Frank Lindh says his son, John Walker Lindh, would have been executed if not for James Brosnahan. Lindh called Brosnahan’s office at Morrison & Foerster on a Sunday in December 2001 after reading online that John had been picked up by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. He knew his sonsoon to be dubbed “the American Taliban” for fighting alongside Afghanistan’s ultraconservative Muslim governmentneeded a good lawyer. Lindh, an in-house lawyer for a utilities company, had been impressed when sitting across the table from Brosnahan during settlement talks less than a year earlier.
“Even though [Brosnahan] represented the opposite side on a case where I felt we were in the right and they were in the wrong, I came away with the impression that he was just a man of incredible integrity,” Lindh says. John Walker Lindh potentially faced multiple life sentences, but Brosnahan negotiated a 20-year sentence with federal prosecutors that avoided a guilty plea to terrorism charges. “As soon as he said, ‘I’ll take this case,’ it was like a kind of canopy went up over my family and my son,” Frank Lindh says.
