FEARLESS
Criminal defense lawyer Anna Durbin
takes the cases no one else will
BY MICHAEL Y. PARK
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUIGI CIUFFETELLI
IN 2004, KIMBERLY YATES, WHILE SERVING AN 84-MONTH
sentence from a drug conviction, was temporarily housed in
the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center. She was working in
the commissary when a male prison guard ordered her into the
basement to attend to a chore. There was no chore. When she got
down to the basement, the guard raped her.
Afterward, despite the guard’s threats to her and her family,
Yates sought justice. But she faced a seemingly insurmountable
wall of Byzantine federal bureaucracy, knee-jerk skepticism and
scant sympathy from the powers that be.
“I went through a time where I thought it was my fault,” Yates
says. “I went from being a very self-confident woman to always
second-guessing myself, having low self-esteem, all these things
that aren’t me.”
She called a lawyer in California who told her she should call a
criminal defense attorney in Ardmore, Pa., a woman who had a way
with juries and a reputation for taking on can’t-win clients.
“When I called Anna, she didn’t even question my story,” says
Yates. “She took the case immediately.”
ANNA DURBIN GRE W UP IN SOUTHEAST WASHINGTON STATE,
the daughter of a manager at Hanford nuclear plant, which had the
distinction of producing the plutonium used in the bomb dropped
ANNA M. DURBIN · LAW OFFICES OF ANNA M. DURBIN · CRIMINAL DEFENSE; FIRST AMENDMENT · PENNSYLVANIA SUPER LAW YERS: 2005-2012
