Mad About You

Any advice for drivers ?

Blinkers are a red flag for us. Hazard lights are for emergencies, not for telling parking officers "I'll be right back." Take your time to observe all the signs, the red and the green: what you can't do and what you can do. And I'd ask people to give us respect, like us or not.

The Criminal Defense Lawyer

A cartoon framed in William Moffitt's Alexandria office shows 12 jurors acquitting Sami al-Arian, the Florida professor accused of supporting Palestinian terrorists in 2005. The title of the cartoon is "The Real Patriot Act." Moffitt was al-Arian's attorney, perhaps his most recent visible assignment.

Moffitt, 59, grew up in New York, went to law school at American University, was hired as a clerk at the first racially integrated law firm in Northern Virginia in the early '70s and now runs his own practice. His client list has ranged from the high profile (controversial political activist Lyndon LaRouche Jr.) to the local (a clinically insane man who went on a stabbing spree in Alexandria). Moffitt, a Reston resident, takes pride in often being the lone person to stand up for the accused in the face of a powerful government and judgmental public.

Why did you become a criminal defense lawyer?

My mother raised me on "Perry Mason." Seven-thirty in New York every Saturday night. I always wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer. For some reason that always attracted me. You know, defending people against the power of the state is a very, very heady experience.

Does hostility toward a client ever turn into hostility toward you?

It sometimes does. Not always. I've seldom had a case where people were particularly angry at me. We got some pretty angry stuff on e-mails when we were doing Sami's case.

Like what?

"How could you represent this guy?" "He's a known terrorist." "How could you do that?"

How did you respond?

Most of my defense was that he was exercising his First Amendment rights. I wasn't calling anybody names; I wasn't calling the U.S. government crooked or anything like that. I was essentially raising a defense that people could understand. . . . We took the position -- as defense attorneys often do -- that we're educating people. One of the greatest things about what I do is my opportunity to use the courtroom as a place to educate people about things they don't really know about.