employment issues, and litigation filed by students and alumni against law schools. The panel will explore the factors that have influenced ethical and values-based decision-making, leadership challenges, and how law school leaders' ethics and values in this area may influence the future of the legal education and the legal profession. 

Participants need not write a paper, but will have the option to publish a paper if they choose to do so.

Any member of the full-time faculty of an AALS member school may submit a 500-1500 word proposal by August 15, 2017 to Renee Knake at [email protected]. The title of the email submission should read: Submission – 2018 AALS Section on Professional Responsibility.

The Planning Committee for the Annual Meeting of the Section on Professional Responsibility will review all submissions and select up to two papers by September 1, 2017. Please note that all faculty members presenting at the program are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

Any questions should be directed to 2018 Program Co-chairs Renee Knake at [email protected] or Paula Schaefer at [email protected].

Flynn's 5th Am. Claim Will Not Protect Him

General Flynn has reportedly declined to comply with a subpoena for documents, citing the 5th amendment's privilege against self-incrimination. But the privilege does not protect the documents here. At most it will protect the act of producing the documents, which can be communicative, not the documents themselves. The act of producing them in response to subpoena communicates that Flynn has them and admits that the documents produced are those the subpoena describes. A limited grant of immunity for the act of production will eliminate the 5th amendment claim. Nor will a limited grant of immunity for the act of production impede the broader investigation. All Flynn will get is delay.

Applying Rule 8.4(g) to Closing Arguments

According to the ABA Journal, a Tennessee lawyer representing a defendant charged with rape made the following comment in closing argument: 

"People can be very good at lying. Women can be especially good at it because they’re the weaker sex . . . and we want to protect them and not have anybody take advantage of them, at least I do."

Does this remark violate ABA Model Rule 8.4(g)? As we know, Rule 8.4(g) prohibits a lawyer from knowingly engaging in “harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status” in the practice of law. The Comment to Rule 8.4 defines discrimination to include harmful verbal conduct that manifests bias or prejudice and defines harassment to include derogatory or demeaning verbal conduct. Rule 8.4(g) does not preclude “legitimate” advocacy on a client’s behalf.

Did the ABA intend Rule 8.4(g) to govern comments in closing argument designating the members of a protected group as natural born liars?

The jury of nine women and three men acquitted the defendant.

Use of Titles by Retired Judges

[Cross-posted from The Faculty Lounge]

My earlier post on Andrew Napolitano got mixed responses, with some readers (and tweeters) comparing his use of “Judge” to the fairly common practice of using honorifics for former senators, governors, and other office holders.  Let me suggest that there is a difference, depending on the nature of the former office.  Everyone understands that governors and senators have always been political figures, so there is no exploitation when they use their former titles for political purposes.  Nobody expects Pres. Bill Clinton to be anything other than a partisan Democrat.

Judges, on the other hand, are supposed to be objective and politically neutral.  (Yes, I know that is not strictly true, but many citizens still idealize judges and certainly respect them more than mere politicians.)  Consequently, the use of a formerly-held judicial honorific can appear to lend greater weight to a political or legal argument, even decades after the individual has left the bench.  Even in situations where individuals are entitled to call themselves whatever they want, I think that media organizations, as a matter of discretion, ought to omit judicial honorifics for former judges.  That is the practice of The New York Times, The Hill, and other organizations, which use honorifics sparingly in all circumstances.

But if the Napolitano situation isn’t persuasive, let me raise another example.

As many readers know, Graham Spanier, the former president of Penn State University, was convicted in March of misdemeanor child endangerment, growing out of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal.  Spanier had earlier been forced out of office following an investigation led by former federal judge and FBI director Louis Freeh.  In the aftermath of the Spanier conviction, Freeh issued a written statement condemning Spanier (who had yet to be sentenced and announced that he planned to appeal) and two co-defendants who pled guilty.  He also called for the resignation of current Penn State president Eric Barron and two members of the board of trustees.  The caption on the statement reads:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 24, 2017

STATEMENT OF JUDGE LOUIS FREEH UPON THE JURY CONVICTION OF FORMER PSU PRESIDENT SPANIER FOR CHILD ENDANGERMENT

I have no quarrel with Freeh’s decision to make post-conviction comments on the Spanier case – which I have not followed – but I think he is exploiting his former office by continuing to call himself “Judge,” the purpose of which is obviously to add greater weight to his opinion, including the defense of his own investigation:

These very sad criminal convictions also completely confirm and verify all the findings and facts which my team and I established after an exhaustive investigation commissioned by the then-PSU board.

