Dial Scheck for Murder

Barry Scheck, across the table and behind a plate of eggs, is talking about his existential dilemma. Not complaining. Talking. Analyzing. Mulling. Expounding in that familiar nasal warble that picks up steam as the triple espresso kicks in. For 23 years Scheck has practiced law, beginning at Legal Aid in the Bronx, donating countless hours, weeks and months to poor clients. In the past five years, Scheck's Innocence Project has used DNA testing to rescue more than 30 men wrongfully imprisoned for rape or rape and murder, six of them from death row. This is what Scheck wants people to know about, the work, he says, that is closest to his heart.

Yet, for all his earnest years of restoring life to lost souls, Scheck knows that most people view him as the sneering New Yorker who helped free O.J. Simpson. More recently, he was derided on the Internet as Babbling Barry, the honking lawyer who defended British au pair Louise Woodward.

Scheck is warring with himself for his own reputation: Saint Scheck, defender of the poor and unknown, versus Scheck the Shark, protector of the celebrity defendant du jour. "They say I'll always be known for Simpson and Woodward, but it's not true," Scheck says, eyes narrowing, emphatic, addressing his audience of one as he would a jury. He thumps the table with his forefinger. "The Innocence Project is what people will remember. It will far outlast anything that came out of the Simpson trial. It has a momentum all its own. This will always be there. This will be my legacy."

On a morning shortly after the Woodward trial, Scheck is sitting in a Brooklyn café near his apartment, unshaven, his skin pale, his sharp, hazel eyes tired. He eats his omelette without removing his long blue overcoat or his baseball cap. He says his day is full. He wants to attend a friend's lecture at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he has taught for 19 years. He has students to meet, memos to write. He may fly to Washington to appear on Larry King Live. Before breakfast, Scheck says that he has only 45 minutes to an hour to spare. But he will talk for more than three hours.

He talks about the evolution of his career, how his clients have included antinuke protesters, black radicals, convicted rapists, IRA sympathizers and Hedda Nussbaum. He recounts how he and his legal cohort Peter Neufeld penetrated the nearly impenetrable world of DNA fingerprinting, with its mind-numbing language of alleles, autorads (continued on page 106)Barry Scheck(continued from page 80) and polymorphic loci.

Oh, and--don't you know?--he has also written screenplays. Three of them. Two were sold to Hollywood, including Doin' the Dozens, a never-made farce in which the heroes, con men named Sam and Barney, devise a game show in which various social groups insult one another. Mexicans versus Mormons. Blacks versus Jewish American Princesses. Mobsters versus Shiite Muslims. Gays versus Hell's Angels. Scheck's buddy and co-author, Harold Rosenthal, chuckles while describing the plot over the phone, but Scheck won't give up the script for a reading. "Too dark," he says, grinning.

Instead, he talks about his father the tap dancer, who hosted a television show and managed such stars as Connie Francis and Bobby Darin. He recites the list of bands that performed at Woodstock--the original, which he attended until the very end, when Jimi Hendrix played the national anthem. His eyes fill with tears as he recalls how, when he was 11 years old, he escaped a horrific fire that killed his younger sister, caused his father to have a heart attack and destroyed his mother's capacity to experience joy.

Only one subject turns Barry Scheck testy: Orenthal James Simpson. Scheck refuses to say whether he attended a reunion dinner that O.J. hosted with Johnnie Cochran in New York last October to celebrate the second anniversary of Simpson's acquittal. "Scheck and Neufeld were there," Cochran confirmed. "It was a great night. We talked about what the case had meant to us. It was magnificent, touching for everyone."

Scheck becomes most irritated when questioned about Simpson's innocence. "Why are you asking me about that?" he snaps. "I don't want to talk about that." For a moment he seems on the verge of walking out. Then he answers, as if by rote, voice low, eyes distant: "All a lawyer can say is, I don't know, I wasn't there. But look at the evidence. We raised the questions for there to be reasonable doubt." A pause. "I don't know the answer. Never pretend to."

More than anything, the Simpson trial launched Scheck as a celebrity, a veritable Perry Mason with a schnoz. Strangers call his name when he walks through airports or down streets, and when he goes to Yankee Stadium. "Yo, Barry! If we kill the ump, will you get us off?" one shouted. Others curse and tell him that he should be ashamed. Fame has forced Scheck into the awkward new role of managing his public persona.

One Sunday in November, having returned to New York from Woodward's trial, Scheck planned to watch Cochran preach at a Brooklyn church attended by their new big-name client, Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant allegedly tortured by New York police. But the prospect of encountering reporters and photographers makes Scheck queasy. "I'm not going," he says. He doesn't want to divert attention from Louima. He doesn't know who might be there--fringe political activists or the clot of bickering lawyers who had latched on to Louima's cause. He doesn't want to get caught on film shaking hands with the wrong person.

