PORTLAND, Oregon - On a summer day in 2005, Federal Public Defender Steven T. Wax faced his staff in a 16th-floor conference room in downtown Portland.
Attorneys, investigators and staff crowded around the long table and lined the walls. They were busy enough already, representing people charged with federal crimes in Oregon who couldn't afford a lawyer. Bank robbers, illegal immigrants, drug dealers.
Now a federal judge in Washington, D.C., wanted them to defend men whom the Bush administration called "the worst of the worst," the shackled men of the war on terror held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Wax was increasingly critical of the handling of terror suspects — the arrests, hidden charges, lack of attorneys, torture — contending it was un-American. He insisted someone had to defend the Constitution, to uphold the rule of law.
Wax threw open the discussion. The cases would suck up time and money, jack up everyone's workload, take them into war zones. The media spotlight would be blistering. The legal process, unknown. And the clients? Perhaps guilty of plotting against America.
The room's response: Take the cases. Which surprised no one who knows Wax or the law office he has built.
Since he arrived in Oregon 28 years ago, Wax has battled the government that pays his salary to ensure that people accused of federal crimes, but who cannot afford an attorney, receive a fair trial. His position — that no person and no place, not even Guantanamo, is outside the law — has vaulted his team from quiet, homogenous Portland onto the world stage on terror issues.
In 2004 the FBI exulted that it had arrested Beaverton attorney Brandon Mayfield in connection with the Madrid train bombings. Wax's team advocated for Mayfield's freedom until the government admitted it misidentified a fingerprint. They had the wrong man. The federal government later apologized and paid Mayfield $2 million.
Wax preaches the same relentless approach for all cases.
"You come back, you come back, you come back," Wax says. "You figure out another way, take another run, try another approach, see if you can find someone else. You can always do more."
That strategy took Wax from Sudan to Guantanamo and other staff to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It explains two groundbreaking YouTube videos, personal appeals to the president and key interviews with military officers at the detention facility. It helped win the release of the six men at Guantanamo whose cases they accepted.
Wax is currently seeking a new trial for Pete Seda, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen. Seda was convicted last fall of tax fraud and conspiracy to send cash through an Ashland charity to Muslims fighting in Chechnya. Federal prosecutors failed to disclose that the FBI paid the husband of a witness.
And in November, the court appointed the federal public defenders to represent the Westview High graduate arrested on accusations of plotting to blow up the tree lighting in Portland's living room, Pioneer Courthouse Square.
The court assigned federal public defenders to represent the young Muslim. Wax and Chief Deputy Stephen Sady can't comment on the Mohamed O. Mohamud case, set for trial in 2012. In pretrial court proceedings, they've suggested government agents entrapped Mohamud.
Once again, his stand puts Wax on the wrong side of public opinion.
Says Mayfield: "He represented me, a white American Muslim. He represented a Guantanamo detainee from Sudan. Now he's representing an Iranian American Muslim, Pete Seda, and Mohamed Mohamud, the alleged Christmas tree bomber," he says. "To me that's what's most commendable. His steadfastness to pursue justice whether it's popular or not."
Wax opened the first federal defender office in Oregon in Portland in 1983 with a staff of nine. Today, because of population growth and changes in drug, immigration and other laws, he oversees a staff of 80, a $12 million annual budget and additional offices in Medford and Eugene. The defenders opened 1,554 cases in 2010.
