Tuesday, April 10, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.
Rodney King changed everything for Lori Teicher.
In the early 1990s Teicher was living in a comfortable Santa Monica, Calif., apartment and getting wined and dined at some of Los Angeles' trendiest restaurants by companies hoping to do business with her burgeoning media consulting firm.
Then King was Tasered and beaten by Los Angeles police officers, a brutal scene captured on grainy videotape. A year later, the city erupted in riots after three of the officers were acquitted.
Teicher drove to ravaged South Central Los Angeles to donate essential goods to looted stores. But by then she knew in her gut there was so much more she needed to do.
"It was shocking. I started to question what I wanted to do with my life, what kind of impact I wanted to make," Teicher said. "I didn't feel like I was making a difference."
She's making a big difference now as an assistant federal public defender in Las Vegas. Teicher, 42, worked relentlessly to help spring wrongfully convicted Robert Hays of Las Vegas after 15 years in prison.
She's one of five attorneys in the noncapital habeas unit, which works on unlawful imprisonment claims of convicted rapists, pedophiles, kidnappers, armed robbers and murderers who aren't on death row.
Unlike some other government attorneys, the lawyers in her unit are not well known, or known at all, outside of local legal circles. They aren't chronicled in the media, for example, showboating to juries while making impassioned opening statements.
Yet these legal workhorses are vital safeguards in a criminal justice system that often doesn't work right, some observers say, and needs watching.
For most convicted felons facing life in prison, a federal habeas petition is the last chance they have to show they shouldn't be there.
"In ensuring that the government plays by the rules, they are an exceedingly important check in the system of checks and balances," said Gary Peck, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. "They are a model of professionalism and doggedly tenacious in the work they do."
Teicher, lawyer Danice Arbor Johnson, a paralegal and other staffers worked doggedly on Hays' case for three years before U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt ordered his release.
Hays had been convicted on several counts of sexually assaulting his daughter, and was serving a life sentence. But Hunt ruled March 22 that Hays was innocent and that several unconstitutional actions on the part of the prosecutor, defense lawyer and judge in the case were cause to release him.
Hays' prosecution, Hunt ruled, "was wrought with constitutional violations so egregious, resulting in consequences so grave, and incarceration so lengthy, that Mr. Hays is entitled to immediate and unconditional release."
Teicher says the Hays case stood out because it was an "actual innocence" case, a rarity among the files that cross her desk.
Teicher has about 35 cases going at a time. The noncapital habeas unit oversees about 150 cases on any given day, says the boss, John Lambrose.
Federal judges regularly review habeas petitions from convicted felons across the state, and allow the federal public defender to look at some of the cases.
In capital cases, first-degree murder cases in which the defendant received the death penalty, habeas reviews are automatically passed by federal judges to the defender's office. The office has a somewhat larger unit assigned to deal only with those cases.
But when death is off the table, it is up to the judge whether to pass the case to the federal defender. If a convict faces life in prison, odds are he or she will receive help from the federal defender's office. Other factors making it more likely are if the defendant is a juvenile or mentally challenged.
Federal Public Defender Franny Forsman says her office will sometimes hear of a case that causes her to request that the judge pass it to them, but that doesn't happen often.
Teicher says about one-third of the cases that land on her desk typically are noncapital murder cases, one-third are adult and child sex-assault cases, and one-third are other types, including armed robberies or kidnappings, that can bring life sentences.
The day-to-day work, Lambrose and Teicher say, includes sifting through case files searching for ways in which a defendant's constitutional rights may have been violated, and then arguing to a federal judge that some form of relief is warranted.
Lambrose says his attorneys have provided relief to 30 defendants out of about 350 to 450 cases his unit has reviewed since he joined in 1990.
Relief usually involves reduced sentences or new trials. Unconditional release, as in Hays' case, is rare, he said.
Lambrose says federal judges rarely granted habeas petitions before a man named Roberto Miranda was released from prison after 14 years in a highly publicized case in 1996 in which errors were found in his original defense case. Miranda, who had been convicted of killing a man and sentenced to death, settled a lawsuit against Clark County in 2004 for $5 million. (This is not the landmark Miranda rights case concerning the Arizona man who went to the Supreme Court and won the right to consult with an attorney before being questioned by police.)
Johnson, the other lawyer who worked on the Hays case, also is a 17-year veteran of the noncapital habeas unit. And like Teicher, she sees injustices in practically every case she handles.
Johnson says she has cried when going through some of the toughest case files. She knows that on any given case she's fighting an uphill battle.
"You get slammed a lot," Johnson said. "You have to have a unique personality to deal with it."
Johnson says minorities and poor people still face a system that often over charges and over sentences them in comparison with wealthier white defendants.
She points to one of her office's most celebrated cases, Reggie Hayes.
Hayes was 14 when he was arrested in Las Vegas with three older teens in the kidnapping and shooting death of a 21-year-old Nellis Air Force Base airman. He was convicted of first-degree murder and several counts of attempted murder, and received a life term without possibility of parole.
Hayes, who is black, said he was merely getting a ride home from the other suspects when they committed the crime. He was convicted although he had stayed at the scene, showed police the victim and led officers to the other suspects.
Hayes was released from prison in 1998 after serving 13 years. Johnson had worked on his habeas appeal for the last seven years of his sentence.
According to Teicher, who applied to law school soon after leaving Los Angeles, she knew exactly what she wanted to do when she got out: criminal defense work.
Defendants, she said, "need a voice, strong advocacy. They need someone to talk to."
She says she has had to fight against a range of legal abuses, including an instance in which a 14-year-old murder defendant was read his rights and interrogated by police for hours without a parent present.
Such clear constitutional violations happen less often now, says Teicher, who clerked for District Judge Lee Gates, worked for the Clark County public defender, and did a short stint in private practice before joining the federal defender's office four years ago.
"The bar was so low in Nevada for so long," she said.
Things may be getting better, but there's still plenty of work to do.
"We're needed to keep everyone in check," Teicher said, "to make sure that the prosecutors and the cops are doing their jobs. Just look at what happens when that doesn't happen."
Teicher - whose personal e-mail address includes the word "innocent" - says she can't envision working anywhere else.
"I've found my gig," she said.
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