In his 37-year legal career, David Nevin of Boise’s Nevin, Benjamin, McKay & Bartlett has often taken on clients other lawyers shy away from. He won an acquittal for Kevin Harris, a co-defendant in the 1993 criminal trial arising from a shootout with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and for Sami al-Hussayen, a Saudi graduate student at the University of Idaho accused in 2004 of involvement in terrorist activities.
Still, the magnitude of his current case, representing accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, is far beyond any other he’s handled. The government has called the case, which involves five 9/11 defendants and is still years away from trial, the largest criminal investigation in history. By comparison, the defense team in the 2006 federal district court criminal trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, which relied on similar evidence, hired 70 lawyers just to read the 350,000 police reports from dozens of countries that were entered into the government’s case.
