The fact that the good or the bad guys get their day in court, but when the attorneys defend them, it creates a system that better protects the innocent. We have compiled this list of the best criminal defense attorney that have represented celebrities, sport personalities, musicians, actors, politicians and more. These lawyers have vigorously represented them all, and are very good at what they do. See below, in no particular order.
10 best criminal defense attorney
1. Mark Geragos
Mark John Geragos is an American criminal defense lawyer. Clients that he has represented include Michael Jackson, actress Winona Ryder, politician Gary Condit, Susan McDougal, Scott Peterson and Scott Barney.
Geragos represented suspended NASCAR driver Jeremy Mayfield; Paul and Kulbir Dhaliwal, two brothers injured after a tiger escaped in San Francisco Zoo; and musician Chris Brown, who pleaded guilty in the assault of his then girlfriend Rihanna. In addition, he assisted the family of David Carradine in the aftermath of his accidental auto-erotic death. He is considered a “celebrity lawyer”
2. Leslie Abramson
Leslie Hope Abramson is an American criminal defense attorney best known for her role in the legal defense of Lyle and Erik Menendez.
Leslie was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, graduated from Queens College, and in 1969 received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from UCLA School of Law.
Abramson gained national attention in the early 1990s, when she represented Erik Menendez in his trial for the murder of his parents, again presenting parental abuse as the defense for the crime alleged.[1] She stirred controversy when it was revealed during the trial that she had Erik’s psychiatrist delete and rewrite passages of the doctor’s notes.
3. Robert Shapiro
Robert Leslie Shapiro is an American civil litigator, co-founder of RightCounsel.com, and senior partner in the Los Angeles-based law firm Glaser Weil Fink Jacobs Howard Avchen & Shapiro, LLP.
He is most recognized for being part of the Dream Team that successfully defended O. J. Simpson in 1995, from the charges that he murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, in 1994. Shortly after the O. J. Simpson murder case, he steered his practice away from criminal defense toward civil litigation. He also cofounded LegalZoom and RightCounsel.com and appears in their television commercials.
4. Alan Dershowitz
Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer and academic. He is a scholar of United States constitutional law and criminal law, and a noted civil libertarian. He spent most of his career at Harvard Law School where in 1967, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its history.
He held the Felix Frankfurter professorship there from 1993 until his retirement in December 2013. He is now a regular CNN and Fox News contributor and political and legal analyst.
5. F. Lee Bailey
Francis Lee Bailey, Jr. is an American former criminal defense attorney. For most of his career he was licensed in Massachusetts and in Florida, where he was disbarred in 2001. Among other high-profile trials, he served as the lawyer in the re-trial of osteopathic physician Sam Sheppard, was the supervisory attorney over attorney Mark J. Kadish in the court martial of Captain Ernest Medina for the My Lai Massacre, and was one of the lawyers for the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
He has also had a number of visible defeats, legal controversies, and personal troubles with the law, and was disbarred in Massachusetts and Florida for misconduct while defending his client Claude DuBoc. In 2014, he was denied a law license by the Maine Board of Bar Examiners and the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
6. Jose Baez
Jose Angel Baez is an attorney and New York Times best selling author. He is best known as the lead attorney for Casey Anthony, who was acquitted of murder in July 2011 after a trial that attracted significant national and international attention.
After graduating from law school in 1997, Baez was denied admission to the Florida Bar due to financial irresponsibility.
Unable to practice as an attorney, he worked instead as an intern at the Miami Dade Public Defender’s office and owned several companies. In 2005, the Florida Board of Bar Examiners admitted Baez after he had demonstrated that he had rehabilitated himself
After being granted his license, he focused primarily on criminal defense cases, including the case of Elvira Garcia, an undocumented Mexican immigrant accused of kidnapping a child that she had adopted as her own. Garcia’s charges were dropped, as it turned out to be more of a civil custody matter
7. Benjamin Brafman
Benjamin Brafman is an American criminal defense attorney, the founder of the Manhattan-based firm Brafman & Associates, P.C.. Brafman is known for representing many high-profile defendants, including celebrities, accused Mafia members, and political figures.
Brafman’s profile rose following his winning the acquittal of Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, who was acquitted from his 1999 illegal weapons and bribery charges. The criminal charges stemmed from a nightclub brawl, while accompanied by then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez and Combs’s usual entourage, and witnessed by over 100 other people. Despite the numerous prosecution witnesses to Combs’s culpability, and Combs’s fame, Brafman produced a ‘not guilty’ verdict for all charges.
8. Mark O’Mara
Mark M. O’Mara is an American criminal defense lawyer in Orlando, Florida, known for being the attorney for George Zimmerman. He is a former prosecutor.
O’Mara gained national attention while serving as the defense attorney for George Zimmerman, who was found not guilty of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
In September 2013, after a domestic altercation between George and Shellie Zimmerman, O’Mara said he was continuing to represent George Zimmerman in a defamation lawsuit against NBCUniversal but was not representing him in the “domestic altercation case or his impending divorce case.”
O’Mara is a legal analyst for CNN.
9. Dick DeGuerin
Dick DeGuerin is a criminal defense attorney based in Houston, Texas, most notable for defending Tom DeLay, Allen Stanford, David Koresh and Robert Durst. In 1994, DeGuerin was named Outstanding Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar of Texas Criminal Justice Section.
He represented Waco, Texas leader David Koresh during Koresh’s standoff with the FBI and the ATF agents. DeGuerin used a self-defense argument, and won, when he represented New York real estate heir Robert Durst, who admitted to killing and then dismembering the body of Durst’s 71-year-old neighbor Morris Black, bagging the body parts and tossing them into Galveston Bay. DeGuerin once again represented Durst at his arraignment in New Orleans on March 16, 2015 for the murder of Susan Berman in 2000 (which arose out of the HBO miniseries special The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst).
10. Gerry Spence
Gerald Leonard “Gerry” Spence is a semi-retired American trial lawyer. He is a member of the American Trial Lawyers Hall of Fame. Spence has never lost a criminal case either as a prosecutor or a defense attorney. He has not lost a civil case since 1969.
Spence gained attention for the Karen Silkwood case. Karen Silkwood was a chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plutonium-production plant, where she became an activist and vocal critic of plant safety – what would now be known as a whistleblower. On November 13, 1974, Silkwood died in a one-car crash under suspicious circumstances after reportedly gathering evidence for her union. Spence represented Silkwood’s father and children, who charged that Kerr-McGee was responsible for exposing Silkwood to dangerous levels of radiation. Spence won a $10.5 million verdict for the family.
In 1984, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the family’s right to sue under state law for punitive damages from a federally regulated industry. The Silkwood case achieved international fame and was the subject of many books, magazine and newspaper articles and a major motion picture.
There you have it. Our list of the 10 best criminal defense attorney. Is there anyone who should be on this list? Hit us up on the comment section below. You can also checkout the 5 most famous lawyers in history here
