Cathy Green JD ’77
Devoted Defender
A former protester makes questioning authority her career.
The only lawyer in Cathy Green’s family when she was growing up was surely not her role model. “He was my mother’s first cousin,” she says of the late Roy Cohn, who served at the right hand of Sen. Joe McCarthy during McCarthy’s investigations into alleged communists in the U.S. government. Always open to an argument, she invited Cohn to her high school in New York’s Westchester County to give a talk about the McCarthy era, but he declined.
Young Miss Green could have used the services of a lawyer herself during her high school days, having once been suspended for wearing slacks instead of a skirt or dress to school. She was suspended at other times for missing school to take part in protests against the Vietnam War. Her eagerness to challenge authority and defend the underdog helped drive her on her chosen career path while attending Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. and Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord.
“Being a criminal defense lawyer means challenging the establishment and making sure that people who are in power don’t abuse that power,” she says.
Green, 53, has always ranked high on both state and national rankings of top criminal defense lawyers. She has had a number of high-profile cases and has defended prisoners accused of murder, child pornography, rape and other horrendous crimes. She leaves it to the prosecution to worry that her skills and tenacity as a trial lawyer may result in a predator being turned loose upon society.
“What I worry about at night are innocent people going to jail,” she says. Is there any category of the accused she will not defend?
“I’m currently having a debate about whether I should represent someone accused of animal abuse,” Green says. “I haven’t come to a conclusion about that.”
Reprinted with permission from New Hampshire Magazine , October 2007
