In a broader sense, the case shines a spotlight on the balancing act criminal defense attorneys must perform when they represent clients for whom violence and witness intimidation are accepted means of doing business.
"The line between a vigorous defense of your client and becoming complicit in criminal activity is something that any defense lawyer has to be very vigilant about," said Robert Mintz, a Newark defense attorney who worked alongside Bergrin in the late 1980s as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office. "Most criminal defense lawyers, given their familiarity with the criminal justice system, are well aware of exactly where that line falls."
Bergrin, 53, is charged with murder on suspicion of passing the name of a federal informant to associates of William Baskerville, his client in a drug case. The informant, Deshawn McCray, was shot to death on a Newark street in 2004.
Bergrin's veteran New York lawyer, Gerald Shargel, whose former clients include the late mobster John Gotti, said Bergrin's actions were within ethical boundaries.
"The defense lawyer's obligation is to put the government's case in the worst possible light," Shargel said, quoting from former Supreme Court Justice Byron White's opinion in a 1967 case. "How do you do that? You talk to people with knowledge, and perhaps you talk to other criminals. If a lawyer learns, or a client suggests, that a particular person is a witness in a case, then that lawyer is duty bound to gather as much information about the witness to try and discredit that witness."
More troublesome for Bergrin are conversations taped by a government informant last year that prosecutors say caught him telling the informant to kill a potential witness and "make it look like a robbery."
During oral arguments at Bergrin's bail hearing this week, Shargel said the excerpts of the tapes released by the government give a one-sided and incomplete account of the conversations. The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment on the case Friday.
Bergrin has been held at a federal detention facility in Philadelphia since his arrest last week. In a decision issued Friday night, U.S. Magistrate Madeline Cox Arleo denied Bergrin's request to be released on bail and subject to home confinement.