If you don’t think it was wrong to issue this statement as “Judge Louis Freeh,” imagine that he had instead issued it as “FBI Director Freeh,” without indicating that he no longer holds the office.  And if you agree that the latter would have been wrong, why would the judicial honorific be acceptable?

The Freeh statement was reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the AP and the local press in State College, none of which referred to him as “Judge.” They did describe him as “former FBI director,” although only once in each article, which I think is appropriate.

I am not making a blanket argument against the use of former titles, but I do think that judges hold a unique position in our society.  Although they may use their honorifics for purposes other than the practice of law, I suggest that reporters and commentators ought to follow the practice of the New York Times and leave judicial titles out of it.

The Defense of Rasmea Yousef Odeh -- Part Four: Supporters

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of posts about the Trial of Rasmea Odeh, cross posted from The Faculty Lounge. Part One is here; Part Two is here; Part Three is here.  This post addresses the responses of Odeh’s supporters to her guilty plea.

It was understandable that Odeh would be treated as a hero among pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel groups in the United States.  Having spent ten years in an Israeli prison, she was naturally hailed as a symbol of resistance, and her many years as a well-known community activist in Chicago provided her with an additional base of support.  Her indictment and arrest for naturalization fraud added a further element to the story, making her, in the words of her defense committee, “an example of government repression waged against oppressed nationalities, anti-war, social justice, and international solidarity activists.”

Odeh’s claims of innocence, torture, and PTSD were predictably taken at face value by her supporters, who rejected even the possibility that she had actually participated in the Jerusalem supermarket bombing that took the lives of two Hebrew University students.  The substantial evidence of her guilt – including statements of two of her collaborators in an Arabic language television documentary – was simply disregarded in favor of a narrative of victimization.

Among many others, the feminist leader and Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour has expressed her support for Odeh, who was included among the organizers of the post-inauguration Women’s March in Washington, D.C.  According to the noted academic and journalist Marc Lamont Hill, “every black activist should stand with Rasmea Odeh.” She had been “railroaded for her commitment to justice,” said Hill, because she had not been allowed to present her trauma-based defense to naturalization fraud.

Odeh’s plea agreement should have caused her supporters to think twice.  Contrary to her earlier claim -- as explained by her attorney to the appellate court – that “she didn’t actually recall the crime,” Odeh now admitted that she had knowingly made false and illegal statements during her naturalization interview. There had been no PTSD, and no railroad.

There are two ways to respond to a crisis in faith.  One is to reevaluate your earlier beliefs; the other is to construct an elaborate system of denial.  Odeh’s supporters chose the latter approach. Rather than accept the fact that she had all along been guilty of lying in her naturalization interview, Odeh’s defense committee blamed the conviction on “zionist Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Tukel,” who represented the government at the plea hearing (non-capitalization in original), as did the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Speaking at a post-plea rally, Brant Rosen of Jewish Voice for Peace reassured Odeh that “you are not guilty. Your strength and your courage and your kindness and your compassion really teaches all of us how to be in this world.”

As explained by The Electronic Intifada, Odeh was coerced into pleading guilty due to the “current, racist political climate” in the U.S., which made her “prospects for a fair trial . . . slimmer than ever.”  Here is how Rebecca Wilkomerson, of Jewish Voice for Peace, put it, when explaining why JVP invited Odeh to speak at its biennial convention, even following her guilty plea:

It may give readers who were horrified by the appointment of Jeff Sessions, who has a long history of being accused of racism, as Attorney General pause to consider that Odeh is giving up her fight to retain her United States citizenship because she does not believe she can receive a fair trial under the current administration.

You cannot get much deeper into denial than that. Odeh’s trial dilemma was not caused by the new Department of Justice leadership, but rather by her own disingenuous testimony at her first trial, which stood in contradiction to her claim of PTSD induced memory failure.  It is true that the government had filed a superseding indictment that added several counts based on her terrorism conviction in Israel, but that was done in December, 2016, when the DOJ was still being run by Loretta Lynch and Barack Obama. 