Yet, when the hour arrives, the entertainer's son who harbored unsated fantasies of singing and dancing on his dad's TV show cannot stay away from the spotlight. Scheck not only shows up but sits in the front pew, clapping as Cochran introduces himself to the throng with his favorite couplet: "Let me tell you that I can still say, 'If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.' " After a brief press conference, the purpose of which seems only to declare that the Dream Team has arrived East, Cochran lingers to explain his sermon, which included a recounting of how he found God when he was 11 years old. Scheck bolts out the door.

•

Comedian and Los Angeles-based radio host Harry Shearer is deconstructing how Barry Scheck became a great American punch line, why comics invoke Scheck to tickle their audiences. "For starters, he has the 'k' at the end of his name. 'K' is the comedy consonant. That's why chicken is the comedy bird," Shearer explains. "Scheck's also short. That's funny. And it's the sound of his voice. He's got that New York voice, especially the way he uses it in the courtroom. He's at the other end of the spectrum from Johnnie Cochran, who's like molasses. Barry Scheck is two and a half pounds of smoked salmon. The hair is the only thing that saves him. If he were bald, we could make fun of him forever."

In the weeks during and after the Woodward trial, rants targeting Scheck were a regular feature on talk radio and in the pundits-only sections of newspapers. Under the headline Barry Scheck Blowing Smoke in Your Face, Anne Roiphe, columnist for The New York Observer, wrote: "Put Barry Scheck together with a smoking gun and he'll find six expert witnesses to tell you that the gun is really a pastrami sandwich, and the burning in your eyes is nothing more than an allergic reaction to the prosecution's blowing smoke in your face."

Shearer, on his nationally broadcast Le Show, mimicked O.J. consoling Scheck after Woodward's guilty verdict. "Makes me real grateful I got you when you were fresh," the Simpson character tells him. Saturday Night Live imagined Woodward asking Scheck for a job caring for his children. "Uh, we're not looking for anyone right now," Scheck squeals. The doorbell rings. It's O.J., thanking him for the acquittal. Then the Unabomber knocks. He's looking for a lawyer. So is Terry Nichols.

"I'll never forget that magical night," the Scheck character says, "laughing and singing with Terry Nichols, O.J., the British nanny and the Unabomber. We became the best of friends. Then I woke up and realized that my wife had been stabbed and my baby had been stabbed and my house had been blown up twice. Yes, some people might call that a tragedy, but I call it four new clients. And four new friends."

In truth, Scheck might be pleased to get a new high-profile case, but he would never enjoy himself trying it. Or admit to enjoying himself, anyway. He works long hours, then stays awake fretting about his cases, about whether he is, as he says, living up to his goal of "being a good person and a good lawyer at the same time."

His ego is large, but so is his capacity for self-doubt. He wants you to know that he once won 29 consecutive jury trials. He doesn't want you to know the information came from him.

"Just say I'm good with juries," he says, nodding.

Ask him how he enjoyed that four-day family jaunt to the Caribbean, and he mumbles, "You know, OK."

Ask him how it feels to watch an inmate he has worked to exonerate walk free from prison, and he says, "Exhilarating. Sad in some ways. Humbling. You worry about what will happen to him."

Even in repose, his expression tends toward a scowl.

"He's a man of conflict," says his wife, Dorothy, a social worker. "He's either anxious or depressed. It's rare that he's really happy."

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Scheck likes to think of himself as an accidental celebrity who, at 48, unwittingly finds himself in fame's fun house. "You become a toon. You have an identity that has nothing to do with who you are," he whines, though it's only a slight whine. "You cease being a person. You become a projection in pop culture. Your life becomes a caricature that has nothing to do with reality." As exhibit A, he recalls a joke Jay Leno told in which Scheck hires Woodward to shake money from his clients' pockets. The implication is that he's getting rich off his work. "Basically, I'm a public-interest lawyer," he says. "Everything I've ever done is consistent with that."

True, most of his clients don't qualify for the country club set. There were the striking tomato-farm workers in California, for whom Scheck did legal work after he graduated from law school. There were the 170 demonstrators whose trespassing charges were dismissed in 1980 after they invaded a nuclear power plant. Scheck was part of the defense team that won acquittals for the New York Eight, black radicals charged with conspiring to rob Brink's trucks and planning prison escapes. And he helped acquit five men--some called them terrorists, Scheck called them freedom fighters--caught sending a cache of arms to the IRA.

In other words, Barry Scheck knows from pro bono.

