Page 40 - ACTL Journal Fall24

Perhaps the choice of law was never really a choice at all for Mark. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Buffalo, and soon learned that the most powerful and interesting guy in the neighborhood was not the policeman, or the politician, but instead was the local lawyer who acted like an unofficial public defender. This lawyer put it upon himself to represent any and all of the families in the area, charging only what they could afford. A nice guy, who went to every kid’s grad- uation, every funeral and likely every wedding in the neighborhood. This was the man that Mark wanted to be. And he succeeded.
When Mark completed law school, he looked only at public defense. He
had a job offer from the Public Defender System (PDS) in Washington,
DC, but the pay was too low to support his family as the job required
he live in the District. He was also offered a fellowship at the University
of Melbourne in Australia, but he turned it down as it would have taken
him and his wife too far away from their families. Instead, he accepted his first job at the New Hampshire Public Defender office (NHPD), where he was one of just seven attor- neys representing the indigent. After two years, he joined NHPD’s Homicide Defense Project, becoming the Deputy Director of the NHPD in 1985, a position he held until
1988 when he left the program to start his own practice. By the time he left NHPD, the program had grown to eighty attorneys.
In private practice, Mark has limited his work solely to criminal defense. Mark’s entire
legal career has been focused on the defense of those accused of state and federal crimes. One of his most notorious cases was the 1991 defense of Pamela Smart, who was con- victed of serving as an accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and witness tampering in the 1990 death of her husband, Greggory Smart.
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