The Avenger

Men: "My defendant," "homeboy," "homeslice."

She was so protective of Rudy -- a tall, strong young man -- that even when he was a teenager she wouldn't let him play football, not even when he, everyone in the family and the school's football coach begged her to.

She would, however, let him play hockey.

"June is tricky, she's complicated, she's got an edge, but she's marvelous," says Carla Diggs Smith, a lawyer and friend for the past decade. Still, Smith says, June is June: When Jeffries came over to visit her and her newborn baby, the first thing Jeffries noted was that there were no cords around the crib, so he probably couldn't hang himself. "In that sense, she can be, for lack of a better term, a little crude. But you have to understand her baby cases are an integral part of her life."

If you say something Jeffries doesn't like or doesn't quite understand, the conversational temperature cools by several degrees. She'll look at you straight on. She'll blink and give a toneless reply, something like, "I don't recall saying that," or just, "Well." Looking you in the eye some more.

Not calling you a liar, exactly. But not backing up from much, either.

'I'm the Only One for Them'

She grew up in Detroit, that bare-knuckled city of the American dream. This was in the days before the riots, before Motown, when there were neighborhoods where no one lived in apartments and no one's parents got divorced.

Her mother made it up from a small town in the empty ocean of rural Mississippi. She worked as a cashier at the A&P. Her father, Malcolm, up from West Virginia, worked the loading dock at the U.S. Postal Service. The Great Migration, hardworking black people moving up north, a new set of possibilities.

One time, she remembers, a white defense attorney did not appreciate a hard bargain she was driving on a defendant who, as it happened, was poor and black. This lawyer told Jeffries: "You need to suspend your middle-class values."

She worked her way into Detroit's premier public high school, Cass Tech, then went to Wesleyan University, then Georgetown University Law Center. She married a doctor; they had a baby. The romance lasted for a time; the marriage lasted 11 years.

She signed on with the U.S. attorney's office, a line prosecutor, starting out with misdemeanors. She raised Rudy alone. That, she says, was and remains her "real job." She left homicide each night, went home and she and Rudy did multiplication tables. Then she put him to bed and studied murder some more.

She took her first child murder case in the mid-1980s. Baby Gregory, killed by his mother, Winda Cannon. Cannon got probation.