Comments (0) Best Lawyer - 2011
Nicole Casarez
Readers' Choice: Readers' Choice: Rusty Hardin
Texans are used to high-profile criminal cases where, let's face it, the defendant is stone-cold guilty but has the means to get a supremely skilled and supremely expensive lawyer to bitch-slap a prosecutor's weak case. But what happens when that defendant isn't loaded, and the prosecutor is especially rabid, to the point where, exculpatory evidence be damned, he's going to get his man? How many lawyers want to step up to that plate? And how many lawyers want to step up to the plate after that defendant has been convicted? Fortunately for Anthony Graves, Nicole Casarez is one of those lawyers. Through the Innocence Project of Texas, she and her journalism students at the University of St. Thomas helped free Graves after he had spent nearly two decades on death row. Prosecutorial misconduct helped put him there; a lawyer with actual respect for the American criminal justice system helped get him out. Imagine that: saving an innocent man's life, not for a fat retainer but because you have the means and desire to. Isn't that the very definition of integrity?