Although he won't discuss his fees (unofficial estimates of Scheck's earnings from the Woodward trial top out at $300,000), Scheck possesses all the accessories of a snappy New York life: He drives a Volvo, and sends his 11-year-old daughter, Olivia, to private school and 18-year-old son, Gabriel, to Brown University. He has season tickets to the Knicks and owns a spacious condo in Brooklyn Heights, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Still, Scheck's niche in the legal world, particularly as it existed before he became famous, is hardly lucrative. Dorothy Scheck concedes she has sometimes wished her husband were more interested in corporate law. But Scheck's heart, she says, has never been in his wallet, at least not since they met as college students hitchhiking around Europe. After they dated for three years, she secured a marriage proposal by claiming that her mother was dying (mom's still alive). Scheck finally proposed at a Grateful Dead concert in Berkeley in 1974. (He can't recall the accompanying tune. "I may not have been in my right mind," he says. Ditto for the missus.) There was no honeymoon.

"Money a priority for Barry? Oh, no," Dorothy says, giggling at the suggestion. But don't think her husband's heart is pure, she cautions. "Fame? Power? Yeah, maybe."

Which explains why Scheck isn't altogether unhappy about being mocked as a shark, that soulless mascot for criminal-defense lawyers. There's a flip side to the needling. The man can work a case. He may never find love from vigilante couch potatoes, but in legal circles his reputation as a tenacious, passionate advocate has never been stronger. And his Innocence Project, while relatively unknown to the public, is lauded by colleagues across the country.

"He's damn good," says Harvard law professor Arthur Miller. "He's probably the leading lawyer in the DNA field and one of the best law-science people in the country today. He can make it simple enough for a jury to understand. That's a gift most people don't have. Defense lawyers have always been pilloried; it's how laypeople reverse the presumption of innocence. But God help any citizen who gets in trouble with the law. Who are they going to hire? Caspar Milquetoast? Sally Sap? You want a guy who will get the job done. Right now, Barry is that guy."

Miller's assessment followed the sniping that Scheck suffered last fall after a Massachusetts jury found Louise Woodward guilty of murdering eight-month-old Matthew Eappen. Though judge Hiller Zobel ultimately released the 19-year-old au pair, Scheck considers the jury's rebuke to be the most painful of his career. He had been so confident in the defense's case that he lobbied Zobel to drop the lesser manslaughter charge as an option for the jury. Scheck gambled that the jurors, faced with an all-or-nothing choice, would sympathize with Woodward. He lost.

"I don't think I've ever tried a better case," says Scheck, who is appealing the verdict. "I was stunned. It was like someone had hit me in the stomach. It's a terrible thing for her to live with. For all of us to live with. It was horrible. I won't get over this for years. We proved she didn't do it. The jurors were wrong. They had no right to do what they did."

The trial was unpleasant for other reasons as well. Fifty medical experts ganged up to denounce Scheck's contention that Matthew died because a previous brain injury had somehow started to bleed again. And legal analysts wondered if the jury had soured on Scheck because of his association with Simpson, or because of his badgering courtroom antics. The heckling over Scheck's style even prompted Simpson to call Court TV. "I don't know anyone in America who, if they ever got in trouble, wouldn't want him on their defense team," Simpson said on the air. Scheck snorts when asked about the unsolicited support. "It wasn't helpful," he says.

Scheck's closing argument was a 35-minute attack on the medical evidence against Woodward. "This is a reasonable doubt," Scheck declared, holding up a scan of Matthew's skull that he insisted proved the boy's injuries were old. "This is the end of their case. Period." At the conclusion, Scheck thundered that a defendant is presumed innocent even if "she has been convicted in the press!" He was near tears. "Send this woman home," he said. "All she ever did on February 4 was try to save a child's life."

The intensity of Scheck's effort was moving, and afterward, exhausted, he sank into a chair at the defense table. His closing was also noteworthy for what was missing. Not once did Scheck express empathy with Matthew Eappen's parents. He would do so later, at a press conference after the verdict, but he hadn't in his courtroom finale. Yet if anyone could communicate to a jury a sense of the Eappens' loss, if anyone could convey their bottomless grief, even if in passing to soften an otherwise bristling defense, that person is Barry Scheck.

As a child, Scheck could find his father Saturday nights at seven P.M. by turning on the television. There he was, George Scheck, hair slicked back, the smooth, smiling host of Star Time, a talent show for child singers, dancers and musicians. Barry himself yearned to perform for the camera, but his father declared the stage off-limits. "He hated the rapacious nature of show business," Scheck says. "He didn't want me to get into it unless I had a license to practice law. He said the only people who survived show business were the lawyers."

Scheck's relatives were a raffish cut of Runyonesque New York. His maternal grandmother, an expert card player, went into labor at the poker table. His mother's first cousin Norton Peppis co-owned a popular gin joint in Queens and lost bundles of cash at the racetrack. George's father was a gambler and an alcoholic who raised his eight children in the sagging tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Some days there weren't enough clothes to dress all the kids; some days there wasn't enough food. "It's something of a mystery how they survived," Barry says.

In his early teens, after dropping out of school to work, George befriended a janitor at a neighborhood bank who taught him to tap-dance. Soon, George found fortune in his feet. He signed on as a dancer--a boy hoofer, as they were known--in a vaudeville troupe. He would become one of the few white performers of his generation to dance at Harlem's Apollo Theater, Later, George opened a performance school for kids.

