Chicago attorney Beau Brindley won the most important case of his life Monday — his own.
In a trial that was closely watched by Chicago’s legal community, a federal judge acquitted the longtime criminal defense attorney of charges he coached witnesses to perjure themselves in five criminal cases and obstructed justice in another by filing misleading court documents.
Announcing the verdict after a two-week bench trial, U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber also found Brindley’s law partner, Michael Thompson, not guilty of all counts.
Dressed in a blue pinstriped suit and bright orange tie, Brindley, 37, listened to Leinenweber’s 15-minute explanation of the evidence in the case with a serious expression, his hands clasped together and thumbs tapping each other nervously. When the judge announced the verdict, Brindley exhaled deeply and broke into a wide grin, grabbing his lawyer’s hand as spectators in the courtroom gallery gasped.
As court adjourned, Brindley stood and hugged Thompson, slapping him on the back.
The surprise verdict was a rarity in a building where the vast majority of criminal defendants either plead guilty or are convicted at trial.
In the lobby of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, a beaming Brindley stood with his legal team and told reporters his case was a “victory for all criminal defense attorneys.”
“It validates aggressive defense on behalf of your clients and doing everything you can to try to achieve the best result, which is our ethical duty,” Brindley said. “It’s a testament to criminal defendants to know that you can fight the case, you can stand up and present your defense when you know that you’re not guilty, and if you do, justice will be served.”
The trial took place a little more than a year after the FBI raided Brindley’s downtown law office, carting off email records, computer drives and handwritten notes. Among the items seized were lengthy question-and-answer “scripts” filled with falsehoods that Brindley had written out for clients to memorize for their trial testimony, according to the charges.
In his ruling, Leinenweber said the 21-count indictment filed against Brindley may have made it seem like “there’s a lot of smoke and therefore there must be a fire somewhere,” but in the end prosecutors failed to prove that Brindley knew his clients were lying when he put them on the stand.
The judge noted that each of Brindley’s former clients who had testified against him — most of whom are serving lengthy prison sentences — had on a previous occasion “lied at least once under oath.” Some also were offered huge breaks in their sentences in exchange for their testimony against Brindley.
Leinenweber also said there was nothing improper about preparing question-and-answer scripts for clients — in fact, the judge said he used them himself when he was a private attorney and “would never dream” of putting a client on the witness stand “without an exhaustive preparation.”
Prosecutors had alleged Brindley’s law office had a “totally defective moral compass.”
“What Brindley perpetrated was a total assault on the judicial system,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Chmelar said in his closing remarks last week. “It was a startling disregard for the law.”
Brindley’s lawyers, however, said he was simply a hardworking attorney trying to give his clients the best defense possible, working from information they were giving him about their cases. The scripts, they said, were no different than prosecutors writing out statements to be presented to a grand jury by witnesses who often have been pressured by threat of prosecution to implicate others.
Thompson’s attorney, Edward Genson, said Monday that lawyers all over Chicago paid attention to Brindley’s case because they “realized that the whole defense bar was on trial.”
Lawyers should be able to represent their clients vigorously without “fear of some sort of witch hunt,” Genson said.
While the charges did not affect Brindley’s ability to practice law, they complicated dozens of his pending cases at the federal courthouse and prompted the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to order that each of Brindley’s clients be notified of his indictment so they could be asked if they wanted a different attorney.
Records show that many of his clients chose to stay with Brindley despite warnings of the potential conflict of interest, and he even picked up several new cases while awaiting trial. Last October, two months after his indictment, Brindley took on a cocaine conspiracy case against Josue Vargas, who was twice warned about Brindley’s pending charges and waived his right to substitute counsel, records show.
This year, Brindley was hired to defend a client facing federal drug conspiracy charges in his native Iowa, records show. In that case, Brindley filed a motion in July seeking to move the trial date because he had a “previously scheduled trial set for Aug. 17” in federal court in Chicago. The motion for a continuance failed to mention that Brindley himself was the defendant.
Brindley, who took the stand in his own defense last week, said he planned to immediately return to work defending clients. He described the stress of waiting to hear his fate as “an incredible sensation,” one that will make him a better representative of his clients in the future.
“This has given me such a clearer perspective on what criminal defendants go through, and I will take that with me on every case from here on out,” Brindley said.
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