Brooklyn, NY – The death threats and hate mail, she says, have slowed, and she keeps her office door unlocked in defiance. There, Jennifer L. McCann sits behind her desk, wearing leopard print pumps, poised for an argument.
Ms. McCann chose to defend Levi Aron, a hardware clerk from Brooklyn who is accused of a crime that gripped the city this summer: the kidnapping, killing and dismembering of Leiby Kletzky, 8, who got lost walking to meet his parents in July in the Hasidic Jewish enclave of Borough Park.
“People assume I’m O.K. with a young boy being murdered because I represent the defendant,” Ms. McCann, 30, said recently in her office in Garden City, N.Y., which she opened in March after four years of practicing criminal defense law for a local firm. “To me, that’s pretty vicious. They have to understand, I’m not all right with people being murdered or with crime. I’m all right with defending constitutional rights.
“If he’s guilty, he will be convicted. And that’s it. But my God,” she added with gritted teeth, “it’s going to be legally.”
Mr. Aron’s trial is months away, but already Ms. McCann has been defending herself as much as her client – to the press, on Facebook and, most recently, to the judge. Justice Neil J. Firetog of State Supreme Court, a veteran of homicide cases in Brooklyn, questioned her experience, and that of her co-counsel, Pierre Bazile, a former New York police officer who has also practiced law for four years.
Still, as Justice Firetog pointed out, Ms. McCann’s trial experience is limited. She handled a resentencing appeal for Nathan Powell, a film producer who killed his colleague in Long Island City, Queens, in 2001, and dismembered the body. Ms. McCann had the original, lower 20-year sentence restored.
Ms. McCann considers it her Catholic, as well as constitutional, duty to care for society’s castoffs. “You protect their rights,” she said, “even when society wants to turn on them.”
In her trial preparations, she has learned about the Hasidic community in Borough Park and has also learned a new word. “Shiska,” Ms. McCann said, mispronouncing the Yiddish word, shiksa, for a non-Jewish woman.
Ms. McCann does not apologize for what she does not know. Or the profession she chose.
“This is what I do,” she said. “You kill people, you call me.”