In fact, the trial landscape was basically unchanged.  The venire would still be drawn from the Eastern District of Michigan, which is certainly one of the most liberal jury pools in the United States, and the trial judge was still Gershwin Drain, a former federal defender who was appointed by President Obama.  The Sixth Circuit panel that unanimously reversed Odeh’s first conviction included one Democrat and two Republicans, with one of the latter writing the strongest opinion in her favor.

It is convenient, of course, for Odeh to say “Sessions made me do it,” and it is even more convenient for her enablers to believe her.  But the truth is that she pled guilty because she is guilty, all rationalizations aside.

The Defense of Rasmea Yousef Odeh -- Part Three: Legal Ethics

This is the third of four installments, cross posted from The Faculty Lounge, in a series of posts about the Trial of Rasmea Odeh. Part One is here; Part Two is here.  This post addresses issues of ethics and responsibility as raised by Odeh’s guilty plea.

Defense counsel Michael Deutsch did an outstanding job in representing Rasmea Odeh, eventually succeeding in persuading the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to allow testimony that his client’s alleged torture in Israel “gave her chronic PTSD and that this disorder operated to automatically filter out Odeh's time in Israel, causing Odeh to interpret questions so as to avoid any thought of her trauma.”  According to Deutsch’s argument, “Odeh employed a protective mechanism that narrowed her focus in reading and hearing the criminal history questions,” so that she considered only events that occurred in the United States. She therefore actually answering truthfully when she denied that she had ever been arrested, charged, or imprisoned, notwithstanding the ten years she’d spent in an Israeli prison.

And then, having secured a new trial on the basis of the skillfully presented PTSD theory, Deutsch turned around and signed a negotiated plea agreement, conceding that the PTSD story had been a sham all along.  It turned out, as Odeh admitted and Deutsch acknowledged, that she did not have PTSD, had not misunderstood the naturalization questions, and had intentionally provided false answers.   Was it ethical for an attorney to raise such a defense, given that its factual underpinnings were untrue?

First, we should recognize that Odeh herself cannot be faulted for either proceeding to trial (in the first place) or pleading guilty (following the reversal of her initial conviction).  As a criminal defendant, Odeh was always entitled to require the government to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt and to appeal her conviction on the basis of evidentiary errors. Afterward, she was equally entitled to enter a guilty plea, if she determined that was in her best interest – which it surely was, given the certainty of conviction – and it was her lawyer’s obligation to represent her effectively at each stage of the process.  Of course, Odeh was not entitled to lie when she testified at the first trial (as clearly appears to have happened), which explains why the government evidently insisted on a full and detailed admission of guilt as a condition of the negotiated plea agreement. In any case, it is hardly unusual for a desperate defendant to come up with a conveniently exculpatory story.

What about lawyers?  Here we must bear in mind the government’s burden in every criminal case, which is to prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  It is therefore defense counsel’s job to raise all reasonable doubts by presenting admissible evidence (or arguing the absence of evidence). 

According to Rule 3.1 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, an attorney may always defend a criminal case so “as to require that every element of the case be established.” Consequently, it is sometimes said that the prosecution must “exclude every reasonable hypothesis of innocence,” which in Odeh’s case would apply to the hypothesis of PTSD.  In other words, Deutsch was operating as a classic defense lawyer when he raised the possibility – that is, the hypothesis – that Odeh had been unable to answer the naturalization questions accurately due to events in her past, at which point it would have become the government’s burden to refute the theory beyond a reasonable doubt. 

And that would be true even if Deutsch did not himself believe the PTSD theory. That is another classic precept of criminal defense ethics, dating back at least to the 18^th Century, when James Boswell asked Samuel Johnson how he could justify “supporting a cause which you know to be bad.” Johnson’s famous reply has survived the test of time:

Sir, you do not know it to be good or bad until the judge determines it. . . . An argument which does not convince yourself, may convince the Judge to which you urge it; and if it does convince him, why, then, Sir, you are wrong and he is right. It is his business to judge; and you are not to be confident in your own opinion that a cause is bad, but to say all you can for your client, and then hear the Judge’s opinion.

Given Odeh’s claims of trauma and memory lapse, and the existence of a clinical psychologist who applied the automatic filtering theory to Odeh’s naturalization answers, it was well within bounds for Deutsch to advance the PTSD defense in Odeh’s trial and appeal, even if he had doubts about it (or flatly disbelieved it) himself. 