In the early Fifties he launched Star Time. One day a roofer from New Jersey arrived unannounced at George's Midtown office, begging for a tryout for his 12-year-old daughter, Concetta Franconero.

"I'm sorry," George said, "but I'm up to my neck in kid singers."

"But Mr. Scheck, she also plays the accordion."

"OK," Scheck sighed, "I'll listen to her tomorrow."

Good thing, too. The girl eventually changed her name to Connie Francis, and she sold enough records--more than 40 million--to pour a load of money into the bank account of manager Scheck. Scheck also discovered singer Bobby Darin and jazz pianist Hazel Scott. By the mid-Fifties, he had moved his wife, Eleanor, and two children, Barry and Marilyn, from their Queens apartment to a three-bedroom house on Long Island.

Barry relished his new suburban life. He and his younger sister had their own bedrooms. He devoured Hardy Boys detective stories, followed the Yankees and was a gritty shortstop in the Babe Ruth Little League (he didn't lose interest even after an errant fungo crushed the bridge of his nose). The sight of Arnold Palmer on television sent Scheck outside with a seven iron to master the art of launching golf balls over neighbors' roofs.

It was a perfectly comfortable existence that ended abruptly in tragedy. On Thanksgiving eve in 1960, 11-year-old Barry drifted off to sleep while his parents bantered downstairs with friends over preholiday cocktails. The guests left around one A.M. An hour later, Barry awoke suddenly, hot, confused, choking, rubbing his eyes, terrified. His mother burst into his room. The house was on fire.

Eleanor grabbed her son and pushed him downstairs, where flames were devouring the floors, walls and furniture. Scheck says his father, frail from a heart condition, tried to carry Marilyn down the stairs but was forced back by the dense smoke. George ran with Marilyn to his bedroom, where he smashed a window and climbed out onto the roof of the garage, shouting for help. His knees buckled and he collapsed with a heart attack. Eleanor's screams mixed with the wails of arriving fire trucks. Firefighters pulled her husband to safety but were unable to reach seven-year-old Marilyn, who was found on the floor upstairs, her lifeless body wrapped around a pillow.

Barry was taken that night to stay with family friends in Queens. Curt Marder remembers Barry standing in the doorway to his bedroom, in his pajamas, his hair singed and his hands burned from touching superheated doorknobs. "He was totally disoriented," Marder recalls. Scheck would share Curt's room for the next two months while George recuperated and Eleanor struggled to regain her emotional balance.

Curt's parents kept Barry away from the newspapers, which were filled the next morning with adoring stories about president-elect Kennedy and wife Jackie becoming parents to John Jr. Marilyn Scheck's death also made the news. Although no cause was determined, the local paper, Newsday, reported that the fire may have been ignited by a cigarette that fell between the cushions of a couch in the Schecks' den. Two photos showed a cop restraining Eleanor, her face blackened by soot, as she tried to rescue her daughter.

For days Barry wondered what had happened to his sister. No one told him she had died. No one told him about her funeral. "It was hushed up," says Shelly Marder, Curt's sister. "The message was, You used to have a sister, now you don't. They didn't want to deal with the tragedy, how profound it was, how inexplicable it was."

Barry expressed his anguish in bursts. "His parents had taken us for a weekend in the Catskills, and we were playfighting," Curt says. "Barry started choking me. I thought he was pretending, but he wouldn't stop. Tears were coming down his cheeks and he was screaming, 'You don't know what it's like to lose a sister! You don't know what it's like to deal with my family!"'

To this day, Scheck dislikes talking about the fire. After a quick, monosyllabic recounting of what transpired, he says the experience "grew me up pretty fast. It gave me a profound sense that things can go"--he smacks the table--"like that." He wonders how he would have evolved otherwise. "I have this image of a suburban life, where there's a certain amount of happy idiocy," he says. "I probably would have ended up in Hollywood, writing sitcoms." He never recovered. "When people say you'll get over it, that's not true," he says. "If someone cuts off your arm, you don't get over it." Moments later, his eyes brim with tears. He looks away and wipes them with a napkin. "It's very painful," he says, his voice barely audible. "It's embarrassing. It's my business, not necessarily anyone else's"

•

After the fire, the Schecks moved to Manhattan's Upper East Side, where Barry finished junior high at a public school before attending Horace Mann, a private boys' school. He had already begun telling friends of a new ambition: He would become president of the United States. Curt Marder recalls that Barry "was always very emphatic about it. He'd say, 'I want to be president.' " Shelly Marder says Scheck was more specific. "He wanted to be the first Jewish president," she recalls. "It was an ongoing grandiose concept, but there was always an edge of humor. At least, I'd like to think so."

