Accused of Aiding Terror Plot, Lawyer Braces for Fight of Her Life

Prominent defense attorneys and legal ethicists have rallied to Stewart's side. "The majority of the charges curtail her First Amendment rights to speak and to act as a lawyer," said Neal R. Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association's Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants.

Stewart often embraces her clients, seeing in their cases the stuff of radical liberation. "I'm not going to say what's healthy for someone who lives somewhere else in the world," she said. "My own political sense tells me that the only hope for change in Egypt is the fundamentalist movement."

Such an argument evokes unease in some of her old friends. Ron Kuby, a pony-tailed defense lawyer and talk-show host, spent two decades working alongside radical lawyer William Kunstler and once defended the sheik. But that's over.

"I love Lynne, but no one in the world could fairly posit the sheik as a progressive or liberal on any issue," Kuby said. "In the aftermath of September 11th, I could no longer put myself in the service of those who are trying to create a world in which I would be put up against a wall and shot, and my daughter and wife would be put in burqahs."

Not a Pacifist

Stewart was a child of the working class, a girl who came of age in what once was known as Archie Bunker Queens. Her father was a meter reader. She went to a local public high school and then to a small Calvinist college in Missouri.

"I know fundamentalists because I lived among them," Stewart said. "My enemy Ashcroft is a fundamentalist."

She returned to New York and found work as a librarian at a Harlem public school. "I saw people forced to live in dirt and the filth and I thought: 'Why the hell didn't I know about this?' " She pauses, her leprechaun eyebrows dancing. "You want to know what radicalized me? Harlem, 1962."

She noticed a muscular black man across the hall, a teacher who spoke passionately about the nation's racial condition. He was Ralph Poynter, and he introduced her to black literature and radical history. They remain married to this day.

In the 1970s, she "hot-footed it" to law school, studying under Arthur Kinoy, a prominent radical legal scholar whose theories centered on the criminalization of the poor.

Stewart slowly carved out a formidable reputation. She is short and heavy, with a flat voice and a taste in clothes that might -- as she jokes -- be described as early frump. But her smile is infectious and her manner disarmingly maternal, and she can home in like sonar on the weakness in a prosecution case.

"Lynne envelops a jury in this idealistic vision," Kuby said. "She gives the sense that if they convict her poor client, the eagle in the American emblem will come to life and peck their eyes out."

In 1988 she defended Larry Davis, a longtime drug dealer involved in a shootout in which he wounded six police officers. The case seemed open and shut. But Stewart cast her client as a noble black outlaw taking on corrupt cops. Davis was acquitted.

"Blacks and Hispanics can hear the nuances in a Larry Davis story," Stewart said at the time. "Blacks fear the police being able to kill their kids at any time and being able to get away with it. This is sort of payback time."

Stewart does not blanch at violence. Blood, she says, has irrigated revolutionary struggles from China to South Africa. When the South African government locked up Nelson Mandela, his followers did not lay down their arms.