Mired in the ‘Heart of Darkness’: Gitmo Lawyers Leave Firms, Tap Savings
The lawyer who left Covington & Burling after dropping his pants at a news conference isn’t the only attorney whose life became consumed by litigation for Guantanamo detainees.
David Remes, who represents 16 detainees in federal habeas cases, stripped to his underwear to demonstrate the full body searches conducted by guards at Guantanamo. Remes acknowledges the incident was a mistake, but tells Legal Times, “The event crystallized for me that I really had to fish or cut bait.”
Now Remes is forming a human rights practice called Appeal for Justice that centers on his Guantanamo work. Two Covington partners will replace Remes as the firm’s counsel in the pro bono litigation. Remes and former Covington associate Marc Falkoff, now a law professor at Northern Illinois University, will remain as co-counsel.
“I didn’t want to be a corporate lawyer who did human rights work,” Remes told Legal Times. “I wanted to be a human rights lawyer doing human rights work.”
The Legal Times story reports that Remes is one of several lawyers “so consumed by the litigation that they’ve recoiled from their practices, left their firms, and in at least one case, raided their retirement savings to represent detainees.”
One Washington, D.C., lawyer who has done more than 40 years of pro bono work told the publication: “There’s something about this Gitmo stuff. People go down there and they come back, and it’s just like they’ve just come back from the heart of darkness.”
Massachusetts lawyer Buz Eisenberg represents three detainees. He takes about $10,000 a year from his retirement savings to fund the litigation, the story says. He is listed as “of counsel” at his law firm in Northampton, but he works only on detainee cases.
Another Guantanamo lawyer, H. Candace Gorman, shut down her civil rights practice last year because of the time she had to devote to the representation of two detainees. Guantánamo has “almost bred me into a new kind of attorney,” she told the publication.