Scheck won't confess to any White House ambition, except to say, "I was intensely interested in politics." His seriousness and drive were formidable at Horace Mann, where he was known for denouncing the Johnson administration. As editor of the school paper, he made a minor splash by scoring an interview with F. Lee Bailey, then the country's preeminent celebrity shark-lawyer. Scheck ignored notorious Bailey clients such as Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, and kept their talk stubbornly substantive. "What is wrong with the present definition of legal insanity?" he asked his future partner.

Even then he had a way of jabbing his finger in people's faces. During a school debate, he advocated ending student draft deferments because he believed they were unfair to those who could not afford college. Besides, he knew that if well-to-do kids were draftable, their parents would storm Washington and demand an end to the war. "We draft only those who cannot afford to hide in the endless catacombs of higher education," he bellowed during the debate.

William Barr, who would grow up to become President Bush's attorney general, did not agree with his classmate's views. During a lunchtime discussion, Barr punched Scheck in the mouth after, Barr says, Scheck cursed the Pope. "It was a very satisfying moment for me," says Barr when asked about the incident. The principal summoned him for an explanation. "I told him Scheck had referred to the Pope with an epithet, and that I hit him. And he said, 'That was a good thing to do.' " (Scheck recalls the dispute but says no punches were thrown.)

Scheck began college at Yale in 1967 and delved into the politics of the moment. He joined the "Dump Johnson" movement, surrendered his draft card in protest of the Vietnam war and campaigned for Robert Kennedy (and even for Norman Mailer when he ran for mayor of New York in 1969). He claims his own political aspirations died with RFK, but the events of those years convinced him that an activist citizenry could effect social change. "We had real reason to believe what we said mattered. I went to college and within a few months, we brought down a president," he says, referring to Johnson's not running for re-election. "We thought we could make a new country."

He applied to law school and was accepted at the University of California--Berkeley. "What the hell am I going to law school for?" he asked friends during a poker game before classes started. He was interested in writing screenplays or even a novel. His parents, though, had always pushed him toward a conventional life. The only ones who survived, his father had always warned, were the lawyers. So Scheck became a lawyer, but on his own terms. Corporate law was out of the question. He would become a public-interest lawyer. "I always saw the money as a trap," he says. "I wanted to remain true to a set of social values."

Those values began forming when George Scheck took his son back to the decrepit neighborhood where George had grown up. He would tell Barry how hard it had been to be poor, how society should care for its weak. He would tell him about his black friends in showbiz, dancers such as Honey Coles and John Bubbles, and musicians such as Hazel Scott, and how their lives had been hurt by racism. Through his father, Barry had salvaged his youth after the fire that killed his sister. And through his father, Barry learned a sense of social justice.

George Scheck had suffered 12 heart attacks before he died in 1984. During any one of his sick spells, friends could walk into his hospital room and find George happily smoking a long cigar. "He was always kind, always warm, always gentle, Scheck says.

Barry had a more difficult time with his mother. Eleanor, now 73, never recovered from the death of her daughter, whose framed portrait hangs prominently in her Manhattan apartment. Eleanor suffered long periods of depression, withdrawal and anger. Often she would unleash her rage on her son, lashing out at him about his grades, long hair or ragged dress. Once she smashed his collection of record albums because they were arranged sloppily. Sometimes, when Eleanor was at her darkest, she would tell Barry that the wrong child had died in the fire and she seemed to make his survival a crime.

Scheck says he grew to understand that his mother was suffering, that she didn't mean to hurt him. "Because of all that," he says, "I learned to deal with damaged people." Yet, it's also true that as a result of his mother's damning words, Barry became similar to the men he would eventually free from prison through the Innocence Project. He, too, was branded for something that was not his fault.

It is 4:30 P.M. on a Tuesday, and Scheck is huddled with five law students in a conference room at Cardozo Law School. The students are updating Scheck on the progress of the cases he has assigned them for the Innocence Project, which he runs as part of Cardozo's criminal-law clinic.

Hundreds of letters arrive every year from inmates begging Scheck and co-director Peter Neufeld to adopt their causes. "I may not be O.J. Simpson," begins one, "but I need your help." The Innocence Project takes on their cases only if the law students can obtain physical evidence from the crime--a vaginal swab, for example, or semen-stained panties or a bloodstained shirt. The sample is then tested to determine whether it matches the convict's DNA. But with crimes that date back more than ten years, evidence is often lost. Sometimes, prosecutors aren't eager to search. "People don't like to open up things," Scheck says. "It's always a can of worms." And there are other obstacles. The Innocence Project, which subsists on a $90,000-a-year budget that relies heavily on private contributions, requires that families of inmates pay $5000 to $8000 for the DNA testing. "If we had more money, we could triple the number of people we get out," Scheck says.

In class, one student tells Scheck that a police sergeant keeps avoiding his phone calls. "Do we have the evidence?" Scheck asks, leaning back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. The drill is familiar.

"The way the sergeant is avoiding us, I suspect we do," the student answers. Scheck orders his assistant to track down a sympathetic attorney in that region to help apply pressure.

