Because criminal clients are not generally free to visit the office, the student Defenders send a representative each day to the Charles Street jail and another to the East Cambridge jail. They interview prospective clients for the Boston Voluntary Defenders, and send reports to the office of that association.

If the Boston Defenders decides that an indigent prisoner has a case worth handling, one of its lawyers will accept it. The Harvard student will act as the attorney's assistant in investigating and trying the case. Unlike students in the civil organization, the Harvard Defenders can only go to the courts as consultants to Boston practicing lawyers, who plead the cases.

While most of the jail visits turn up such routine cases as breaking and entering, assault and battery, and larceny, occasionally the student counsel encounters something as dramatic as murder.

Murder Case

A year ago last May, at the request of the Boston bureau, a student interviewed an indigent at the Charles Street jail accused of second-degree murder. The prisoner claimed he had acted in self-defense.

The victim, just before his death, told the police that the prisoner had approached him with an ice pick and stabbed him without justification. The defendant, however, said the victim had come at him first with a knife. It was only to defend, himself, the prisoner insited, that he picked up an ice pick from behind the bar.

The representative of the Voluntary Defenders believed the prisoner. He convinced the Boston lawyer who was handling the case to approve further investigation. The problem was to find a living witness. The defendant thought that there had been another man drinking at the bar where the murder had occurred. He didn't know his name--only the general area which the man frequented.

Although exams were a week away and the bureau had almost closed down for the summer, the student and a co-worker from the Harvard Defenders spent six days tramping the part of Boston where the murder had occurred. Two days before their first exam, they turned up with the man.

The witness later testified, and his testimony was instrumental in clearing the defendant. The Boston lawyer made the actual appearance before the court, but the law student sat with him at the counsel table and suggested lines of cross-examination.

"Cases like this happen once a year or less," Kohls said, "but they make us feel that all our tramping is worth-while."

Whereas most Voluntary Defenders cases originate at the Charles Street and East Cambridge jails, clients are frequently referred to the organization from other penal institutions.

Requests from Alcatraz

The Defenders often receive requests for help through the mail from inmates of Sing Sing, Alcatraz, and other out-of-state institutions.

"Once one prisoner in an institution knows about us, others do too," Kohls said. "They think it's kind of fun to write letters."

And the student lawyers enjoy helping to answer them.