Thomas Anthony Durkin, renowned Chicago defense attorney, dies at 78

CBS News

23-07-2025

Thomas Anthony Durkin, a Chicago defense attorney who rose to national prominence as he advocated for a roster of notorious clients, died this week.
Durkin died Monday after a brief battle with cancer, said a daughter, Alanna Durkin Richer, an Associated Press journalist in Washington. He was 78 years old.
Durkin participated in some of Chicago's highest-profile court cases, but his influence spanned beyond the city through his representation of Guantanamo Bay detainees, lectures at law schools across the country and legal essays and news media interviews in which he sounded the alarm about the perils of unchecked government power.
His career was driven by a conviction that all defendants, no matter their alleged crime or society's perception of them, were entitled to a rigorous defense and to the protection of their constitutionally afforded civil rights. So committed was he to the defense of the unpopular that the headline of a 2016 Wall Street Journal article described him as a "terror suspect's best hope in court."
"I don't do this because I think my clients are wonderful people who should be exonerated," he was quoted in the story as saying. "I do it because I think I have a role in the system."
Durkin was born on the South Side of Chicago to a steel mill worker's family. He graduated from Leo High School in Chicago in 1964, and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1968.
In 1973, Durkin earned a law degree from the University of San Francisco, where he was exposed to criminal defense by serving as a student adviser for the U.S.F. Criminal Law Clinic at the Marin County, California public defender's office, according to his bio on Durkin & Thomas law firm website
Back in Chicago, Durkin clerked for U.S. District Judge James B. Parsons in 1973 and 1974. He went into private practice in Chicago specializing in federal criminal cases, and tried jury cases as a panel attorney for the Federal Defender Program.
From April 1978 until March 1984, Durkin worked as a federal prosecutor in Chicago under U.S. attorneys Thomas Sullivan and Dan Webb. He much of that time in the Special Prosecutions Division, which was responsible for investigating prosecuting white-collar fraud corruption cases, his bio said.
Durkin personally investigated and prosecuted corruption cases in the City of Chicago Electrical Inspection Department and two major Medicaid fraud cases, as well as the first federal criminal civil rights opening housing case in the area — involving a racially motivated bombing in south suburban Burnham, his bio said.
Over more than 40 years in private practice since then, Durkin cultivated a reputation as one of the country's foremost advocates of defendants other attorneys would pass on representing.
"He took on the most challenging, controversial and complex cases that other lawyers would run away from," said Joshua Herman, an attorney who worked on national security matters with Durkin. "Above all, he valued the rule of law the most and raised his strongest objections to what he saw as abuses of power."
Durkin's clients included Adel Daoud, who was accused in a plot to bomb a Chicago bar, and Mohammed Hamzah Khan, who as a teenager was arrested on charges of conspiring to provide support to the Islamic State.
Durkin won an acquittal on terrorism charges for Jared Chase, one of the so-called NATO 3 defendants accused of plotting to bomb the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago. Durkin also represented Matthew Hale, a white supremacist leader accused of domestic terrorism offenses for soliciting the murder of a federal judge in Chicago.
Durkin also was a go-to lawyer for numerous local elected officials who found themselves in legal trouble. In August 2002, on behalf of former Cicero town treasurer Joseph DeChico, Durkin also obtained the only acquittal in the criminal case involving Cicero and its town president, Betty Loren-Maltese.
The work, Durkin said, appealed not only to his commitment to civil liberties but stimulated him intellectually and spiritually as well.
"I think these are the cases of our day. They point out all the problems that terrorism has spawned, with the reaction on our side, both good and bad. I find them fascinating," he said in a 2014 Chicago Reader piece. "There are some days I find it hard to believe that people are paying me to be involved in what I'm involved in. There's a tremendous amount of history you have to learn, which I enjoy. There's a lot of theology you have to understand, which I enjoy."
Beyond Chicago, he did legal work for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including helping represent Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an accused facilitator of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and representing others who have since been returned to their home countries. His experiences there, he said, helped show him the "dark side" of American intelligence.
In 2010, Durkin returned to school as a graduate student at large and returning scholar at the University of Chicago, focusing on graduate political science and Divinity Schol courses that focused on his academic interest in religion and nationalism, according to his bio.
Since 1984, Durkin had operated a law practice, Durkin & Roberts, with his wife, Janis Roberts.
Besides his wife and his daughter Alanna, he is survived by five other children: Erin Pieplow, Krista Mussa, Catherine Durkin Stewart, James Durkin and Matthew Durkin, and 15 grandchildren.