Next case.

Prosecutors in a Massachusetts town have located a lost piece of evidence, but they won't release it for testing. "This is really stupid," Scheck says, bristling at the prosecutor's letter. "This was written by someone who is brain-dead." The students chuckle. "It's totally moronic," he says moments later, "such an ignorant response,"

"OK," Scheck says finally, "we're going to get a lawyer for this one."

Since its inception in 1992, the Innocence Project has helped more than 30 inmates, nearly all of them picked out of police lineups by rape victims or witnesses before DNA testing existed. They are men no one wanted to believe, men who spent years in prison cells, cut off from families and livelihoods. Their releases are Scheck's absolution, their voices a compelling counterchorus to those who would tether him to Simpson.

They include Kirk Bloodsworth of Baltimore, who was accused of taking nine-year-old Dawn Hamilton into a woods, raping her, bashing in her head with a rock, then strangling her. Five witnesses insist they saw Bloodsworth with Dawn the day she was killed. He was convicted in 1984, then sentenced to die. Eight years later, with prodding from the Innocence Project, prosecutors reexamined the little girl's underwear. They found a spot of semen less than one sixteenth of an inch wide. A DNA test proved the semen was not Bloods-worth's. He walked in 1993.

Troy Webb lost seven years in a Virginia state prison. A woman flipping through police photographs said his baby-faced mug matched that of the man who had raped her outside her apartment complex. Her word was all the jury needed. A judge sentenced him to 47 years. In prison he heard about the Innocence Project. He wrote Scheck, who campaigned for a DNA test that ultimately proved Webb was not the attacker. Webb was impassive when he learned of the results. "There was nothing to celebrate. I always knew I was innocent," he says. "But no one wanted to hear about it."

Edward Honaker of Virginia forfeited ten years of his life in state prison. A woman insisted he had raped her in his truck after he threatened to shoot her boyfriend. Both the woman and her boyfriend picked Honaker out of a lineup, and a jury convicted him of rape, sodomy and sexual assault. A judge sentenced him to three successive life terms, plus 34 years. Honaker wrote to Scheck, who demanded DNA testing on the victim's vaginal swabs. Honaker, too, was vindicated. "There aren't enough words in the English language to express what I owe those people," he once said of his rescuers.

A cautionary tale to these bittersweet endings features Kerry Kotler of Long Island, whose successful quest to overturn a rape conviction was championed by Scheck and Neufeld. After 11 years, Kotler left prison in 1992 and celebrated his freedom by riding a horse on a beach in Montauk. Four years later he was arrested for raping a college student. He was convicted and sentenced to seven to 21 years. The prosecutor on the original case, James Catterson, is sure he was guilty the first time. "The man is a predator," he says.

Scheck and Neufeld were distraught over Kotler's arrest but still believe he was innocent in the first case. They suggest he was damaged by his experiences in prison. "This is a man who at 22 was accused of a serious crime he did not commit," Neufeld says. "While other young men were getting married, he was being sexually assaulted in Attica. While other young men were starting their careers, he was bending license plates. He was stabbed twice, was the victim of extortion. I'm sure it had a profound effect on him." They worry that the Innocence Project could be tainted by association. "To some degree," Scheck says, "Kotler's case gives people an excuse to say, 'Look what happens when you let someone out.' "

Scheck and Neufeld's expertise in DNA has not only enabled them to free convicts, but also allowed them to attack the testing and handling of evidence, as they did during Simpson's trial. Their opponents have accused them of being hypocritical. "They're trying to have it both ways," says Rockne Harmon, a prosecutor in Oakland.

Beginning in the late Eighties, prosecutors and judges began touting new DNA technology as a surefire way to prove guilt. The alibi is dead, they rejoiced, long live the double helix. Scheck and Neufeld jumped into the fray during a 1989 murder trial in the Bronx. Joseph Castro, a janitor, was accused of stabbing to death a pregnant woman and her two-year-old daughter. The case seemed like a lock. A DNA test matched a speck of blood on the face of Castro's wristwatch to the woman's.

Scheck and Neufeld nibbled at the edges of the prosecution's case. First, they proved that the test had been done sloppily. Then they showed that the testing company had miscalculated the odds that the blood could have come from anyone other than the mother. By the end of their presentation, some of the D.A.'s expert witnesses called the testing unreliable. The judge barred the DNA evidence in a ruling that turned Scheck and Neufeld into conquering heroes in the criminal-defense world. Lawyers across the country invited them to conduct seminars on how to contend with DNA. In all the euphoria, it hardly seemed to matter that Castro ultimately confessed to the murders. "Before Scheck and Neufeld, no defense lawyer would take on DNA. I mean, how do you defend against God? How do you defend against those odds?" asks Eric Swenson, author of DNA in the Courtroom. "They had the chutzpah to do it."

