With Patti Blagojevich in the jungle, Drew Peterson on the radio, and Roland Burris on tape, Chicago is already providing the tabloids and cable news networks with a veritable feast of tasty tastelessness.
Now we're entering the Caylee Anthony sweepstakes.
A prominent Chicago lawyer has joined the defense team of Casey Anthony, the 23-year-old Florida woman accused of killing her 2-year-old Caylee, in a case that has Nancy Grace at her best/worst almost every night.
DePaul University law professor Andrea Lyon has joined the circus.
The Anthony legal team tapped Lyon because they needed an expert in death-penalty cases. Lyon- the self-described "Angel of Death Row" - is the director of DePaul's Center for Justice in Capital Cases. She is also a former Cook County public defender and frequent media commentator.
Lyon is scheduled to appear at a hearing in the case today.
Grace is scheduled to go ballistic at her usual time tonight.
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Lyon's book, Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer, is scheduled for release in January.
Perfect!
Alan Dershowitz is writing the foreword.
A few years back, Lyon took a break from death penalty cases to work on the defense team of George Ryan.
A 1995 profile of Lyon - called "Angel of Death Row" - described her thusly: "Lyon, 42, lives by a simple rule she learned as a child: 'You see something wrong, you do something about it.' She grew up in Evanston in the '60s, the oldest of four children in a family of far Left liberals, activists committed to civil rights, women's rights, free speech, ending the war, saving the whales, the whole schmear."
Lyon also once said that “Crime has been going down for years, and yet it gets reported five, six hundred percent more than it used to be because of the 24-hour news cycles and the need to feed that entertainment beast."
Now she'll be feeding that beast almost nightly.
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.
