Paul Barrett, a criminal lawyer in Elkhorn, Wis., sums it up this way: “People can say, "There goes a good lawyer, a bad lawyer, an old lawyer.' But not "a blind lawyer.' To me, that's pejorative.”

        Still, that's what a certain deputy was saying in a Milwaukee County Court last week, in a preposterous — one might say “blind” — adherence to the rules.

        As Mr. Barrett was about to enter a room adjacent to the court where prisoners are held, a secure area where two of his clients were waiting to meet with their lawyer, he was intercepted and denied entrance. The problem was his white cane, perceived as a threat to security and the well-being of those within.

        I'm not making this up. His white cane, the mobility tool that enables him to move confidently and independently about any number of courthouses and other municipalities and with which he has entered that very room “hundreds of times,” was about to be confiscated by a deputy who deemed it a potential weapon.

        Mr. Barrett is not unused to adversity. His first successful career as an engineer was interrupted in his late 30s by multiple sclerosis.

        First there was paralysis of his left side. When the paralysis retreated and MS replaced it with blindness, Mr. Barrett says, he was depressed for a time. He needed something to do. So he picked up the phone one day, called Marquette University (about an hour from his home) and began the procedures for enrolling himself in law school. He finished in 1983, graduating magna cum laude, and proud that he refused any special favors as a blind student.

        He never learned to read Braille. He uses tapes and paralegals to review case documents, and he has a small recorder for dictation in his pocket at all times. When he received instruction from a certified orientation and mobility instructor, he says, he loved the freedom returned to him by effective use of a white cane.

        His is no standard-issue folding cane. He made it himself, of white oak, and painted it the standard white and red. And for 20 years now, he and his cane have been going about the business of defending felons throughout Milwaukee County.

        He says he's not an advocate. If another blind law student wants advice, he's happy to give it. But Paul Barrett is just a guy who happens to be blind and wants to be seen as the criminal lawyer he is.

        Most of the time, that seems to be working. An assistant public defender wrote a letter on Mr. Barrett's behalf, and the sheriff stopped him in the street to apologize. “He said the whole thing is going to be straightened out,” Mr. Barrett said. “This whole thing was a mistake, just one insensitive guy. It embarrasses me and I wish it would go away.”

        For one deputy, however, that menacing white cane — the very tool that enables this lawyer to “see” his way around the buildings where his business is conducted — loomed larger than life, was seen in cartoon proportions as a serious weapon and, once more, upstaged an individual human being, placing disability in the foreground. Of course Paul Barrett wishes it would go away, that he could return to the simple pleasure of being seen as just a guy, a lawyer — a good lawyer, a bad lawyer, an old lawyer who happens to be blind.

        Contact Deborah Kendrick by phone: 673-4474; fax: 321-6430; e-mail: dkkendrick@earthlink.net.

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