The following year the duo helped William Kunstler in the appeals of three Hell's Angels convicted of murdering a man in Ohio. Though Scheck and Neufeld lost their bid to dismiss the DNA evidence, memories of their courtroom ferocity still provoke bitterness. At one point, they accused former FBI lab director John Hicks of seeking to destroy evidence, an allegation that was later proved unfounded.

"I was insulted. I thought it defamed my character and integrity," Hicks says. "I saw in Barry a mean streak and a callous disregard for what he knew was true."

Assistant U.S. Attorney James Wooley, a prosecutor in that case, says Scheck and Neufeld employ "a scorched-earth approach, and I'm not sure I agree with burning down everything they do. They're willing to attack the personal integrity of someone who takes an opposing position. In my 15 years in courtrooms, it was a singular moment."

Scheck and Neufeld make no apologies for their aggressive style. As for questions about their varying postures regarding DNA, they see no inconsistency. Their only problem with DNA, they say, is when the collection of the evidence, or the testing itself, is mishandled. Of course, that's their last worry when it exonerates an Innocence Project client. Then they talk of DNA testing with the zeal of a prosecutor. "We're doing God's work," Scheck says. "It's the best thing you can do as a lawyer. There's no higher calling."

•

O.J. Simpson's acquittal is not what comes to mind at the mention of God's work. Still, Scheck insists that he and Neufeld saw in the Simpson trial the chance to argue the merits of DNA evidence on a national stage. Ultimately, no matter what anyone thinks of the verdict, Scheck believes the trial delivered the enduring message that investigators can botch a seemingly airtight case if they mishandle evidence. "If you do it right," Scheck says, "you will convict the guilty. That's the lesson."

The trial sent another message: Barry Scheck was a formidable courtroom presence, even if he dressed as though he were starring in a bad gangster movie. "We told Barry, 'You have to lose those Guys and Dolls suits,' " recalls Johnnie Cochran. " 'Get suits that come from the second half of the 20th century.'"

He's probably the best lawyer they had," says Christopher Darden, one of the prosecutors in the case, who now teaches law at Southwestern University. "He made the most difference in front of the jury. He's a very smart man." (The good feeling, however, has its limits. After the trial, Scheck wrote Darden a note inviting him to meet for a drink or to speak to a Cardozo class if he ever passed through New York. Darden never responded.)

For all his apparent ambivalence, friends say Scheck has enjoyed his fame, even if it hasn't always been as widespread as he believes. Visiting Curt Marder's father in the hospital, Scheck boasted that blacks everywhere recognize him because of the Simpson trial. "So my father called in one of the attendants and asked if she knew who Barry was," Curt recalls. "She looked at him for a while and said, 'Are you a game-show host?' "

The trial levied many burdens. Strangers sent him death threats and hate mail, including one letter that began, "Barry Scheck, how can you work for that nigger?" And associates could not fathom their old friend from Legal Aid defending a wealthy celebrity who had once pleaded no contest to beating the woman he was accused of murdering. "When the O.J. case came in, many people believed it represented the classic batterer case, and many thought Barry shouldn't do it," says Cardozo professor Ellen Yaroshefsky. "At that point I was concerned. We argued about it. Barry and Peter both believed it was a DNA case and would be a forum for DNA issues."

For Yaroshefsky, DNA was not a sufficient reason. "We were walking down the street, screaming about it," she recalls, laughing. "I asked Barry, 'Could you do a DNA case for a Nazi?' And he said, 'Personally, I couldn't do that.' Then, later, he came to me and said he could defend a Nazi in a DNA case, for the sake of intellectual consistency. I thought this was outrageous." (Scheck denies he said he could defend a Nazi.)

To his friends, Scheck's role in Simpson's trial seemed especially contradictory because of his impassioned defense during the late Eighties of Hedda Nussbaum, who was arrested with Joel Steinberg for the beating death of Lisa Steinberg, their six-year-old illegally adopted daughter. Nussbaum became a national symbol for battered women, and while public pressure mounted in favor of punishing both parents, Scheck argued that Hedda, suffering from a broken nose, 16 broken ribs, split lips and a gangrenous leg, was also Joel Steinberg's victim and could not have been responsible for Lisa's death. "Speaking with her was like talking to a torture victim," he says. Scheck finally persuaded prosecutors not to charge Nussbaum and instead enlisted her to testify against Steinberg.

"It was a true obsession," says Michael Dowd, a lawyer who referred Nussbaum to Scheck. "Barry became infatuated with Hedda. He didn't know where she ended and where he began. Hedda was perfection. It wasn't balanced. He was so driven, as if it were his own life. If he hadn't persuaded the prosecutors not to charge her, he would have been devastated."

Dowd has enjoyed discussing cases with Scheck, except during the Simpson trial. "I'd tell him, 'Barry, I can't talk to you. I'm turned off by this guy. I think he beats the shit out of his wife,'" Dowd says. "Barry would say, 'Mike, if you were to spend two hours with him, you'd change your mind.' And I said, 'Come on, give me a break.'"

