The Lawyer Who Specializes In Despicable Clients

In a profile in Variety magazine, writer Gene Maddaus discusses the career of Jose Baez, the lawyer who bumped another well-known and highly successful defense attorney, Benjamin Brafman, off Harvey Weinstein’s legal team in a dispute over strategy. Baez made headlines in 2011, when he defended Casey Anthony, The Florida mother who was on trial for the murder of her 2-year old daughter. The consensus was that Baez, a local DUI lawyer, was in over his head, but he won an acquittal. Besides the Anthony verdict, Baez has gained acquittals for Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end, on a murder charge; David Demos, a bond trader who was charged with fraud in Connecticut; and Benjamin Shaw, who was accused of murdering a man in a bar fight in Louisiana. Like those other clients, Weinstein is also almost universally despised, but that’s Baez’s specialty. A law professor quoted in the article says he thought Baez was the luckiest lawyer in America after the Anthony verdict, “but given what he has done since, if you have luck after luck after luck, at some point it’s not luck.”