Matters would be different, of course, if Deutsch had colluded with his client and the psychologist simply to fabricate the PTSD story.  The right to present a defense does not include the right to invent false testimony. Rule 1.2 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides that a lawyer may not “counsel” or “assist” a client in committing fraud, and Rule 3.3 explicitly adds that an attorney may not “offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false.” 

Lawyers for guilty defendants are regularly questioned about their ethics, so it is important to understand the centrality of “reasonable doubt” to the criminal justice system. The standard would be meaningless if lawyers could not raise hypotheses of innocence. Assuming (as I do) that Michael Deutsch did not participate in contriving the sham PTSD story for Odeh, he was well within the rules to present it as an argument in court.  It was always the government’s burden to prove that Odeh understood the questions at her naturalization interview, which included refuting the hypothesis of PTSD.  When the PTSD theory was shown to be illogical and unsupportable, Deutsch did the right thing by negotiating a guilty plea, including his written acknowledgement that Odeh’s trauma claim had been false.

The same cannot be said, however, for Odeh’s supporters and enablers, as will be discussed in Part Four.

The Defense of Rasmea Yousef Odeh -- Part Two: The Guilty Plea

This is the second of four posts on the Rasmea Odeh case, cross posted from The Faculty Lounge. Part One is here. This installment discusses the circumstances of Odeh's guilty plea.

Represented by the estimable Michael Deutsch, Odeh succeeded in obtaining a new trial following her 2014 conviction for naturalization fraud. The appellate court held that it had been error to exclude expert testimony on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which supported the defense that she had “automatically” filtered out her entire time in Israel when she answered questions about her past arrest, conviction, sentence, and imprisonment for terrorist bombings.  At the new trial, Odeh would have been allowed to testify to her alleged torture at the hands of the Israeli police, and to present evidence that the resulting PTSD had led to her to innocently provide incorrect answers in her naturalization proceeding.

Rather than take that opportunity, however, Odeh pled guilty on April 25, accepting a sentence of time served, along with revocation of her U.S. citizenship and deportation to an as yet undetermined country. As part of her guilty plea, Odeh signed a 27 page agreement in which she admitted to making eight false statements on her visa and citizenship applications. Moreover, she admitted that:

She made the false statements intentionally and not as a result of any mistake, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or any other psychological issue or condition or for any innocent reason, and notwithstanding any other statement or testimony Defendant Odeh may have made at any other time regarding those answers.

In addition,

At the time she made the false statements, Defendant knew that it was unlawful for her to provide false information to the United States Department of State and to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services in connection with her application for Immigrant Visa and her application for naturalization.

In other words, the whole PTSD story had been a contrivance.  Odeh admitted that her alleged PTSD had not caused her to answer the naturalization questions incorrectly, and that she had known all along that she was intentionally lying in order to obtain U.S. citizenship.

A question remains: Why did Odeh plead guilty and admit lying rather than present the PTSD defense – for which Deutsch argued so effectively to the appellate court – in a second jury trial?  One obvious answer is that there was a stark conflict between the PTSD theory and her actual testimony at the first trial.  Odeh told the first jury that she recalled the naturalization interview and denied that she had been advised that the questions covered “anywhere in the world.” Thus, she consciously understood the questions as referring only to her time in the U.S.  That would have been contradicted by her expert’s claim that she had subconsciously “filtered out” everything related to Israel, answering “automatically” that she had never been arrested or convicted anywhere.  The two stories were jointly untenable, as the prosecution would have been certain to point out at a second trial.

A further problem for the defense was the existence of an Arabic language television documentary, in which Odeh had essentially admitted planting a bomb at the British consulate in Jerusalem (it failed to explode), and in which two other Palestinian women discussed Odeh’s leadership in the supermarket bombing.  This evidence was not offered in the first trial because it was irrelevant in the absence of the PTSD claim, but the prosecution clearly intended to offer it – and was preparing to subpoena the Palestinian witnesses – for the retrial (there was also physical evidence of her participation in the bombings).  In other words, Odeh had talked herself into a corner, and was facing devastating impeachment no matter how the retrial proceeded.