Scheck says that Simpson's history of beating Nicole was not a central issue when he entered the case. DNA was the issue. Simpson's record as a batterer, he says, "might have been a good reason not to get involved. It was a horrible, terrible thing. It's something he should be ashamed of. But it doesn't mean he killed his wife."

Unlike his colleagues on the defense (Cochran, Bailey, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Uelmen), as well as the prosecution (Marcia Clark and Darden), Scheck abstained from writing a memoir of the trial. Instead, he and Neufeld signed a deal last fall with Doubleday to write about wrongfully convicted prisoners. Earlier, they had pitched a TV series about two idealistic law professors who, assisted by their equally idealistic students, seek to exonerate convicts. CBS expressed interest, then passed. Saint Scheck, the network decided, just wouldn't sell.

•

Class is over. Barry Scheck limps to his large corner office at Cardozo. The light outside his windows is gone. A painting of Jackie Robinson stealing home hangs on one wall. On another, Willie Mays is making his famous over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series. Scheck's desk is covered with phone messages. A clock says 2:47, about four hours slow.

A note on a nearby table begins, "Don't let the bastards and pundits get you down." Scheck gets stacks of mail from strangers (one included a photograph of a bikini-clad woman holding her son between her knees). He holds up a card. "I like this one," he says.

"Dear Professor Scheck," it starts. "I admit I didn't like you too much during O.J. Simpson's trial. I judged you by your client and the trial as a whole, and I was wrong.... I'm very proud of you and the recent work you gave to Louise Woodward's case."

Scheck slumps into a chair. "In the long run, I have a lot of confidence that people will recognize what the legal community sees. I have a lot of confidence that people will say, 'Look at what they did with the Innocence Project. Look at what they did with forensics,' " he says. "In the long run, it doesn't matter what the popular perception is, so long as you do the right thing."

A moment later, he opens a pamphlet listing the people the Innocence Project has helped free. He starts checking off the names. Vincent Moto. Terry Chalmers. Robert Snyder. Victor Ortiz. Edward Honaker. Brian Piczczek. Troy Webb. Kirk Bloodsworth--

"Excuse me, Professor Scheck."

A young woman pokes her head through his open door.

"I ran into O.J. Simpson the other night at the Four Seasons," she says in a relentlessly sunny voice. "He said your closing argument at his trial was the best, and that you're a really great guy."

Scheck glances at the woman and his lips form a small, polite smile. "Well, isn't that nice," he says before returning to the list of names he hopes will deliver sainthood.

I don't want to talk about that." For a moment he seems on the verge of walking out.

Death Row Angel: Scheck's The Man

Everyone, it seems, knows about O.J. Simpson. Ronald Jones, 48, is another story, lost among the legion of nameless inmates in the American prison system. His mug isn't likely to grace the cover of a national magazine. Larry King hasn't called for an interview. Yet Jones has something in common with Simpson. He, too, is Barry Scheck's client.

Scheck joined Ronald Jones' legal team years after Jones was sentenced to death in 1989 for raping and murdering Debra Smith, a 28-year-old mother of three, in an abandoned motel on the South Side of Chicago.

Jones' case is typical of those handled by Scheck's Innocence Project. There are no heroes in these sorts of cases, the story-lines are dreary and the clients often have troubled, even unsavory, pasts. Addicted to drugs and alcohol, Jones was on a prolonged downward spiral. He had been convicted of robbery and burglary and his parole had been revoked twice by March 1985, when Smith's body was found.

At first, Jones was not a suspect. Then a woman told police he had raped her at knifepoint in the neighborhood in which Smith had been found. That victim's description of Jones included an account of his complexion, a condition, that earned him the nickname "Bumpy,"

The case stalled when the woman failed to show up in court. Still, detectives decided to question Jones for Smith's murder after a witness claimed to have seen him begging her for money shortly before she was killed.

After a nine-hour interrogation, Jones confessed, saying he had killed Smith in self-defense. They'd had sex, he said, then she demanded payment. He refused. She took out a knife, which he grabbed and then killed her with.

Jones was convicted and sentenced to die in 1989, though during his trial he testified he confessed only after the police suggested it would help him get a lighter sentence. For nearly eight years, public defenders in Chicago kept Jones from dying. They invited Scheck to argue for DNA tests on the semen found in Smith (such testing was not deemed reliable when Jones was apprehended). The results proved the semen could not have come from Jones. His conviction was overturned last summer and he was removed from death row. But Jones still sits in prison as prosecutors assess whether to retry his case. For Scheck, the ordeal won't end until Jones is free. "I'm haunted by Ronald Jones," he says. "It has taken close to a year to get him out of jail and the case may well be retried. It's very upsetting that someone could be on death row for over a decade, then be exonerated by a DNA test and still not be released."--P.S.