Swomley Primed For Latest Challenge

He represents the underdogs, the dissidents, the disenfranchised, the outsiders whose beliefs deviate sharply from the mainstream.

Ardently liberal and decidedly anti-authoritarian, John G. Swomley, the lawyer who has been the public face of the notorious Made Men rap group during the Paul Pierce saga, has carved out a niche for himself in the city's legal community handling often-controversial civil rights and criminal defense cases. He successfully has sued the Town of Ashland for blocking the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, which advocates legalized marijuana, from holding a rally there. He defended a Harvard student investigated for possible child abuse after a photo lab developed nude photos - taken for a class project - of her 4-year-old son.

And he lodged a discrimination complaint against the state's trial court system for allegedly denying a court officer a transfer because he lacked a political patron, exposing a system that often rewards people who have friends in high places.

"Real civil libertarians look at the government with a wary eye, and John's a real civil libertarian," said veteran civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate.

Silverglate describes Swomley as a "free-speech absolutist" who takes a "cautious approach to government power and authority." Yet Swomley has a reputation in courthouse corridors for being aggressive and persistent - qualities that lead some court employees to regard him as a pest.

True to his libertarian bent, he is outspoken, once deriding the rehabilitation treatment offered to sex offenders as "a charade" and dismissing the sex-offender treatment center in Bridgewater as a "festering underbelly where people don't have any rights."

Slightly built and even boyish looking, Swomley doesn't project the image of a courtroom gladiator. While he could easily pass for a young associate at a white-shoe Boston firm, Swomley is clearly at ease with clients whose reputations run toward rogue, renegade, and ruffian.

A vehement supporter of the First Amendment, Swomley has a penchant for taking on tough cases. And sometimes he achieves surprising results.

In a well-publicized case, Swomley defended convicted child molester Frederick Wyatt, who was declared a sexual predator in the 1980s after he claimed to have sexually assaulted 30 to 50 boys. In 1998, to the dismay of prosecutors and prison officials, Swomley won Wyatt's release after convincing a jury that he was no longer sexually dangerous.

And in a case that earned him the ire of many law enforcement officials, Swomley was able to bring criminal charges against two Braintree police officers who allegedly assaulted a Boston-area rap musician after questioning him about credit card purchases he made. The officers were acquitted at trial.

"I think John enjoys the fact that some of his clients aren't the most loved people," said Boston attorney Peter Ramgren, who works with Swomley.

"He takes the challenging cases," added Silverglate. "There is a very small cadre of lawyers who take those cases, and John is among them."

Silverglate met Swomley when he was combing colleges for students willing to spearhead campus chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union. As Silverglate recalls it, "When I foraged at Boston University law school, everybody kept saying, `Oh, you've really got to talk to John Swomley.' "

So Silverglate did, and Swomley earned the distinction of being the founding president of BU Law's first ACLU chapter.

After receiving his law degree in 1987, Swomley moved to New York, where he was a public defender in Brooklyn. He is licensed to practice in both states and maintains a law firm in both, although he works primarily in Massachusetts.

According to attorney Edmund Robinson, one of Swomley's colleagues at Swomley & Associates in Boston, Swomley "comes from a family of social activists"; his mother was a peace activist for the American Friends Service Committee in the 1940s and '50s, and his father, a theologian, was a longtime member of the national board of the ACLU.

"He's very much a stickler for the rights of the individuals against any kind of collective entity, no matter how large or how powerful," Robinson said.