Odeh would not have been the first criminal defendant to end up contradicting her lawyer’s best efforts, nor was she the first to make up a story in order to get out of a jam.  People in serious trouble do desperate things, and truth is all too easily sacrificed in favor of expedience. After all, that is how Odeh obtained her U.S. citizenship in the first place, and there is no reason to have expected more of her as she tried to keep it.

But what about Odeh’s lawyer and supporters?  Michael Deutsch also signed the plea agreement acknowledging that the PTSD defense had been groundless, and Odeh’s supporters continue to make claims about her innocence.  That will be the subject of the next and final post.

NOTE ON SPELLING: Odeh's supporters typically refer to her by her first name, spelling it "Rasmea."  I have primarily used her last name, as I would with any other public figure. For those who want to search further, Odeh's first name is spelled "Rasmieh" on most official documents, including the indictment and judicial opinion.

The Defense of Rasmea Yousef Odeh -- Part One: Background

This a four-part post is about the defense tactics of the lawyers and supporters of Rasmea Yousef Odeh, cross-posted from The Faculty Lounge. Part One is background:

Although the Odeh case has generated great controversy, there has never actually been any real dispute about the central facts.  After spending ten years in an Israeli prison for the terrorist bombing of a supermarket in Jerusalem, Odeh emigrated from Jordan to the United States, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen in 2004.  Odeh, however, did not tell the truth on her initial visa and citizenship applications, falsely stating, among other things, that she had never been convicted of a crime.  The citizenship application was unambiguous, including the following questions (capitalization in original):

Have you EVER been arrested, cited, or detained by any law enforcement officer (including INS and military officers), for any reason?

Have you EVER been charged with committing any crime or offense?

Have you EVER been convicted of a crime or offense?

Have you EVER been in jail or prison?

Odeh answered “no” to all of those questions under oath, even though she had been sentenced to  life imprisonment for the murder of two Hebrew University students who were killed in the supermarket bombing, as well as her participation in an unsuccessful bombing of the British consulate. (Her early release had been part of a prisoner exchange for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon, and she also falsely omitted the fact that she had lived in Lebanon after she was freed). In 2013, Odeh was indicted and arrested for felony naturalization fraud, which can result in a lengthy prison sentence, revocation of citizenship, and deportation.

Defending Odeh presented an obvious problem, as there could be no doubt that she had been arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned, thus making all four of her answers (and several others) untruthful.  Even if she had been innocent of the Israeli terrorism charges (which was not the case, in my opinion), her answers on the citizenship application were still glaringly false.

After initial plea discussions broke down, Odeh retained Michael Deutsch, one of the most talented and creative lawyers on the American left, and a veteran of Chicago’s legendary People’s Law Office.  Deutsch and the defense team raised the novel defense that Odeh suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder due to mistreatment at the hands of the Israelis, which had prevented her from properly understanding the questions in the citizenship examination.  Notwithstanding the capitalization of EVER, they claimed that Odeh’s PTSD caused her to think that the question only covered her life in the U.S., and she had thus answered it truthfully.

Despite the evident implausibility of the claim – how could anyone forget having spent ten years in prison? – Deutsch located a clinical psychologist who was willing to testify that Odeh’s PTSD would have “automatically” caused her to “filter out” her entire time in Israel, thus keeping her from answering the questions accurately. The district court, however, excluded the PTSD testimony and the case went to trial in late 2014.

The immigration officer who administered Odeh’s 2004 naturalization proceeding testified that she had repeated the questions from the application, adding “anywhere in the world,” and Odeh had confirmed her answers. Odeh testified that she had misunderstood the questions and had consciously believed that they had referred only to her time in the United States. Contradicting the immigration officer, she denied that the questions had been explained as applying to “anywhere in the world.”  Following a relatively brief deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict.

On appeal, however, the conviction was reversed and remanded because of the trial court's ruling on the admissibility of the PTSD expert. On remand, the district court ordered a new trial in which Odeh's PTSD evidence would be allowed.

This time, however, the plea negotiations were concluded and Odeh pled guilty on April 25, 2017.  The circumstances of the guilty plea will be discussed in Part Two, as a lead-in to the ethics issues.

NOTE ON SPELLING: Odeh's supporters typically refer to her by her first name, spelling it "Rasmea."  I have primarily used her last name, as I would with any other public figure. For those who want to search further, Odeh's first name is spelled "Rasmieh" on most official documents, including the indictment and judicial opinion.