The door to the Merrimack Country Courthouse suddenly opened, slamming the brakes on my interview with the big-shot lawyer.
In the doorway, flanked by a sheriff’s deputy, stood a small man with bushy dark hair, a tweed jacket and glasses. He motioned to the big-time lawyer.
“Do you mind coming up for a second?” Cannon Labrie, the father of Owen Labrie, asked Boston-based attorney Jay Carney. “Someone wants to say something to you.”
Carney disappeared into the courthouse to see Owen, the former St. Paul’s School student who wants a new trial so he won’t have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Carney had represented Labrie during that first trial, two years ago, but a new lawyer wants to show that Carney made mistakes and deserves another day in court.
So what happened during that private meeting, between the lawyer and his former client, now on opposite sides? They hugged. They made plans.
“He said he will always be grateful for the work I did for him,” Carney told me once he came back outside. “And he said he’d take me up on my offer to get together when this is all over.”
Why is it so damn hard to get mad at Jay Carney? Better still, why does everyone seem to like him so damn much?
He’s tall, with a shiny head; a nicely groomed white beard; and a slow, deliberate gait. He led TV cameras from the boring parking lot to the North Main Street. side so their news clips would show a “prettier background.” He joked that he’s been an attorney since the “Jurassic Era” (actually since 1978), and the Boston media wanted to shake his hand once their cameras clicked off.
A security officer inside the courthouse said Carney had a magnetic personality when the alarm sounded as he passed through the metal detector.
Monitor photo editor Geoff Forester was thrilled that Carney said he liked one of his photos. I was tickled pink when Carney said he liked talking to me, liked my columns, liked ME.
“I’m enjoying this,” Carney told me. “If we were sitting together with an adult beverage, my wife would send me a text message saying, ‘Are you going to be done soon?’ ”
It made little sense, this really famous attorney, defender of James “Whitey” Bulger, adviser to Johnny Depp while Depp was preparing to portray Bulger in a movie, giving this really little columnist so much time.
I asked Carney about his changing legal role here, the potential conflict he might have felt. By defending the work he had done while defending Labrie two summers ago, he was in essence trying to prevent Labrie from getting a new trial.
“My role as a witness at trial is to take an oath and then testify as truthfully and accurately as I can,” Carney told me. “I tried to do that today, and I think I accomplished my goal. I put my heart and soul into this case and did everything I could to help Owen receive justice.”
Then he went back in time, to his days as a prosecutor with the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office. He secured a guilty verdict more than 30 years ago against a man named Dennis Maher. Maher was a rapist, the jury ruled. Maher got a life sentence.
Carney had had his doubts about the verdict, had wondered if perhaps he had helped put an innocent man away. He said he’d suggest a retrial to his boss if new evidence surfaced during the appeals process, but nothing came of it.
Bottom line: Carney was responsible for locking the door and throwing away the key.
Then, 19 years after Maher’s freedom was taken away, DNA evidence exonerated him. He’s been free since 2003.
And guess what? The two men are now buddies. They speak at Harvard Law School about the justice system. They speak at law conferences. They spoke at Saint Anselm College.
“We have become quite close,” Carney told me. “At one point after a conference, I said we should have coffee and he said why not a beer?”
They made dinner plans, a family affair at a restaurant in Tewksbury, Mass. On the way, Carney’s middle school-aged daughter, Julia, realized they were meeting the man her father had helped put away for 19 years.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Julia asked.
“What do you mean?” her father replied.
“He’s not still mad at you?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
Some people are, indeed, still mad at him. Or at least they were. For example, 20 years ago, Carney defended John Salvi, who had killed two people and wounded five others at a pair of Massachusetts abortion clinics. Carney was and is pro-choice, a big contributor to Planned Parenthood.
How could he do this, defend this murderer, some thought. He was selling out the cause, they claimed.
“I got death threats,” Carney told me. “What I didn’t tell my wife for decades was that the death threats against me got so serious that the attorney general of Massachusetts put an unmarked cruiser on my street to watch my house.”
And then there was Carney’s defense of 15-year-old Damien Bynoe, who fired his gun blindly while running from gang members and accidentally killed two children. He served five years thanks to Carney, who convinced the jury that Bynoe’s age had to be factored into their decision.
To this day, Carney sees the mother of one of the boys when he’s at Roxbury District Court, where the woman works security. He tried once to talk to her. She extended her arm, displaying the palm of her hand.
When asked if, in hindsight, Carney thought Bynoe should have received a stiffer penalty, he said no, then explained about brain development in teens.
It’s one of the cases, along with his defense of Bulger, that has shone a spotlight on Carney. And this week, he came back here. The three-day evidentiary hearing ended Thursday. Labrie’s new lawyer, Robin Melone, wants a new trial for her new client, forcing Carney to drive from Boston, eat alone at the Gaslighter.
Carney didn’t mind at all.
“I love the state of New Hampshire,” Carney said. “And driving up here in February was a wonderful experience.”